| Subversive storytelling
Author: Tom French
Published: December 02, 1998
Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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National Writers’ Workshop
Strategies for narrative reporting and writing
Numbness is the real enemy
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Not deadlines, not budgets, not our competitors
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Every day, and with every story, we must fight to reawaken ourselves to
the fact that the world is far more wonderful, more terrible, more complex,
more unbelievable, more vivid, more shocking and more beautiful than any
fiction we could ever invent
Take us into the secret garden
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Show the unofficial, the hidden, the real
Stop worrying (at least once in awhile) about what’s news and what’s
not news
n Instead ask what’s important, what’s interesting, what will challenge
you and your audience
Timeliness is overrated
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Timely is good; timeless is a hundred times better
So is information
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Our readers are already drowning in information; what they need is not
more information, but more good information and some context to make sense
of it
Move past the usual suspects
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Interview those who are never interviewed, write about those who are never
written about
To explore the macroscopic, go microscopic
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The bigger the story, the tighter the frame
Harness the engine of your story
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Identify the unanswered question that drives the action of your piece —
the question that will propel readers forward — and use it to maximum advantage
Stop rushing and let the damn thing unfold
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There’s immense power in letting the story happen the way it happened,
instead of telling it in the jumbled, hurried, truncated forms we usually
rely on
Make room for little moments
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That’s what most lives are made of, and it’s where most of us are revealed
Make room for love, joy, pettiness, rude behavior, raucous laughter,
also the mysterious and inexplicable
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For everything newspapers normally won’t touch
Ask yourself how your favorite novelist would tell it
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Then search for those real-life details, points of view, alternate lines
of approach, and use them in your writing
Think cinematically
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Visualize your story in terms of scenes, cross cutting, montages, etc.,
so the reader can see it all happening
Drop the depth charges
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Slip in details that explode later in muffled blasts
Hurl the boomerangs
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Let the story turn on the reader’s expectations
Beware of breaking the spell
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Stay in the timeline as much as possible and avoid intrusions that
interrupt the flow
One more time: Let it unfold
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Tape those last three words to the top of your computer screen
French writes for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. His 1997 “Angels
and Demons” series won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
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