You've probably never read a novel this way

Fans of action-driven narrative storytelling should check this out. Buffy has broken down her novel into tweets. Should be quite a ride:

Novel starts at 11 a.m. follow @brain_invaders hashtags = #Invaders & #Twitterfiction Or follow compilation here: bit.ly/YtuMC0

— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) November 29, 2012

The deer hunter who shot 'Pink 23': Letting the story unfold

I like what Teresa Boeckel did with the story about the hunter who shot "Pink 23," the doe that escaped from a farm where chronic wasting disease had been discovered.

She started the story at the moment the hunter spotted the deer, and let the story unfold at a natural pace, to the point where the hunter realized that it was "Pink 23." And then Teresa used three short (and decreasing in length) sentences to describe the hunter taking out the deer.

Nicely done -- and a much better read than what would have resulted with some other possible approaches to the story.

An ex-Marine reflects: Two stories in one

As part of the national online project American Homecomings, photographer Kate Penn and columnist Mike Argento are following West York's Darnell Rias for a year as he builds his post-war life.

Recently, Kate and Mike went with Rias to Camp Lejeune, N.C., where Rias welcomed home his good friend, Lance Cpl. Harley Philhower.

Because I'm working with Mike on the text version of the story, Kate's video is always fresh to me. I'm always fascinated at how a writer and a visual artist work together-but-separately -- they're on assignment together, so there's a teamwork aspect to it, but neither wants to tell exactly the same story as the other.

In this case, Mike's story focuses on the (mild) suspense of Rias meeting Philhower, exchanging scenes of anticipation with background that fills out the military friendship part of their story. Kate's video has the reunion, too, but it left me thinking about how wistful Rias is when he's talking about his time in the Marines (even when he talks about feeling like he had to cut his hair to go back to Camp Lejeune).

They are complementary pieces, each of which tells an important part of Rias' story.

Eight returning war veterans, eight narratives, one site

Check out the American Homecomings site, built on year-long narratives of eight veterans who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan and are building their post-war lives.

Mike Argento and Kate Penn are following Darnell Rias of West York. An IED blast broke his back and left him with a brain injury, but he's preparing to move out of his mother's home and go to college.

What I learned: John Clayton on trust

 The York Daily Record/Sunday News won 22 Keystone Awards in judging announced Thursday; many of those were writing/reporting awards, and by many different staffers.


I asked those staffers if they'd tell me, in 50-75 words, something they learned about storytelling (or generally about writing or photography/visual work) as they worked on the piece that was honored; or how they are trying to be better storytellers now than they were a year ago.


I'll share them on the blog as they come in with the hope that they create a kind of online roundtable about what we can learn from doing great work.


 Here's sports reporter John Clayton. He won first place in the sports story category for Stand strong, a profile of William Penn football player Anderson Novalin, who grew up in Haiti.

To me, this story reinforced the importance of trust. Anderson had seen some awful things in Haiti -- dead bodies, people being killed, etc. -- and he had to trust me before he was going to share them. I had to put in time ... Anderson was pretty shy during our first sit down. But over time he opened up, and I was able to get the important events/scenes that made the story work.

 An excellent point about earning the trust of the person you're working with to help make a story deep and true. Anyone else have a similar experience to share?

Longreads' Top 10 of 2011

Guaranteed to be good, y'all. Here you go.

Do stories, do stories, do stories, get better

 Wow: This, from Ira Glass of This American Life, hits home.

 You have an idea. This could be a great story. You can see it, feel it, taste it. You report, write, revise. You finish and think: That's not what I wanted it to be. You deflate.

 But you can't stop. You have to keep trying to execute those ideas, because only in doing that, over and over and over, can you ever get closer to the actual vision you see in your head when you think, This could be a great story.

Glass puts it better here, and lets you know: You're not alone.

New stuff here. And it's good stuff.

 I did something long overdue: I've added several examples of excellent storytelling by YDR staffers to the blog.

 Under "YDR documentaries" (see link at left) you'll find Paul Kuehnel's video about a woman who, as a 3-year-old, witnessed her mother's murder and visits the scene 39 years later.

 Under "YDR success stories" you'll find Mike Argento's piece about that woman. You'll also find two other great pieces by Mike -- one about a medal of valor winner, and one about a couple whose health forced them to part after decades of marriage.

 There are other great reads there, too, including "Her wild life," Frank Bodani's piece about a legendary exotic animal rehabilitator who, with age, has had to give up most of her animals.

 Check 'em out.

Costumed crusaders save the day! (Seriously)

Must read: Jeff Frantz's piece on two guys who dress up in superhero costumes, call themselves the Keystone Crusaders and go around Harrisburg -- a city more or less in freefall -- cleaning graffiti and dog crap, giving water to the homeless, helping out people who need help and doing whatever else urban despair-fighters might do.

A snippet:

They begin — as they have at least twice a week since March — in the Market Street tunnel. 
    
“Good Morning!” they bellow, warming up their superhero voices to the office workers walking west, and the residents heading east. 
    
How can anyone, Commonwealth asks, feel good about their city if their first sight of it is this cavern of filth? 
    
The battle is joined, and Commonwealth’s three utility belts/fanny packs, come open. 
    
A hand-held vacuum for cigarette butts. “L.A.’s Totally Awesome,” the Dollar Store industrial cleaner they don’t bother diluting. Spray paint bought on clearance. Their real superpower is bargain hunting. 
    
When danger arises, they reach for the original crime fighting tools. Broken glass is no match for Kevlar-lined gloves! No clogged gutter can withstand a steel baton! 
   

'Beautiful story-telling must survive no matter the medium'

From Tim McGuire, journalism professor at Arizona State, in a speech to high school graduates, in which he details what moved him when he read an Arizona Republic story on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her recovery from a gunshot wound:

Great story-telling always has a grand story arc. Sometimes, it’s jealousy. Sometimes it’s hate. For me, there were two grand story arcs in the Giffords and Kelly stories–love and perseverance.
A great tale well-told is like a homily, full of meaning and lessons.
Please notice I have not mentioned the words newspaper, computer, book or magazine in this discussion of what makes great story-telling.
Beautiful story-telling must survive no matter the medium.

Indeed.

Knowing the way to the end

Freaking cool story by Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times on a diver who went missing in a deep and dangerous cave, the people who looked for him, and what happened ... and what didn't happen.

The ending knocked my socks off, and it made me think of two things:

One, he didn't suddenly discover that ending as he wrote the last few grafs of the story.

Two, he didn't just tack on the ending when he felt like he was about near the end of the story.

I'm betting he knew where he was going from the start, and wrote with that destination in mind the whole way. And that's why it's such a great ending -- it's a nifty line or three, to be sure, but its power derives from everything that comes before it, everything that he reported, how he prepared/organized the story, and every choice he made as he wrote it.

Thoughts?

Ex-NYT war correspondent scheduled to speak in Gettysburg

Melissa Nann Burke posts on her blog that Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times, is scheduled to speak at the Lutheran seminary in Gettysburg about "narratives and how communally held memories are transmitted" throughout communities.

Looking for the human stories of the Japanese people

With all the focus in Japan on what's going to happen to the nuke plants -- and the fact that apparently rescue/salvage workers and journalists haven't gotten to some places yet -- it's understandable if there haven't been many truly human stories yet. (If I've missed one or more, please link here.)
So far what I've seen has come from raw video -- powerful indeed, but lacking the structure and context that gives you the richest experience.
When those stories start to come out, this tragedy is going to have another level of impact -- human impact -- that's going to hit us all over again, and hopefully galvanize us in some way, as the best stories do.
It reminds us: Cover the hell out of the news, and never stop searching for the story.

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A Christmas list of good reads

Writers behind Gangrey.com just posted their "Top Longreads of 2010." Can't imagine better tips if you're in search of a compelling story or 20 to read.

Quick takes from PNA storytelling seminar

I'll post more from this seminar later, but for now, some things to get you thinking:


Marion Winik, author and NPR commentator: "The things you think you shouldn't do and can't do are the things you should do and can do."
 And,
 "Writer's block is simply a lack of typing. Sit down and type and then your writer's block is over."

John Luciew, Patriot-News enterprise writer, talked about his long investigative narrative "In the path of a serial killer," the story of how police first suspected the husband of a woman murdered by a serial killer: "I wanted all the key people in the story to be characters, not talking heads." So he did the reporting/writing that enabled him to make them characters in his story.

 Chris McDougall, author/freelance writer, who wrote "Born to Run," about a hidden tribe of people who are fantastic distance runners: "Human life is about movement." Same is true of stories, he said; something evolves, something changes. "What's the journey? What's the progression?"

Paterno's 400th win, and how to knit social media fragments into a story

Storify. Check this out. Like it? See potential?

Hardcore investigative narrative

I've been reading this series from the L.A. Times called "Project 50: Four walls and a bed" about a program that inverts the usual theory about helping homeless people: Instead of working with the homeless to get them off drugs and help them get a job, then get housing, this program gives the homeless a small apartment in hopes that will help them overcome whatever else is wrong in their lives.

Christopher Goffard clearly did a mammoth amount of on-scene reporting for this, and you can imagine the tower of information (if not literal notebooks) he had when he sat down to write.

I admire a few things he's done here, and I think there are lessons to be taken and applied to many of the enterprise pieces we do or strive to do. These are things that you will hear about in many writing seminars, and I'll bet most if not all of you have heard them before. But it's important to see them in practice, and to try to deconstruct how they came to be the way they are:

1. There is a four-graf nut graf in part 1. But it fits seamlessly into the storytelling because of the transition from the scene, and because part of it is rendered as questions ... the very questions that led to the creation of the program, and the very questions the writer is telling you he's going to explore in the story. He's married investigation and storytelling here.

2. In any part after part 1 of a series, you have to clue the reader in to what's going on -- either to remind someone who read part 1 yesterday, or to introduce the story to a new reader. Look at how Goffard does that in part 2: A two-graf scene to open, a recap graf, then back to the subject in context of the whole project:

 To rescue the 50 people deemed most likely to die on the streets in skid row, Los Angeles County had a pragmatic plan: Give them an apartment and all the help they'd accept, requiring little in return — not sobriety, not meetings, not psychiatric drugs.
 Livingston and a handful of others posed the most extreme test of Project 50's premise. Merely living among others, with a modicum of structure and social rules, was proving a steep demand, considering what accompanied the hardest cases indoors: untreated mental illness and ferociously solitary habits formed by decades in the city's dope dens.
"If we can succeed with him — oh, my goodness," said the program's director, Carrie Bach. "If we can do him, we can do anybody."

 Scene-setting, intro of main character, tie-back to narrative story and establishment of conflict in the current story -- all in five grafs. Pretty good stuff.

     3. This is, as I said before, really an investigative piece at heart, but it never feels like one. It feels like a story. As it should. 

If anyone else reads this (or has read it) let me know what you got out of it.

When feedback zigs instead of zags

Whenever we write, whether we admit it or not, we want to know what people -- could be your editor, could be your source, could be your reader, or any/all of them -- want to think about what we wrote. I started thinking about that this afternoon after I dug around in a couple of notebooks I've used whenever I've gone to a writing seminar and came across some interesting thoughts from Jan Winburn, the great editor formerly with the Baltimore Sun and more recently the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (though I'm not sure she's still there).

At the '99 Nieman narrative writing conference, she talked about a couple of serial narratives the Sun had done. One was on a woman who survived two bouts with cancer and the death of a child, before her illness progressed and she had six months to live. The story was about how she wanted her baby to know who her mom was. Reaction for the first couple days was negative, then turned more positive as the series went on.

And she talked about Ken Fuson's piece on the high schoolers putting on "West Side Story" -- which remains one of the most enjoyable pieces of nonfiction I've ever read -- and she said that the reaction to that was pretty much the same: some negative, some positive.

I'm not saying that's a universal response to narratives, but when readers respond like that, why do you think that is? Do you have stories about reaction like that to a piece you did? What did people like or not like about your piece? How do you deal with negative reaction to a story you believe in?

In case you're going to the UK in February ...

I added a couple of feeds to this blog in the past couple days, one of them being anything tagged "storytelling" in del.icio.us. I saw this and thought it was cool: There's an event called "The Story" in London on Feb. 18.

It bills itself as "a one-day conference about stories and story-telling ...

"The Story will be a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

"The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story."

 I don't know. This event may have to become this blog's unofficial mascot or something.

This never gets old

"This American Life" is so popular now that it's easy to come across stories or videos featuring Ira Glass talking about what makes a great TAL story. Nevertheless, I'll read or listen to them every time, hoping to internalize what he's talking about.

 Here's such a piece in The Seattle Times. In it, Glass talks about the need for surprise in a story, something that's unexpected buy key to what happened. I was drawn to this quote: "Even stories of life-changing, traumatic events can lack surprise," Glass said.

How many times are we attracted to stories of people who have overcome an illness, or experienced a traumatic event, or something like that, and we think that's enough? It's not that those can't be good stories. But the best stories, as Glass knows, are ones that are at least a little bit unpredictable. Find those stories, and tell them.