Creative storytelling in a routine situation

Events like news conferences, unveilings, groundbreakings, check presentations and the like are big deals to the people involved in them, but they are usually only marginally newsworthy, if at all, in and of themselves. 

In other words, for example, if the project that people are breaking ground for really is a big deal, we don't want to photograph and report on several people holding shovels and lifting up the first scoops of dirt; we want to report and photograph the project work itself. 


So, watch the video that goes with this story. It's great creative visual journalism from Jason Plotkin. He goes to a news conference about a project, at which a new sign is to be unveiled, and he tells the story of the guys who have to take the tarp off the sign. The result is great fun -- in no small part because the guys totally played along. 

It's a classic example of how to tell a fresh story out of a routine news event.

Writing that makes you swoon

This has to be one of the best passages of writing I've read in long time. It's from Chris Jones' piece in Esquire about the Zanesville, Ohio guy, Terry Thompson, who let his exotic animals loose and then killed himself. Just the precision in the reporting and writing is amazing here, especially in the middle paragraph of these three.

The story starts with the landowner next door Sam Kopchak, who went out into his field to get his horse Red in for the evening, and first saw Thompson's horses acting strangely, then saw a bear chasing them, and then:

Now he approached Red, reaching out with his bucket of water, calling to him gently. Red nosed in for a drink, and Kopchak got a rope on him. He put down the bucket and began to lead his horse back toward the barn. He'd covered maybe twenty or thirty yards, Red bouncing a little, pulling at his rope, when Kopchak suddenly felt a shiver go over him. "I can't really explain it," he says today, "except to say that I felt like I was being watched." He looked back toward Thompson's band of horses; the bear was pushing them north, toward the highway. Then Kopchak saw the lion.

It was a male African lion, with a great golden mane. "It was just enormous," Kopchak says. The lion was to his left, feet rather than yards away, pressed against that thin wire fence. It was lying flat on the grass with only its giant head lifted up, and it had been watching Kopchak walking down the hill. The lion was looking dead at him. Kopchak let out a breath and fixed his eyes straight on his barn, still more than a hundred yards away. He made two decisions: He would not run, and he would not leave Red. He would walk, as calmly and as steadily as a sixty-four-year-old retired schoolteacher being watched by a lion could manage, all the way back down to his barn.

Kopchak looked back only once, and the lion returned his stare. It had also risen to its feet. The fence had seven strands of wire strung between its wooden posts; the lion's back ran parallel to the second strand from the top. Kopchak continued to walk down the hill. Each push into the mud felt slower than the last. Finally, he opened the barn's big sliding doors and stepped inside with Red in tow; he closed the doors with a clang and felt his shoulders slump a little. He put Red into his stall, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Reception wasn't good. He stood in a corner of the barn closest to the house, and he called his mother. He told her that he was inside the barn, and that there was a bear and a lion outside the barn, and she needed to stay inside the house. She also needed to make a phone call.

I think I've discovered my new favorite writing blog

It's not a how-to or tips blog, or a blog that links to great stories. "Letters of Note" says it "is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.

So far, I've read one from a freed slave responding to his ex-master's job offer, and one from E.B. White responding to the ASPCA when it accused him of owning an unlicensed dog.

It's really interesting writing that you might not come across unless someone like Shaun Usher was finding and collecting them.

How do you set up a narrative? Like this

This is an old story I came across the other day, but I wanted to pass it along because it has one of the best opening sections I've read in a while. "The Accused," by Paige Williams, starts at that one vital moment in time, and ends by ushering you into what the story is really about.

'Whiskey Robber' about to be free

If you read "Ballad of the Whiskey Robber," you'll know what this is about. If you didn't, you gotta read it. Great, great book. GREAT book.

P.S. Since I couldn't embed the tweet with a live link, Julian Rubinstein is here on Twitter if you want to follow his tweets about Ambrus.

When sourcing comes grudgingly, if at all

The Boston Globe's Sally Jacobs obviously had a tough time getting people on the record for her profile about Cathy Greig, longtime companion of accused mobster Whitey Bulger. I thought her treatment of that fact was interesting; it begins in the story's 19th graf, so, fairly early, and it's used as a way to help paint the portrait of Greig:

Yet there is one tradition that remains largely unaffected by the tide of change, and that is the code of silence that has long prevailed in Southie. At least it remains the rule for some when the subject has anything to do with the infamous Whitey. Bulger is securely locked in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, his criminal empire is long gone, and many of his former associates talk and write freely about him without apparent consequence. But many in the neighborhood, and even some who no longer live there, still don’t want to say a word about him. Or about Greig.
High school classmates of Greig’s abruptly hang up the phone when asked about her. Class officers, who still live in the area, brusquely turn away. Boston City Councilor Bill Linehan, who was a member of the class of 1969, declined to be interviewed. Those that are willing to talk about her insist that their names not be used.
“Are you kidding? Nobody wants to talk about her,’’ said one Southie resident who attended school with Greig.

Fairly well-known writer, name of King, talks about where ideas come from and other stuff

Semi-gratuitous post about Stephen King, since I'm a sucker for pretty anything he does and have posted about him several times here.

Anyway, this is an interview from The Atlantic in which he talks about ideas -- getting them and managing them -- and other writing topics.

Most startling to me was a quote that, when I thought about it, could apply to any big writing project, and really serves as a piece of inspiration: "I never started a book that I expected to finish," he said. "Because it always feels like a job that's much too big for a little guy like me."

Stories vs. articles

I tweeted this last night, and a couple people (Kate Harmon and Chris Dunn) already responded, picking out favorite parts of an interview with Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times.

There's a lot of great stuff here and it'd be tough for me to pick a favorite line or whatever. But one thing that resonated with me was that early on in his career, he said, he "quickly came to understand that I wanted to do stories, not articles." And he set out to get to a place and a position in which he could do that, and did.

Almost all of us start out doing articles, or the equivalent of them in whatever job we have. If you really want to do stories instead of articles, it'll take a lot of hard work and a lot of feeling like you'll never have the time to do stories because you're doing articles, but don't stop trying. Stories are the thing.

Here's more on Ben.

Longreads' Top 10 of 2011

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

On short -- the shortest of the short -- stories

Robert Krulwich, on his NPR blog "Krulwich Wonders," ponders how short a story can be. The occasion is a book just out that's called "The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories."