A Facebook feed turned into a narrative

The Washington Post (with permission) took a woman's Facebook feed -- she was a constant updater -- and edited it to tell the story of childbirth followed by complications, and how it turned out.

This is the type of story that conventionally could be a long narrative. It's fascinating to see how it works in this format.

Update: The writer talks about how he put the story together.

'How will I coach?'

A column with conflict and no resolution -- but that's the point. It's about a college football player, paralyzed during a game, and his high school coach's reaction. Good stuff.

Cool, unorthodox, crazy and frustrating all at once

Conflict-resolution video narrative? Almost ...

Watch as an adrenaline-fueled tornado chaser drives toward a big tornado. I start thinking:

When is he going to stop?

When is he going to stop?

Is he ever going to stop?

Finally, late in the video, comes his moment of realization.*

The video is not set up to be a narrative, and it's a compelling video, but it left me wondering -- wouldn't a little bit of text storytelling have helped here? What was the building? Was there anyone in it? Anyone hurt? Did anything happen to the chaser or his vehicle? Did the tornado go on to level the town or just peter out?

Maybe I'm asking for too much. But seems to me they had a short narrative opportunity here and missed it.

*This comes a few seconds after, at the 44-second mark, the amazingly timely and helpful electronic advice he receives from whatever Onstar-type device he has in the vehicle. Listen closely. It's great.

Plotkin's words and pictures

Shout-out to Jason Plotkin for not only the photos but the story he put together on Dan Nied, director of the York Time Institute, for today's Living cover.

He wrote probably a 10-inch story, the first five grafs of which are a conflict/resolution anecdote -- and the anecdotal lead works because it represents the core of the story. Nice work.

When the music dies. Almost.

Pretty cool read. What happens when a world-class pianist backs out of a concert at the last minute? Canceling wasn't an option.

Art & narrative

This Boston Globe piece is neat for a couple reasons -- it's a "how" narrative about the creation of something that's a big part of its community; and the thing it's about is an art museum ... not necessarily the most-written-about subject.

We've done stories here about how projects came to be, and the hurdles they faced, how those hurdles were overcome, etc. This story is a good example of that kind of approach, and a nice read.

This is awesome

Monkeys escaped from a private zoo near St. Petersburg. Staffers at the St. Petersburg Times show what you can do when you approach a story, from the beginning, with a storyteller's sensibilities and with determination to make the most of the story. And I'm talking words AND visuals.

Be sure also to read the linked story, "Monkey No. 15 met the wrong human." Again, this writer went in knowing he had a chance to get great material and knowing he'd try to make the most of it. I think he did a great job.

Narrative storytelling and Obama's inaugural speech

The narrative embedded in the speech is short, but powerful and on point. Near the end, he noted that 60 years ago, his father might not have been served at a restaurant in America.

Then came a smooth transition: So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. Narrative is a journey; all of this is the country's story, he's saying. Then, storytelling:

In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

A character: the army. A conflict: Winter, enemy, death, despair. A turning point: Washington's words. A resolution (artfully implied): Victory, and the birth of America.

Well-done, I thought.

Do a critique, and marvel at the no-duh quote

I'd encourage anyone who has a few minutes to read this piece (link below) from the Denver Post about the Denver plane crash, appreciate it for what it is (the reporters worked hard to get interviews with passengers) and critique it for what it isn't -- a strong narrative on what happened when the plane skidded off the runway.

It's a good way to think about stories we do -- sometimes, during a big news event, we get good interviews for a news story, but we don't get enough deep interviews for a narrative. If you can approach stories knowing what makes the difference, you'll have a better chance of getting what you need for narrative and being able to write a great story.

The paper even had the hed for that narrative as a subhead in the story: 10 terrifying seconds. Imagine what kind of interviewing you would have had to do to truly tell that story. Thinking about that kind of thing now, when nothing is at stake, helps prepare you to go for that kind of story next time you're in that situation.

Oh, and the quote? "When the engine caught fire, I knew something was wrong."

Savvy.

Seriously, though. Would you have even put that in your story?

Passengers recount the terrifying DIA crash - The Denver Post

What does good narrative do?

Good conflict/resolution narrative asks, and answers, a central question. In this case, it is: Can the soldiers save the Afghan cook? This is an example of a true narrative that does its job.

This'll scare you

I just heard Neil Gaiman read the beginning of his graphic novel "The Graveyard Book" on XM, and now I have to get my hands on it. It's about a young boy who's raised in a graveyard by whatever/whoever inhabits a graveyard.

***(update on this post: Go here to listen to Gaiman read. He's pretty damn good. It's actually a video, but I'd suggest closing the window and just listening.)***

It's allegedly a young-adult novel, but whatever. The book opens with a killer having disposed of three people in a house and about to go after the toddler. Here is the exquisite opening, and tell me if this doesn't sound worth following to the end:

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
"The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you'd been cut, not immediately.
"The knife had done almost everything it had been brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
"The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
"The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly-colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done."

Stories are everywhere

I found an awesome narrative this weekend -- in a Supreme Court decision about a drug arrest in Philly.

Here's the beginning:

"North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.

Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner."

Update: I was talking to a friend who mentioned NPR did a short piece on this. It's a dramatic reading -- totally worth a listen.

Pace in narrative

"To hell and back" is a first-person narrative by a Kansas University student about his mental illness.

I think he set it up well -- starts with action, uses dialogue, and, several inches in, tells you where the story is headed, with a tease to induce you to keep reading:

"I had no way of knowing then that this doctor’s diagnosis would start a year-long journey into the mental health system and the depths of hell. It would feature seven different diagnoses, 13 different mind-altering drugs, more than a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists, hundreds of hours of therapy, drug overdoses, self-mutilation, a suicide attempt, a weight gain of 140 pounds and being committed by the state of Minnesota for four months into three separate mental institutions.

It will end with one last-ditch attempt at a self-imposed cure."

I'd call your attention to the pace of the story. Basically, it barrels ahead without pause or, really, reflection; there's no rest for the reader, no time to take a breath. I think that can enhance a story or detract from it, depending on the story and the command of the story by the writer. Do you think it works here? Did you want a break, want some background; or did you just want to find out as quickly as possible what happened to him?

It started with an e-mail.

The subject line was, My cousin's story. A woman's Jeep had run off the road, she'd been missing for more than a day, and had been found with the help of complete strangers. This isn't some Internet thing-- this really happened to them yesterday, the text read. I think this is nothing short of a miracle and worth reporting.

Susan forwarded it to Hoover, who worked the phones to get police, the victim's mother and a co-worker.

By afternoon Mike wrote what he had, and Ted put out calls to try to get at least two of the four people who were involved in the rescue.

He got more sourcing on Saturday, and on the strength of Mike's original reporting and those new sources, wrote a strong narrative tale for Sunday 1A.

Check it out. Good stuff.

Great narrative read

Stuart Warner, writing coach at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, passed this story out today as an excellent example of narrative writing. It's about the death of a toddler, and whether prosecutors would charge the father, and what happened when the case finally went to court.

Read to see how the writer set up the tension in the overall story but also among several characters in it; and how the story keeps its focus on the choices made by several characters and what happened because of those choices.

Great stuff.

How many kinds of narrative are there, anyway?

With Robb Montgomery in here yesterday talking about all kinds of narratives -- graphics narratives, voice narratives, etc. -- and us talking fairly regularly about true narrative stories, here's my take on the differences:

This is not a definition to exclude all others, but, as we've learned over the past two years in our storytelling focus, true narrative is a story with a beginning and end ... a conflict that is resolved ... a story told over time, usually chronologically, which allows the story to unfold as it actually did ... and a story that is reported so that you have the dialogue, scenes, action, tension, timeline and so on that you need to effectively tell the story.

A true narrative story is not a passage of descriptive writing, or an anecdotal lead that contains six grafs of narrative writing, or a piece of dialogue within a broader conventional story. And a true narrative story is most certainly conceived, planned, reported and written differently than news stories or feature stories or profiles or any other type of story we do.

They are emotionally and intellectually pleasing to read and experience, because human beings love stories, and in fact have used them and relied on them for centuries as a way of recording what happens in their lives and communities, of recording history, of passing on culture, and as entertainment; and because it is satisfying to have an experience in which someone you like or can identify with faces a problem you can see yourself facing, and finds a way out of it.

When Robb about other types of narratives -- say, graphics narratives, voice narratives, video narratives -- he's broadening and stretching the meaning of the word to include snippets of stories, or complete stories that aren't necessarily conflict/resolution, or layers of stories (like the text that would accompany a video.) Ideally, those 'other narratives,' say, text in a video, would not simply be for the convenience of the video's producer or just haphazardly included; the text would be written with the aim of telling in a different way, or reinforcing, the story being told by the visuals.

Robb is also talking about inviting readers/users to create their own narratives ... which can mean nothing more than information on a topic they discover by fooling around on your web site for an hour one day. In other words, he's not saying readers/web users are going to write our Sunday enterprise narrative story. He's saying that by using the info we put out, and that others contribute to our site, they essentially create a personal story.

For example, we could do Utterz at the fair and we could ask fairgoers to do them too. Then someone goes on their computer and listens to, say, half a dozen. They've just created their own personal narrative of the fair. It's not a true narrative, and it's not necessarily the story we offered them, but it's their story nonetheless.

One big thing to remember, I think, is that there is not only room for both kinds of narratives in what we do, there's a need for both. People are going to want to create their own stories by using bits of information we give them in various forms (the soldier death map, or posts on the biz blog, or fair Utterz). But people also are going to want us to make sense of things -- major events like the guy who got stuck on the spike fence, daily-life events like the woman who lost the scarf her dear friend had given her, and so on -- through storytelling. They want and need us to, in a paraphrase of something Hoover said yesterday, go out and find stuff out and come back and put it in a story to tell people things they didn't know before.

There is always going to be an audience for that.

And a P.S. -- Robb Montgomery says "the web is about small talk. Small talk leads to big talk." That fits right in with our focus on Felix Feneon this year -- essentially, the narrative story in three lines. That's one way to think about writing for the web -- make a little say a lot.

Highly recommended reading

"The Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson is one of the best books I've read in some time. It's part detective story, part scientific discovery, part historical narrative about how a couple of guys in mid-1800s London figured out what was causing a cholera epidemic, and how their discovery affected science, sociology, cities and other aspects of our lives.

And it's a terrific read -- characters, cliffhangers, converging plotlines ... the whole deal.

Serial narrative on N.O. homicide detectives

Times-Picayne has this running. Starts off with a lot of promise and Ch. 1 ends with a pretty good cliffhanger. Check it out.

Stephen King graphic short story

25 episodes, one a day beginning July 28. Watch them all here and deconstruct the storytelling techniques and framework of King's story, 'N,' and the techniques used in the visual telling of it.

Strong (and short) straightforward narrative

Good conflict-resolution narrative on what happened when a guy climbed the New York Times building and called the New York Daily News to talk about why he was up there and under what conditions he'd come down.

Starts like this:

We had gotten as much as we could on the fatal fire in Sugar Hill. Six people had been shot a few blocks away, but no one was going to die.
At 1 a.m. Wednesday, my busy night was almost over - or so I thought.
Then the phone rang and I realized my night was about to get a lot longer.
The man on the line said he was climbing The New York Times Building.
"Oh, really?" I said. "Why are you doing that?"