While waiting at Logan with Ben and a beer for a snow-delayed flight back to what will be the most welcome warmth of Greater Tampa Bay …
Nieman every year ends up being about amazing talents from amazing places saying amazing things – Mark Singer, Philip Gourevich, Tom French, book writers, Roy and Chip and the Poynter people – and then most of the rest of the folks there going, OK, well, great, but how the heck do I do that at the place where I work?
A suggestion then:
Let’s have more breakout sessions on doing narratives in “normal” stories. “Regular” stories. Daily stories. In other words: MOST of the stories that MOST of us do.
The inimitable, accessible Kelley Benham talked at Nieman ’04 about doing narrative off a beat. “You do narrative one line at a time,” she said. Narrative, she was saying, that isn’t a project, or really, really long, and doesn’t take 10 months of reporting and two months of writing and five weeks of editing. Realistic narrative.
No less important.
MORE important?
Maybe.
Narrative, after all, is the easiest way to tell a story – arguably, actually, it’s THE way to tell a story – and it’s the most sensible, the most natural, the most fun. The most fun way to report and the most fun way to write and the most fun way to READ. As Gourevitch said this year in his breakout session Saturday afternoon, almost off-handedly, and I’m paraphrasing here: Does anyone else find the name of this conference a little puzzling? NARRATIVE journalism? If a narrative is a story (it is), and if journalism is the stories of the time in which we live (it is), is there any other KIND of journalism?
Laurie Hertzel, the practical, loveable editor and writing coach from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, did do a breakout on Sunday morning about doing narrative in 40 to 60 inches. That’s a start. But 40 to 60 inches is NOT really a SHORT story that most of us do on a regular basis as a daily story.
So let’s knock it back even more for Nieman ‘06:
Doing narrative in a 10-inch cops daily.
Doing narrative when someone dies in a wreck at 4 p.m. on a Monday and you’re writing for Tuesday.
Just sayin’, Mark Kramer, et al. I can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com. Ben’s at bmontgomery@tampatrib.com. We work well as a team. Hope to talk to you soon.
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