To report with everything you have – how did it look, how did it sound, how did it smell – and with FEELING. Let stuff hit you. Flat-faced and hard-hearted “objectivity” misses what’s most important. When you’re out there in the noise … stop. Listen to people breathe. And when something catches on your insides, and when you feel your eyes start to get big, or wet, or when your heart starts to beat a little bit more quick, write that down. Right there. That’s it. Know that moment. Embrace that moment. It’s what got you, and it’s what’s going to get the reader, too.
Go to municipal meetings. Know your beat. But please. No meeting stories. Just go to them, know the people there, and their fancy titles, and what they want and why, and then also know the other people who go, the ones in the metal folding chairs, the ones watching the people with the titles, and know why THEY go, and why THEY care – and then go from there to where the real story is.
Sit in bars and coffee shops and luncheonettes and Laundromats in the community you cover. Listen to the people talk. They know what the stories are.
Ground up. Not top down. Get low and get still.
Story. Story. Story, story, story. Not articles. Stories.
Look what you can do in 13 inches!
Structure, structure, structure. Where’s the heat? Where’s the tension? Tell me the story in a sentence. What’s the ESPN The Magazine tease?
There’s a beginning, and a middle, and an end, and that’s where we’re going. Know your end. Write to it. Better make it good because the reader took the time to take that trip with you and now you’re going to give him something special.
And know that the structure of every story fits into a much, much larger structure. The big stuff. From light to dark, from day to night, from spring to summer to fall, from one generation to the next. This is where all stories start and move and live.
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