Feature and Magazine Writing

Action, Angle, and Anecdotes

David E. Sumner, Holly G. Miller

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118305140
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

Updated with fresh facts, examples and illustrations, along with two new chapters on digital media and blogs this third edition continues to be the authoritative and essential guide to writing engaging and marketable feature stories.

• Covers everything from finding original ideas and angles to locating expert sources
• Expanded edition with new chapters on storytelling for digital media and building a story blog
• Captivating style exemplifies the authors' expert guidance, combining academic authority with professional know-how
• Comprehensive coverage of all the angles, including marketing written work and finding jobs in the publishing industry
• Essential reading for anyone wishing to become a strong feature writer
• Accompanied by a website with a wealth of resources including PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and Q&As that will be available upon publication: www.wiley.com/go/sumnerandmiller

PART I
READING, WRITING AND RELEVANCE

“Ninety-eight percent of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first—and the other 2 percent are lying.”

David Remnick, editor

The New Yorker

The challenge of every feature writer is to find a topic that is so relevant and riveting that readers tune out all distractions—regardless how entertaining—and concentrate on the article’s content. The process begins with knowing where to look for such topics, understanding the audience that the publication serves and conducting in-depth research.

1

WHAT MAKES A STORY INTERESTING?

KEY POINTS

• Why action, angle and anecdotes matter
• What makes a story interesting?
• Understanding readers and reader demographics
• Five mistakes of beginning writers

“Sálvame, por favor. Sálvame. Save me. Please save me,” he prays to Our Lady of Guadalupe. In the chilly, early morning hours of March 24, 2009, 57-year-old José Arias fights for his life, floating in the water 66 miles from Cape May. The nearest lights are from another fishing vessel, which does not see him, anchored less than a half-mile away. A little farther out, a mammoth container ship steams toward Philadelphia. Although Arias does not know it yet, all six of his friends and fellow fishermen are dead, and the red-hulled scalloper, the Lady Mary, is resting, right-side up, on the sandy bottom of the Atlantic.

Thus begins “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” a story that won the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for Newark Star-Ledger reporter Amy Ellis Nutt. She reported a deeply probing story of the mysterious sinking of a commercial fishing boat that drowned six men in the Atlantic Ocean.¹

“The Man the White House Wakes Up To,” in the New York Times Magazine, profiled Mike Allen, publisher of the daily e-mail newsletter Playbook, which thousands of the nation’s most influential political leaders, media executives and journalists read daily for their “insider” news about politics.² The profile, which won a National Magazine Award, told this anecdote about Allen:

In 1993, Allen was covering a trial in Richmond, Va., for The New York Times (as a stringer) and The Richmond Times-Dispatch (which employed him). He found a pay phone, darted into the street and got whacked by a car. Allen composed himself, filed stories for both papers and then found his way to the hospital with a broken elbow. This is one of the many “Mikey Stories” that Washingtonians share with awe and some concern.

“You Have Thousands of Angels Around You,” from Atlanta Magazine, told a heart-tugging story about Cynthia Siyomvo, a 17-year-old refugee from Burundi who, after arriving in Atlanta without any family, faced the threat of deportation. But soon she discovered a circle of new friends who helped her find a home, and she began pursuing a biology degree and a career in medicine.³

These stories, all of which won either the National Magazine Award or the Pulitzer Prize, offer rich examples of action, angle and anecdotes, the three primary ingredients of interesting writing. “There is a principle of writing so important, so fundamental that it can be appropriately called the First Law of Journalism and it is simply this: be interesting,” wrote Benton Patterson, a former Guideposts editor and author of Write To Be Read.⁴ The book you are holding includes “Action, Angle and Anecdotes” as a subtitle because we believe that lively action, a fresh, creative angle and lots of anecdotes characterize interesting writing that keeps readers reading.

Action. These stories tell about a mysterious sinking of a commercial fishing boat that the U.S. Coast Guard spent months investigating, a high-profile political reporter who talks daily with senior officials in the White House and Congress and a Burundi teenage girl who discovered a new circle of friends and support from a southern American city.

“Readers love action, any kind of action, and the story that does not move, that just sits there stalled while people declaim, explain, elaborate and suck their thumbs is justly labeled by some editors as MEGO—My Eyes Glaze Over,” wrote William Blundell in The Art and Craft of Feature Writing.⁵

Angle. These stories offer an angle on specific people who have expe­riences to share that illuminate larger issues. An angle makes a story interesting because it provides enough detail about a subject to give the reader some fresh, original information. Broad subjects are vague, fuzzy and boring. Fresh angles give insight into old topics. You have to discover a tiny slice that no one has yet cut from a broad topic to make a compelling and publishable story.

For example, in the Good Housekeeping feature “The (Surprising) Truth About Salt,” a National Magazine Award finalist, writer Rachael Moeller Gorman, tackled the unusual angle that salt is not necessarily “bad” for everyone. She interviewed doctors and medical researchers who said that, while it makes sense for some people with high blood pressure to lower their salt intake, current science shows that most people will reap little, if any, benefit from reducing their salt intake.⁶

Anecdotes. “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” “The Man the White House Wakes Up To” and “You Have Thousands of Angels Around You” tell specific stories about specific people doing specific things at specific times and in specific places. Anecdotes make articles interesting by telling true stories about people doing things. Many articles begin with an anecdote for a good reason: anecdotes tell a story—a tiny tale that draws us into the larger one. They illustrate the meaning of the information that follows. Nothing is more involving or revealing than human drama, and anecdotes capture drama with impact.

Feature stories are sometimes called “human-interest stories.” Good writers know people as well as they know language. They are sensitive, socially connected individuals who have a talent for finding and writing stories that interest people. The more you talk to people, the more you understand what people are interested in hearing and discussing.

Successful salespersons nurture relationships with their customers. Likewise, successful writers nurture relationships with their readers. Good writers need to develop two personalities as they write. The first is the sensitive creator of words and eloquent ideas. The second is the critical editor, acting on behalf of the reader, who savagely scours the page looking for mistakes and unnecessary content. The editor part of your mind must demand perfection.

When you write, always ask yourself: “How will the reader react to this? Will this sentence cause the reader to laugh or roll his eyes? Will this paragraph fascinate the reader or send her quickly to another article?”

We frequently refer to “the reader” in this book because great writers develop a second-sense about for whom and to whom they are writing. As you build experience as a writer, you develop a sense of what interests readers and what bores them. Your readers scan their tablet computers and smartphones while they roam supermarket aisles and airport lounges. They browse through cover lines of articles while waiting in line for the checkout or to make their plane connection. If a title attracts their attention, they read it. If it holds their attention, they read to the end. Think about this happening millions of times every week, and you get the picture. Editors are paid, writers are paid, websites stay in business and everyone is happy.

Large publishers hire research companies to determine the characteristics of their readers because advertisers demand it. Known as “demographics,” this information includes readers’ median ages, household income and gender and race percentages. You can often find this information on a publication’s website under links for advertisers. Sidebar 1.1 includes an illustration of the differing reader demographics of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Lucky. These magazines’ readers differ so much that an article written for one magazine could never be published in the other two.

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SIDEBAR 1.1 Demographics of Magazine Readers (2012)

Source: Magazine websites and MRIPlus.com (Mediamark Research, Inc.).

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When most people read an article, they seek diversion, entertainment or information. If a reader doesn’t finish an article, you can’t blame the reader; blame the author. You can’t argue that the reader is too lazy to understand the challenging content. If the reader feels bored, the writers didn’t do their jobs. Great writing is all about reaching the reader through the use of compelling action, an original angle and colorful anecdotes.

The best way to develop sensitivity for the reader is to read—a lot. If you are not an avid reader who reads everything you get your hands on, it’s doubtful you will ever be a great writer. Read books, blogs, bulletin boards, billboards, menus, manuals, meeting minutes, magazine articles in the doctor’s office and online articles anywhere you go. Read the fine print before you “agree” to a download; read the junk mail before you throw it away. Even if you find it boring, you’ve improved your writing ability because you now possess a better sense of what bores people and what interests them. If you don’t read much outside classes, you may not realize that what you consider a groundbreaking idea may have already been written about dozens of times.

Great writers acquire intellectual depth from a huge amount of time spent reading. It’s not enough to know the mechanics of writing or how to put together a coherent sentence. Most college students know how to do that. To break out ahead of the journalism pack, you must acquire ideas to write about. You must possess a well of ideas drawn from reading hundreds of books and periodicals.

FIVE MISTAKES OF BEGINNING WRITERS

After reading thousands of student-written articles for more than 35 years, we’ve created a list of the most common mistakes. We will start by explaining these five common mistakes and tell you how this book will teach you to avoid them.

Staying Safe in Your Own Backyard

A newspaper editor once joked to a group of journalists at a workshop that “News is what happens to or near the editor.” Many new writers, unfortunately, develop their story ideas based on what happens to or near them. They rely on home-grown situations for article ideas and personal connections for interviews. They write stories about themselves or their parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, or grandparents. That’s a...