Real Feature Writing

Abraham Aamidor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135250058
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Real Feature Writing emphasizes story shape and structure by illustrating several distinct types of feature and non-fiction stories, all drawn from the real world. Author Abraham Aamidor presents a collection of distinct non-deadline story types (profile, trend, focus, advocacy, and more), providing an introduction to each story type, a full-text example, a critical analysis of the example, and clear directions for producing similar stories. In this second edition, Aamidor and his guest contributors (all with real-world journalistic experience) demonstrate in clear, honest language how to write features. New for this edition are:
*updated examples of feature writing, integrated throughout the text;*a chapter on ethical journalism, which takes a critical look at propaganda;*a chapter on international perspectives, including coverage of issues in the Middle East;*chapters on research, freelancing, content editing, copyediting, and literary journalism.
This text is appropriate for upper-level journalism students, and will be a valuable resource for freelance writers and young working journalists needing guidance on writing features.

I

Types of Feature Stories

Chapter 1

The Profile

Did you ever meet a celebrity? The Reverend Jesse Jackson or Peyton Manning or Nancy Grace or Mel Gibson or Hillary Rodham Clinton? What’s the first question a friend would ask you if you had met any of these celebrities? I guarantee you it would be, “What’s he or she like?” This is inevitable. Magazines like People, TV Digest, and Rolling Stone and newspaper feature sections from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, are filled with stories every day that basically answer the question, “What’s he or she like?”

Martha Stewart is famous for her home decorating and gardening tips, her own magazine and successful line of products at a major department store chain, and her 2004 conviction for lying about insider stock trading. Some stories on Stewart simply are news stories, but every profile I’ve seen on her calls her ambitious to a fault, a control freak who can be hard to get along with. That’s what she’s like.

The late baseball player Jackie Robinson was the first Black person to break the color line in the major leagues. He was chosen for the task at hand by executives of the Brooklyn Dodgers because he was a gentleman who made as good an impression off the field as on. But he was also a fierce competitor who resented that some people might think he was a lackey, or what used to be called a “plantation Black.” That’s what he was like.

And it’s not just people we’re talking about when we use the word profile. Think of the last travel story you read, perhaps as part of your research into vacation destinations for yourself. Did you ever want to travel to London? Timbuktu, perhaps? Before you would commit to any place, though, you’d have to know what to expect or what it’s like! You could say the same for an automobile review, which is a kind of profile, too. “Hey, man, what’s it like to drive a Dodge Viper at more than 140 miles per hour?”

Imagine you’ve interviewed someone who spent the last 2 years in a biodome, hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world and confined to a small space with just a few other people. You would have to ask the person, “What was it like?” Sometimes what you find may not be very agreeable, of course. Too often profiles really are nothing but puff pieces—little more than public relations jobs meant to enhance the image of the profile subject. That may not be surprising because people with something to hide typically won’t agree to a profile.

I wrote a profile several years ago of Jack Crawford, the first director of the Indiana lottery. Jack was a Notre Dame graduate—first in his class, as I recall—and was a top prosecutor in Lake County, that crime-riddled part of northwest Indiana that borders Chicago. Jack was a young, handsome, highly competent, and ambitious politico whose future in Indiana politics seemed assured.

But he was brought down by a sex scandal while in office, and he resigned in disgrace. Many reporters in Indiana recall the press conference in which Crawford bowed his head and began sobbing uncontrollably, then announced his resignation. I wrote about Jack after the fall. I had a better-than-average profile going in because there had been some real news here. This wasn’t just another pretty face, after all. Plus, there was the titillation factor. People would read about this guy if for no other reason than the humiliating nature of his particular sex scandal.

Jack didn’t have to speak to me. But there wasn’t much more he could hide from the public, either, so he agreed. His wife had left him, he was driving a second-hand Chevrolet Cavalier because he was broke, and he shared office space with another attorney in a small shopping center up around 62nd and Keystone Streets in Indianapolis, most definitely not a place where the rich and powerful gathered. Talk about how the mighty had fallen!

This man was down, but he was not out. My story turned out to be a profile of the indomitable human spirit. Jack held his head high and was determined to rebuild his career—and his name—as best he could. He was doing criminal defense work at the time I met him, which was ironic because he had been one of the state’s toughest and most successful prosecutors in his heyday. I spent some time with Jack in court and followed his style closely: He was a great defense attorney. I remember telling friends this was the guy I’d hire if I ever got in trouble with the law. Naturally, he knew all the tricks and weaknesses of the lesser prosecutors he confronted daily.

I tried to speak with Jack’s former wife and some of his former associates as well. The wife said no, and some of his old friends turned out to be proverbial fair weather friends. That was all part of the tragedy and part of the story I reported. But I guarantee you this: My profile was no puff piece. It had some real grit and substance to it. And it proved there is indeed life after death, in a manner of speaking.

The basic strategy in reporting and writing a profile is to spend time with the subject—as much as possible. Do not do a phone interview and expect to know what a person is like. If it’s a personality profile of, say, the first woman mayor in your town, visit her at her office, sure. But also visit her at her home, with her husband and children (if applicable), or perhaps at her favorite retreat. Maybe she likes to sing in the church choir, or perhaps she’s on a bowling team. Then by all means visit with her at these venues, too, and talk to people who know about this other side in her life.

As part of your background research, you’d read other stories that may have been written about her, or you’d look for her name in any previous stories about local government and development issues. You’d also look at applicable campaign financial statements and talk to people who worked with her in the past but who have no stake in her career at present. (This latter point is important because former associates may speak more candidly than current associates.)

And when your research and interviewing are over, tell the reader the facts but also tell about the mayor’s smile and moods, her passions and peeves, and the way she likes to dress and act when she’s out of the limelight; tell the reader what the mayor is like in her most private moments as well as when she’s on center stage. Tell the reader enough so that he or she can decide what the mayor is really like.

The following story is a profile of a trailer park. First, you have my permission to laugh and giggle, chortle and snicker and do whatever it is you have to do. But leave all your preconceptions and stereotypes of life in a trailer park at the door. (My Gawd, he’s writin’ about a dang trailer park!) Finished laughing? OK. Now, let me tell you first that it is real people who live in trailer parks. That was the one unalterable truth I carried with me, along with my pen and reporter’s notebook, when I went looking for this story, which overtly is a profile.

Who are these people who live in trailers? What’s it like to live in a trailer and why? Why would anyone live in a trailer in the first place? This should sound like I was working off the time-honored inverted pyramid, that reporting and writing model that always calls for answering the 5 W’s and H. If truth be told, every story must answer the 5 W’s and H (who, what, when, where, why, and how) at some point, although not necessarily at the top of the story.

The story you’re about to read is set in Johnson County, Indiana, just south of Indianapolis. Indiana has one of the highest concentrations of trailer park housing in the country, and the state is a leading manufacturer of mobile homes and trailers, so it was a good story to do for The Indianapolis Star. We had featured life in small towns, hippy communes, religious communities, inner city neighborhoods, trendy downtown redevelopments, and more, but amazingly, we had almost completely ignored people who lived in trailer parks (except for the occasional tornado or fire story).

Because there were so many trailer parks in central Indiana—my newspaper’s circulation area—I felt it was impossible to report on all of them, or even very many, in an adequate way. I would have to focus on one community. (Note that you’re going to see a later chapter devoted to focus stories, but none of these distinctions or story types are mutually exclusive. A story can be a profile and a focus story and an expanded inverted pyramid, all at the same time. The ultimate question will be, “Was it a good story?”)

Consequently, I went stalking the perfect trailer park. I personally visited five or six different mobile home communities and made observations and took notes before I committed to writing a story. I ultimately chose a place called Friendly Village because it was neither the poorest nor the most splendiferous; it was neither the largest nor the smallest, but it was representative of many parks. (Plus, I really loved the name.) It was quite photogenic, too: Friendly Village has a nice swimming pool and a large, welcoming gate in front, just like a vacation or campsite, as well as its own small fishing hole and other little touches. This was important because I knew ahead of time that we’d run a bunch of color photos with the story.

There was another factor. I spoke to management at Friendly Village, and they seemed very cooperative; they had no objections to me and a photographer coming onto their property and interviewing folks. Friendly Village is on private property, and trespassing was an issue. Go ahead and read the story now.

Upward Mobility

by Abe Aamidor

Harry Wagner was mad; he wasn’t going to take it anymore.

A longtime resident of the Friendly Village trailer park in northwestern Johnson County, he had seen enough break-ins, street-corner fights and speeding cars to be disgusted with it all. In 1984 he banded together with other residents of the sprawling, 500-unit mobile home community and formed one of the very first Crime Watch programs in a trailer park in the country.

“We never went in to get someone ourselves, but there’d be 15 or 20 of us standing around a trailer until the police showed up,” the 50-year-old commercial refrigeration technician said almost gleefully.

“Would you want to come out and face all those angry people if you were a burglar?”

Imagine those Friendly Village residents—retirees and late-shift workers who needed their sleep, and countless single mothers—with their citizens band radios in hand, all ready to bolt from their long, narrow steel homes the instant their scanners alerted them to a robbery in progress.

And it worked. Crime dropped and remains down in Friendly Village, which then was Shady Brook Heights, according to Maj. Steve Byerly of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department, who helped Wagner start the program.

The 1,600 people who live in Friendly Village are part of a nation within a nation that’s tucked away at the edges of the American Dream, out of sight of the mainstream and out of the news except for an occasional scare story during tornado season. They are people often plagued by stereotypes.

About 10 million Americans live in 4 million manufactured homes in 25,000 communities, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute in Arlington, Va. In Indiana an estimated 460,000 people reside in all types of manufactured homes, including what are traditionally called trailers. That’s nearly 10 percent of the state’s population.

“Not everybody can live in $200,000 homes in Carmel,” said Thomas Corson, chairman of Coachman Industries in Elkhart, until recently a major manufacturer of mobile homes. “It’s an important segment of housing.”

Paradise Lost and Found

Harry Wagner, a heavy-set, Buddha-like presence known throughout Friendly Village for his mutton-chop sideburns and the radio-controlled car club he helps run, has built a private Eden on his small lot. He and his wife Barbara have a flower garden alongside the metal skirt of their trailer, a cozy wood deck by their front door and a small picnic table in the shade of the poplar and dogwood trees in their front yard.

Nearby, in one of the other looping courts within the 68-acre park, Billy Parker is bent over an old Chrysler he bought for $80, troubleshooting some engine problems under the hood.

Parker recently bought his “fixer-upper” trailer for $1,000. “It definitely was not in move-in condition, but it’s a start,” says the 29-year-old concrete mixer truck driver.

A divorced father of two, Parker lives in the trailer alone except on the weekends when he cares for his daughters, ages 3 and 5. In the five months he’s been in his home, he has replaced some of the water pipes, repaired the roof and fixed seams in the sheet metal exterior walls that literally were coming apart. But it’s home to him.

“Oh, yeah, it was definitely the money,” said Parker, explaining why he chose to live in a trailer.

“I could spend $400 to $500 (a month) on an apartment, plus the utilities, or I could move in here for a lot less money, and I’ve got three bedrooms for my girls.”

Like the other residents in Friendly Village, Parker must abide by several management-imposed “stipulations.” They include no privacy fence; no wading pool for the kids (this one is widely ignored); no satellite TV dishes (you must buy your cable TV service from the park management); and no major auto repairs on the street, such as “dropping” a transmission or overhauling an engine (this one also is ignored on occasion).

Still, Parker figures he is saving money compared to renting an apartment elsewhere in Johnson County, where he grew up. Besides, there is a countrylike charm to the narrow, winding lanes that branch out everywhere in Friendly Village, and to the little, unnamed creek that flows just behind the park.

Other amenities include a convenience store that operates outside the main entrance and small swimming pool on the grounds that is open in warm weather. A meeting room is available to residents in the main office building, and the management even tosses seasonal parties for the residents, including an annual summer cookout and a community-wide garage sale.

Compared to traditional single-family homes built on a foundation, trailers, mobile homes or manufactured housing—all three terms are used—are considered questionable investments by some. Larger, top-of-the-line mobile homes can cost as much as $35,000 set up and skirted; barely adequate used homes in the area cost $3,500 and up, though “fixer-uppers” are cheaper.

Many banks will make loans on mobile homes, but they are financed like cars. When the home is paid off, you get a title, not a deed.

Worse, mobile homes depreciate in value, just like a car.

But worst of all, to some people’s thinking, is the “lot rent” you must pay for the privilege of setting your trailer down in someone else’s trailer court. Lot rental at Friendly Village, for example, is $213 a month.

No matter. For many mobile home owners, the purchase price represents not so much an investment as a stepping stone to true home ownership.

As the World Turns

By the front entrance, on County Line Road, a large painted sign beckons passers-by, as if the trailer park is a campground or tourist attraction. Bertha Upton, whose trailer is near the front, says she has the best seat in the house for the para...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Author and Contributors
• I: Types of Feature Stories
• II: Writing Features
• Author Index
• Subject Index