Feature writing

Feature writing is story telling.  It’s one of the three main  kinds of non-fiction writing; the others are news / information and opinion / editorial.   

People love stories.  And a true story is all the better.

Great story telling (narrative writing) elements include sympathetic characters, interesting complications, revealing dialogue, and strong plots.

In Journalism, feature writing has the same standards of truth,  accuracy and public service as  news / information writing,  but it is often about topics that are less serious and more about the human experience.

In all literature — fiction and non-fiction — writers pursue human truth and try to understand how they connect to the divine,  says Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s great historians.  In his series of talks with Bill Moyers, the ideas that animated the Star Wars film are shown to be part of an underlying set of myths found in nearly all cultures.

John Franklin’s textbook on literary journalism, Writing for Story, describes the most basic kind of feature story:

A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.  What separates literature from life is that many of us live with complications (problems) that go perpetually unsolved.  (See also Doug Toft’s review).

Take John Franklin’s 1979 Pulitzer-winning story for the Baltimore Sun, Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.  It’s annotated, so he explains the thinking behind the writing.

In the cold hours of a winter morning Dr. Thomas Barbee Ducker, chief brain surgeon at the University of Maryland Hospital, rises before dawn. His wife serves him waffles but no coffee. Coffee makes his hands shake. In downtown Baltimore, on the 12th floor of University Hospital, Edna Kelly’s husband tells her goodbye.

Think of news as a continuum, says Tim Harrower.

At one end you’ve got hard news:  serious breaking news events like murder, war, a fire in a nursing home.  On the other end of the scale, you’ve got soft news: Lighter, less urgent, less somber topics, like how to buy a puppy, cookie recipes… makeup secrets…

It’s not just puppies and cookies, nice though they are. Feature stories are  opportunities to use a more literary style of writing or to open up deeper explorations of the human experience.

For example, in fashion writing and blogging, there’s this advice from Tim Blanks.

“You set yourself your own standards in a way and I say this again and again: to write you have to read. While you’re reading you are seeing things that you can aspire to. You are seeing a style of writing, you’re seeing writers who have been through what you maybe want to go through in your life…”

Or take some of these  great sports stories (from Forbes Magazine), including this gem, “The Last Days of Stealhead Joe” by Ian Frazier

Casting for steelhead is like calling God on the telephone, and it rings and rings and rings, hundreds of rings, a thousand rings, and you listen to each ring as if an answer might come at any moment, but no answer comes, and no answer comes, and then on the 1,001st ring, or the 1,047th ring, God loses his patience and picks up the phone and yells, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR?” in a voice the size of the canyon. You would fall to your knees if you weren’t chest-deep in water and afraid that the rocketing, leaping creature you have somehow tied into will get away.

Another great feature story is “Footprints in the Snow lead to an emotional rescue“ by T.Y. Gagne for the Manchester Union Leader.    

Feature story structures    

Sometimes it helps to think of feature leads being structured through some framework.       

  • Lead – variety of types include contrast, narrative, descriptive* 
  • Context – Who, what, where, when   
  • Colorful quote – Sometimes just one sentence 
  • Roadmap through the material
    • Roadmap 1 – 
    • Roadmap 2 
    • Roadmap 3 
  • Close   
  • More information / pointers  

Tell many stories 

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

 

Types of writing and useful lead structures  

There are  four basic types of writing that apply to journalism:     

  • Expository — Transmits facts, for example, hard news 
  • Narrative — Tells a story  
  • Descriptive — Uses imagery to describe a place or person 
  • Persuasive — Editorials and op-eds  

Consider how feature articles use these basic types 

Expository Contrast:  Ten years ago, Jake Smith spent his days underground, digging coal.  “It was a hard life,” he said, “but one my father and grandfather had lived.”  Today he is in graduate school, looking for ways to bring change to Appalachia and new jobs to those who — like him — can no longer work in the mines.         

Narrative sequence:  The day begins at 4 am. Hopefully there is coffee and a clean pair of coveralls waiting.  Its hell going down into the mine without coffee, even worse in a wet pair of coveralls.      
     Jake Smith remembers those days …    
 
Descriptive/ expository:  Appalachian coal mining has fallen off by half in the past decade, and the economic and demographic trends of the region show  America’s changing energy mix.    
     Jake Smith, a former coal miner, talks about the human impacts of these trends.    
      “There is a butload of desperation in the coal fields,” Smith said.       
 
Descriptive approach with the human element first:   
     When Jake Smith left coal mining ten years ago, it seemed as if the industry would go on forever. That year the Appalachian mines churned out  over 400 million tons of coal, and he contributed his share. But now,  coal production has been cut by  almost half.   What Smith and other Appalachian residents can do about the decline in the coal industry is not clear, but they are determined to find a way forward.    
 
Narrative contrast (cliche): 
       Jake Smith was looking for lunch, and not looking to become it.  
Last week, when he took a break at his temp job in Florida, he stumbled into a drainage ditch where he found a large alligator lurking. The creature bit into his leg and held on.   
     Passers-by heard his calls for help and the rescue squad arrived in time to save Jake — but not his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  
“I think the gator got it,” he said.  “Im just glad it didn’t get me.”