Great literature — fiction and non-fiction — is the depiction of human truth.
Writers who aspire to this level often craft their plots along mythological lines. These often involve fate and free will, love and betrayal, and, especially, the hero’s journey. The hero myth connects ordinary people with a call to extraordinary work along divine principles, according to Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s great historians.
In his series of talks with journalist Bill Moyers, Campbell says the ideas that animated Star Wars and many other heroic films and books are part of an underlying set of myths found in nearly all cultures.
Within the story are narrative elements that include sympathetic characters, interesting complications, revealing dialogue, and plots that are constantly advancing along one or several timelines.
In Journalism, feature writing has the same standards of truth, accuracy and public service as news / information writing, but it is more often about individual human experience (and sometimes heroics) rather than politics or public affairs. Feature writing is considered one of the three main kinds of non-fiction writing. (The others are: news & analysis and opinion & editorial).
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
FURTHER
The hero’s journey — Wikipedia page summarizing this mythological trope
Stone’s Throw – by Bill Kovarik, Earth Island Journal, 2008
Lincoln and Climate Science – by Bill Kovarik, Appalachian Voice 2012
Chasing Copenhagen – by Bill Kovarik, Appalachian Voice 2010