{"id":699,"date":"2017-03-20T13:18:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T13:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/journalism\/?page_id=699"},"modified":"2026-03-26T13:35:05","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:35:05","slug":"features","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/journalism\/the-craft\/features\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feature writing is story telling.\u00a0<\/strong> It’s one of the three main\u00a0 kinds of non-fiction writing; the others are news \/ information and opinion \/ editorial.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

People love stories.\u00a0 And a true story is that much better.<\/p>\r\n

Great story telling (narrative writing) elements include sympathetic characters, interesting complications, revealing dialogue, and strong plots.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

In Journalism, feature writing has the same standards of truth,\u00a0 accuracy and public service as\u00a0 news \/ information writing,\u00a0 but it is often about topics that are less serious and more about the human experience.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

In all literature — fiction and non-fiction — writers pursue human truth and try to understand how they connect to the divine,\u00a0 says Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s great historians.\u00a0 In his series of talks with Bill Moyers<\/a>, the ideas that animated the Star Wars film are shown to be part of an underlying set of myths found in nearly all cultures.<\/p>\r\n

John Franklin’s textbook on literary journalism, Writing for Story,<\/a> describes the most basic kind of feature story:<\/p>\r\n

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A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.\u00a0\u00a0What separates literature from life is that many of us live with complications (problems) that go perpetually unsolved.\u00a0 (See also Doug Toft’s review<\/a>).<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Take John Franklin’s 1979 Pulitzer-winning story for the Baltimore Sun, Mrs. Kelly’s Monster<\/a>.<\/strong> \u00a0It’s annotated, so he explains the thinking behind the writing.<\/p>\r\n

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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.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Think of news as a continuum, says Tim Harrower.<\/p>\r\n

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At one end you’ve got hard news: \u00a0serious breaking news events like murder, war, a fire in a nursing home. \u00a0On 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…<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

It’s not just puppies and cookies, nice though they are. Feature stories are\u00a0 opportunities to use a more literary style of writing or to open up deeper explorations of the human experience.<\/p>\r\n

For example, in fashion writing and blogging,<\/strong> there’s this advice from Tim Blanks<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

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\u201cYou set yourself your own standards in a way and I say this again and again: to write you have to read. While you\u2019re reading you are seeing things that you can aspire to. You are seeing a style of writing, you\u2019re seeing writers who have been through what you maybe want to go through in your life…”<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Or take some of these \u00a0great sports stories<\/a> <\/strong>(from Forbes Magazine), including this gem,\u00a0\u201cThe Last Days of Stealhead Joe<\/em><\/a>\u201d by Ian Frazier<\/p>\r\n

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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, \u201cWHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR?\u201d in a voice the size of the canyon. You would fall to your knees if you weren\u2019t chest-deep in water and afraid that the rocketing, leaping creature you have somehow tied into will get away.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Another great feature story is “Footprints in the Snow lead to an emotional rescue<\/a>“<\/strong> by T.Y. Gagne for the Manchester Union Leader.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Feature story structures\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Sometimes it helps to think of feature leads being structured through some framework.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\r\n