Dear Narrative Group Members: 

This is a place for us to talk about form, structure, voice and other things that occupy (and bedevil) the narrative writer.

This is an asynchronous group. People can post any time, morning, noon or night. For the sake of group cohesion, though, please try to read and post fairly quickly after a topic goes out.

Stories to discuss are listed in the Narrative Group Folder (i.e., classroom). You can always get there by clicking Narrative Group or Forum Home above, top left, just under the WholeStory logo. 

Please respond to this welcome post using tools below. In your post, please include name, job, and a thing or two about you. To get the discussion going, please describe what concerns you, what you think about/ worry about when you first start hashing out a story. When you are ready to post, click on Post Reply below.

cheers, ma

Linda Shaw - 14 December 2007 01:42 PM

Linda Shaw, education reporter, Seattle Times

When I start a story, I worry about how to sell it to a narrative-skeptical editor, and also how to make sure it has impact.

Linda—I, for one, would love to hear more about this. Seems like there’s an interesting issue going on: Does the editor in question, on face, just dislike narrative? Or do you mean, how to sell her on whether a particular education story should take a narrative approach? Can you give an example? Editors (good and bad and ugly) figure into these topics in huge ways. More, pls!  Thanks.

Linda Shaw - 14 December 2007 02:54 PM

It’s just that sometimes when I can see and feel that a story would make a good narrative, I have trouble getting her to see that. Does this help?

Yep, helps a lot. This is an interesting issue.Question, I think, is: How can we frame a story pitch to an editor (who might have more of a hard-news bent) so that she can engage in/ see the value of using a narrative approach to a given story. (i.e., instead of just saying, “Hey—I want to do this with narrative” and having them recoil by default.) Would love to hear from others about how they have done this successfully. How do you frame the pitch/ idea to get the buy in?

In the stories to read section, I included a beautiful mini-narrative news story—FELON—which offers a micro-view of a wonderfully framed story.

Folks—thoughts?

Kristin - 30 December 2007 06:52 PM

when I turn in a first draft, everybody’s reading it as though it was the last draft. I don’t know about you guys, but more and more I value the experience of working on a rewrite....

Hi, Kristin, welcome to the group.

Guys—this is important! How do we maintain that personal ethic of “rejecting the first-draft culture” while getting an editor’s support and buy-in and face-time?

Tanya Rose - 14 February 2008 02:54 PM

Turns out I’d much rather write about things like giant geese terrorizing students on a college campus with their honking and pooping ... the quirkier the better. .

Hey, Tanya—welcome to the group! We love wonderful and quirky stories… post the best you come across )yours, too, if you got ‘em to share!) in Stories We Come Across. Look forward to hearing from you in the Threads ...

jhood - 03 March 2008 07:17 PM

Hello Mary Ann,
On the surface, the geese story, or one I wrote here recently about some small town canceling teen dances because the kids were getting too frisky on the dance floor (when have they not in parent’s eyes) might seem superficial. But newspapers need to not only provide the news, they need to capture life in their community.

Welcome, Joel. Hey—frisky teens, geese, I say it’s not the subject, but the hit of the story… if you comb the Threads here, you will find some cool stuff.... in Stories to Read, http://www.wholestory.com/classroom/viewthread/12/, I think Reading Throne and Cheerleader (maybe Ring of Regret) exemplify, on their face, the frisky-geese thing. Real simple stories, that, once pursued, became great ones....

In FELON, http://tinyurl.com/yvnsv5, we started hashing out the issue of small, as in small not only CAN be beautiful, it often times is preferable (and a good thing to nail given the news-hole situation for most of us)… Looking forward to your comments!

Jason Elek - 04 March 2008 12:54 AM

I sometimes find my narrative thread wanders through my stories like a sheep without a shepherd, eventually finding its way back to the fold—although the journey can be a little rough. I want to be a good shepherd

Jason—welcome to the group! Glad to have a sportsguy! (Hey post some great sports narratives for us in Stories We Come Across! http://tinyurl.com/2cqeq7)

As far as the sheep-shepherd thing goes, we have a good discussion going in CAMILLE (http://tinyurl.com/yrpyyx) about chronology, exactly what it is, how it works, whether it is necessary in the text-book kinda way, etc. Looking forward to your shepherding thots on that and other things.... see you in the Threads....