I’m Tanya Rose, a city reporter at the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA)
A couple things about me: I went to law school in another life, and thought I’d be one of those reporters obsessed with the technical and political. 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. Duh, right? I feel I have a TON to learn, and am constantly looking for teachers. I’m obsessed with narrative and my biggest concern these days is getting buy-in from my editor (others mentioned this, too). I hope it’s OK that I’m posting here kind of late ...

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 ...

Hello Mary Ann,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to sign on and get plugged into the conversation here. For those of you I don’t know, my name is Joel Hood and I’m a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune and formerly of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and a few other stops along the way. The post about covering geese terrorizing students sounds a lot like the kind of things I’ve stumbled into writing about over the last couple of years. Not that I consider that a bad thing. I find that reporters so often get bogged down in the technical aspects of writing that they simply forget how to tell a good a great story. That is what this is all about, isn’t it? 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. Happy to be a part of the discussion. I hope to post more ...

Jason Elek
Assistant Sports Editor, Charlotte Sun, Port Charlotte, FL

Hello, all. I find myself becoming a very busy person these days. In addition to a full-time job, which includes covering a beat and designing pages for a daily, I’m getting married in May and working on my masters degree in English. So, my main problem seems to be finding time to hash out the finer points of narrative writing. I’m hoping that entering into this ongoing discussion with a group of intelligent and passionate writers will help me develop as a narrative writer.

As far as the writing process goes, I’m with Liam in that I tend to visualize the beginning and end of a story before I dive into it. 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

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....

Love the image of frisky geese, Mary Ann!