Resources: Feature Writing Tips
Marshall Soules: Feature Writing
Features are not meant to deliver the news firsthand. They do contain elements of news, but their main function is to humanize, to add colour, to educate, to entertain, to illuminate. They often recap major news that was reported in a previous news cycle. Features often:
* Profile people who make the news
* Explain events that move or shape the news
* Analyze what is happening in the world, nation or community
* Teach an audience how to do something
* Suggest better ways to live
* Examine trends
* Entertain.
William E. Blundell: The art and craft of feature writing
For a two-day engagement, William E. Blundell brought the live performance of his book, "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing," to the Detroit Free Press.
Blundell played himself; the cast included an assortment of imaginary friends and pet peeves. In one scene, Blundell had drinks and talked story with the intelligent, interested and totally imagined friend whom Blundell writes for -- and who reels him back in when his writing gets gassy and bloated.
Roy Peter Clark - Reviving the Feature Story (Poynter Online)
Readers like stories, even news stories, written in "feature style," according to the Readership Institute. And since the invention of the human-interest story, the feature has had the beneficial effect of expanding the universe of newspaper readers while enriching our definition of news.
Mark Kramer: What is Narrative? (Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism)
Perhaps the question "What's up with this narrative stuff?" is an uneasy one - a question that denotes factions and discomfort with the clear movement toward more narrative in news coverage.
Nieman Narrative Digest - Interview with Jon Franklin
The story has a lot of aspects. It has character, meaning, plot. As a reporter, when you find any one of these you can connect the dots and find all the others. Often one bit of trouble the reporter will get into is that we're all living multiple stories at once. So they try to report the hottest parts of four stories, but you can't do that. You have to pick one. If you don't it'll be a bloody mess. You see a lot of that problem. People try to do the top of three or four stories.
Rick Meyer : 14 Tips for Building Character (Nieman Narrative Digest)
We probably ought to declare something right away, so no one can accuse us of cheating. In nonfiction, when we talk about building characters, we're not talking about creating them. That happens in fiction. In our world, God creates the characters. That's his or her job. It's our job to write about those characters.
Laurie Hertzel: Six Tips for Crafting Scenes (Nieman Narrative Digest)
Here's the thing to remember about scenes: You want the reader to feel like he's right there with you. Scenes are all about action and movement and tension and detail. They should unfold moment by moment. It's helpful to think in terms of making a movie or putting on a play: The curtain rises, the scene begins, your characters walk onto center stage and there's action. They move through the scene, talking, fighting, eating, emoting, whatever. The curtain goes down, and the scene is over
Steve Weinberg: Tell it Long, Take Your Time, Go in Depth
Weinberg looks at some trends that were emerging in US newspaper features in the late 1990s...Some newspapers are giving writers a wealth of time and space, urging them to get intimate with subjects. The call it Immersion Journalism
