EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by nonfiction writer and teacher Lauren Kessler. Previous posts provided an overview of the power of narrative, how to build a story through scenes and how to report and write memorable characters.

When a friend returned the book I loaned her a few weeks ago, she said what I knew she would say: “I loved it right up until that ending.” She shook her head. “That ending.” We talked for a minute about the wonderfully quirky conceit of the book— “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus — the vibrant central character, the genius dog, the precocious child. But the ending? The ending, we agreed, was contrived. It took all the oomph out of the narrative, at least for us. “Why did the author think she had to wrap it up with a bow?” my friend asked.

Why did the author think she had to wrap it up with a bow? Why do we who write nonfiction, who work as (or are learning to become) narrative journalists, often feel compelled to create a tidy package to deliver to the reader? Why is it such a struggle to write ourselves to a satisfying ending?

Here’s a thought, courtesy of one of the finest writers of narrative nonfiction: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”  That’s Joan Didion beginning one of her most memorable essays, “Goodbye to All That.”

Didion is writing about the beginning and end of a love affair — hers, with the city of New York — but I think it is an equally wise statement about writing. It is easier to know when and where to start than when and where to finish.  And because of that, it is easier to write good beginnings than it is to craft good endings.

I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious that we struggle with endings. The final pages or paragraphs or even sentences of a story carry extraordinary weight. They can and should leave a lasting impression on the reader and often determine the overall success of the narrative. That is a lot of pressure. This could be why some endings seem forced or contrived. We must make our point! We must tie up loose ends! This is our last chance.

The challenge of endings may also be a matter of focus. Throughout the thinking, reporting and organizing phases of a piece of writing — everything we do before sitting down to actually write — we often concentrate on how and where our story will begin. We narrative journalists are suckers for a great opener. The lead — or lede, as some prefer — is the most important part of the story. We obsess over what that first sentence will be, that opening scene, that initial snippet of dialog, that quotable quote. That’s good.

But all that focus on beginnings means less, or in my cases no, concentration on endings.

Obstacles to a good ending

Some writers cling to the myth that once they figure out how to begin a story, the rest will just “fall into place.” Sometimes the magic happens. Often, not so much. Endings generally don’t miraculously materialize. And the danger of thinking (or hoping) they will means not devoting enough thought to them at the beginning.

The mechanics of the writing process can also stand in the way of creating a memorable ending. If we’re not batting out something on deadline and have a few days, or even a few weeks, to craft a piece, consider how that works. We invariable come back to the story by re-reading it. We read, re-read and then, of course, edit, and polish the beginning. Again and again. By the end of the process, we may have burnished and refined the opening paragraphs five, six perhaps a dozen times. But the ending — the last scene, the last paragraph, the last sentence we write — is the least edited. Of course it isn’t as strong.

And let’s not forget the hallowed “inverted pyramid.” Many narrative journalists, myself included, learned to write in journalism school, where we were taught that the way to organize a story was from most important element to least.  Using this model, we pyramid-veterans might end the story when we run out of material important enough to include or, frankly, when we run out of allowed room or time.  In other words, there is no ending — no considered, crafted way to bring a story to a close.

Thinking of stories as a whole

What to do? Maybe these suggestions will help:

The first is conceiving of the story as a story, by which I mean a narrative, a tale, rather than a coherently ordered collection of information. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, all of which are important and purposeful and carefully molded.  Once we frame an assignment as a story rather than a report, we immediately become attuned to endings. The news feature that was going to be a serviceable piece about a facility that helps feed the food-insecure becomes a vignette- and scene-powered story. When I approached “Shelter from the Storm” this way, letting the vignettes tell the story, the ending vignette was obvious.

Second suggestion is this: Although it is a mistake to believe that once we figure out how to begin a story, the rest (including the ending) will spontaneously generate, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the material we have gathered will lead to an ending as we write. The key is that we have conceived of the piece as a story and conducted our reporting to gather that kind of material. This is not “go with the flow” advice. It is, in fact, pro-active. It is being alert and attentive to the narrative structure, reporting with narrative needs in mind, then watching it from the outside even as we are writing it from the inside.

Occasionally a story will naturally and neatly conclude: the “and they all lived happily (or unhappily) ever after” variety. I don’t mean to imply that these kinds of endings are always trite but that they are definitive and conclusive — and, in real life, rare. Other stories naturally end in a mystery, a question unanswered, a conflict unresolved or unresolvable. Some narratives fold in on themselves or come full circle. When I wrote a piece about my love-hate relationship with the potato, the story began in the potato fields of Long Island with my mother cursing the volunteer spuds in our backyard garden and ended with me, 50 years later, embracing the diversity of the lowly spud and choosing to plant it in my garden. My most recent book, “Free,” which examines the challenges of reentry after long-time incarceration, opens when one man is released from prison, leaving behind a fellow prisoner, a close friend and mentor. It ends when the other man, three years later, finally gains his freedom. The two releases act as narrative bookends.

Here’s the third idea that may help illuminate the path to a good ending: Focus on the readers. We offer stories in the hopes that our readers will learn and care and question, empathize, sympathize, laugh, get angry. We write for them. And so, when contemplating how to end a story or when scrutinizing the ending we’ve written, it makes sense to ask:

• Does this ending deliver what I promised the reader at the beginning?
• Does this ending leave the reader with a sense of time well spent?
• Does this ending leave the reader smarter?
• Does this ending leave the reader with something to think about?

The contrived ending often does not. The tidy-little-package ending often does not. The non-ending ending (ran out of good material) often does not.

Ambiguity in endings ~ as in life

There are alternatives. Consider the power of a scene as an ending device. This can be a scene that captures the essence of the story or brings the narrative full circle — like the end scene in “Free” — or that presents a sort of cliff-hanger, leaving the reader to wonder and want to read more.

There is a difference between leaving the reader wanting more (curious, engaged) and leaving the reader unsatisfied (confused, cheated). When I was struggling with how to end my exploration of middle school, teen girl culture, and parenting a 21^st century teen in “My Teenage Werewolf,” I knew the natural conclusion to the story was the end of middle school. But there was no tidy ending to the issues raised by the narrative. And so, in the final scene, at the eighth-grade graduation dance, the reader is left not with a “well, that’s over” feeling but rather wondering “what happens next?”

Ending with a conversation among the characters in the story or with one character’s monolog can also create a meaningful ending.

I also think there is a place for what I’ll call the “transparent” ending. This is when the writer admits, in exposition, that this story doesn’t have an ending. The crisis continues. The relationship remains unstable. The goal has not been reached. The jury is still out. It is a candid admission to the reader, whom you have taken along for the ride, that there’s no grand finale here. This can be the only credible and honest way to end.

Reader validation

Endings are a challenge, no doubt about it.  But a strong, satisfying, meaningful conclusion is worth the thought, planning the effort extra it takes.

I like to imagine my ideal reader.  She is sitting in her favorite chair thoroughly absorbed in my article. She comes to the final few paragraphs. They bring the story into focus for her. They leave her with ideas worth pondering, with an image she’ll remember.  She nods to herself, then sits for a long moment before she reaches for her phone. “Let me tell you about this piece I just finished reading,” she says to her friend.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Endings: How to leave readers satisfied ~ and wanting more appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by nonfiction writer and teacher Lauren Kessler. Previous posts provided an overview of the power of narrative and how to build a story through scenes. A final post in the series will explore effective endings.

Scarlet O’Hara, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Vito Corleone, Jo March, James Bond. What do these fictional folks have in common?

They are unforgettable characters. They are embedded in our psyches and imaginations. We feel we know them. And, although we may have little in common with them, we feel a connection.

What if the readers of our stories felt the same way about the people in our journalistic stories—maybe not forever but at least in the moment?

They can. And maybe they should.

Among the things I had to unlearn from my traditional journalism training as I labored to become a nonfiction storyteller was this: The place of people in a story, and the journalists’ attitude toward people in their stories. I had been taught in j-school classes to think of people as either objects in a story or sources of information for that story. If they were objects, things happened to them (they were robbed) or they did things (they opened a business). If they were sources of information, they were mined for usable material.  Either way, what you did with people was this: You asked them questions. They answered. You scribbled. If you were lucky, you got a good quote. And, maybe, in between scribbling, you looked around for descriptive details to insert in the story. “Cluttered desk,” you wrote down diligently.  “Coffee stain on shirt.”

But really, it didn’t matter if you saw a person — live or on Zoom — or heard a person, or if you spent 10 minutes or two hours with a person, because people only existed to provide information or to answer your specific questions so you could write things about them. My ah-ha! moment about this came after I wrote a story based on a long interview believing I understood the person at the core of the story. I didn’t. That was because during the time I spent with her, I saw her not as a character at the center of the story, not as a person to be understood, but rather as a source from whom information could be extracted. She was a cardboard cut-out — an interesting cardboard cut-out, but an object without life.

Beyond the bio to character

In a recent piece for my Storyboard series on essential narrative elements, I proclaimed that scenes were the heart of narrative journalism. I take that back. Characters are the heart. Characters inhabit those scenes and make them work. Characters propel the story forward. They connect us to issues, bring resonance to facts, make us care. People care about people, plain and simple.

So how do you make a character come alive on the page? Consider those unforgettable fictional characters I mentioned above. What made them come alive for you? You know what they look like, sound like, move like — not just the ones you’ve seen on screen but the ones you have imagined in your head when you read words on the page. You feel you know them: what they want, what they care about, obstacles they face and how they face them, and enough of their backstory to make some sense of who they are.

That sounds like a lot. It sounds complicated. But really, it isn’t. What underlies the art of bringing a character to life on the page is the reporting, which comes down to this: Listen. Watch. Let them be who they are.

Listening does not mean half-listening to a response to one of your questions while the other half of you concentrates on what your next question you be. It means focused attention. It means being sincerely interested — and mostly silent. Watching is not passive. It is an intense activity that takes enormous concentration. It is the learned and practiced ability to see both big picture and small detail in the moment. By “let them be who they are,” I mean stepping back, not directing the conversation or the action but allowing the character to show you what’s important to them, in words or deed.

Reporting tools to reveal character

Consider these six ways we have to bring a character to life:

• What the character looks like
• What surrounds the character
• What the character says
• What the character does
• What the character thinks
• The character’s backstory

What the character looks like might include physical features, clothing, posture, demeanor, or mannerisms. When Nora Ephron — an extraordinary journalist before she became a screenwriter — profiled men’s clothing designer Bill Blass for the New York Times, she began with a deadpan head-to-toe description of his outfit. (The prices are 1968, so don’t be shocked!):

One day not long ago, Bill Blass, who is tall, slender and tawny and speaks with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, was standing in his brown plaid Bill Blass suit ($175), his brown Bill Blass shirt ($22.50), his brown Bill Blass silk tie ($15) and brown Bill Blass buckled shoes ($50) in the center of the Bill Blass men’s boutique at Bonwit Teller’s.

In Ephron’s deft hands, Blass becomes a walking advertisement, the brand incarnate. You know this guy.

Sometimes it’s the briefest of glimpses that can bring a person to life as a character, that “telling detail,” that says more than it says, that is both descriptive and evocative. Think Scarlet O’Hara’s 18-inch waist. Think Harry Potter’s scar. In a portrait of the pugnacious teamster boss Tony Provenzano, Jimmy Breslin has us readers notice the diamond ring sparkling on the man’s pinkie finger. A diamond. On a pinkie. On a teamster. This speaks volumes. In a profile I wrote of a woman’s college basketball coach, I direct the reader’s attention to the 3-inch heels this 6’3” woman wears as she paces up and down the sidelines. These are small telling details.

Characters also come alive when the reader can see them in context — in their surroundings, their environment. It’s helpful to think like a cinematographer about this, offering readers a pan (a sweeping landscape), a mid-shot (an office, a kitchen), a close-up (a desktop) or an extreme close-up (a coffee cup). The people who surround a character, at work, at home and at play can add context. Animals, too. As Emmanuel Kant is reputed to have said: “You can judge the heart of a man by how he treats animals.”

What characters say (conversation and dialog rather than just quotes) and what characters do (from the boldest of actions to the smallest of twitches) go a long way to bringing them to life. It is matter of being there to listen and notice, to watch as they do what they do, and then to choose the bits bit of dialog, action or inaction that illuminates and reveals. In a story I wrote about a facility that feeds the unhoused and food insecure, I captured the experience and intensity of the chef by focusing on his knife skills.

Ask rather than assume

What a character thinks can also be extraordinarily revealing but difficult to ascertain. As nonfiction writers we cannot suppose or imagine what characters are thinking. We cannot project what we would think in their circumstance and place this inside their heads. But we can ask them, in the moment, what they are thinking. We can, if given access, discover what they were thinking at other moments by looking at texts or social media posts.

Finally, characters’ backstories — the key events that brought them to this place, to world of the story you are writing — can provide insights into who they are. A little goes a long way. A backstory is not a resume, a recitation of achievements or failures. It is, again, the small, carefully chosen detail. When I was researching the life of an American spy for the biography “Clever Girl,” I found out everything I could about her four years at Vassar: every course she took and every grade she got, what activities she participated in. But the piece of that backstory I used was what I learned when visiting her freshman dorm room. It was the last room on the corridor and the only single on the floor. It faced north and was dark most of the day. It faced away from the quad, away from campus. That was her life for a year. It helped me understand her, and I hoped it did the same for my readers.

The biggest take-away from all this is that once you begin to see people as characters in a story rather than sources of information you hold a powerful narrative tool in your hands. People make the story live. They engage the reader. They may even be unforgettable.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Character: The beating heart of narrative appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler. Future posts will explore the development of character and crafting of story endings.

A passage from a true story:

In Portland, in the spare bedroom in his daughter’s house, David Bradley was sitting up in bed dressed in a thick, scarlet-colored robe, his dog Scooter napping by his feet, the bottle of Nembutal on the night table. When the doctor arrived in the early evening, the family was finishing its farewells. They had all sat together in David’s room that last week watching old episodes of the TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” his favorite movie in which–it was hard not to notice–the fiercely independent main character chooses to die on his own terms.

David picked up the end of his feeding tube, removed the plug and poured in the liquid Nembutal. Then he poured in a cup of water to make sure the medicine went down, re-stoppered the tube and settled back on his pillows. He talked to the doctor sitting beside him about how much he loved his family.

Downstairs, eight people sat in a circle on the floor, including David’s three daughters and his sister. In the middle of the circle were objects important to David: an eagle feather, the Leatherman tool he always carried with him, a battered stuffed animal he had when he was a child. Each person picked up an object and told a story about it. Then they went around the circle again, this time each person holding David’s eagle feather and saying whatever they wanted to say. David had wanted someone to recite the strong, unsentimental poem John Wayne had said at Howard Hawks’ funeral, “Do not stand at my grave and weep,” and so someone did.

Upstairs, David yawned. The Nembutal was beginning to take effect. David motioned the doctor closer. He had one more thing to say.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I’ve done a lot of things right.”

Then he smiled and closed his eyes and fell asleep. Within a few minutes, he was unconscious. Within 10 minutes he stopped breathing. The doctor felt for his pulse and found none, listened for his heartbeat, and heard none.

You were there.

Only you weren’t. The magic of scene-setting took you there.

But it isn’t magic. It is the result of engaged reporting, careful observation, thoughtful questioning, meticulous note-taking and cognitive empathy — those journalistic skills we practice and hone every day — plus a flair for narrative. Narrative journalism — the literary journalism or long-form reportage by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin —is primarily found in a few elite magazines. But the legacy of that work continues in the narrative approach sometimes found in news, feature and investigative journalism. This approach translates into thinking story, seeing events through a storytelling lens, reporting with the goal of gathering material for storytelling and embracing some of the elements crucial to compelling storytelling.

Chief among these is the crafting of scenes.

The scenes that build the story

Scenes are the building blocks of narrative construction, from stories on the big and small screen to novels to, yes, journalism. Scenes immerse readers in the moment, bring characters to life, and set a tone. The reader is in the room with David watching these last moments of his life. The reader is downstairs watching David’s family participate in a final ritual. It is woven into “The End in Two Acts,” a story I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2007. It includes interviews with medical and legal experts on “death with dignity,” religious and political arguments for and against end-of-life legislation, historical context, statistics gleaned from documents and testimonies — the stuff of solid, traditional reporting. But it is the scene that pulls in the reader and, most important, compels the reader to read on.

The only difference between writing a scene as a novelist and writing a scene as a journalist — and it is a huge and existentially important difference — is that journalists do not fabricate scenes; they report them.

Here is a very short scene, a snippet, from later in that same article, which contrasts David’s death with the end-of-life decisions faced by another man, Tom, who lived in a state without the Death with Dignity option. Here is Tom testifying in a court case:

“My doctor told me I’d know when I’m near the end because I’ll be coughing up blood,” he said. He was sitting motionless, a little slumped, at the witness table. “I’m not too thrilled with the prospect of ending my life drowning in my own blood.” His voice cracked. Someone brought him a glass of water, and he composed himself.

Reporting that serves the writing

I chose “The End in Two Acts” to illustrate the crafting of scenes for two reasons: First, as the author, I know exactly what went into the process of reporting and writing. Second, the three scenes you just read — David upstairs, his family downstairs and Tom in court — were based on different reporting methods, all of which are viable and legitimate ways to gather material for scenes. Reporting comes before writing, so let me explain.

The downstairs scene of David’s family was based on direct observation, being there, fly-on-the-wall reporting. I sat quietly in the corner and took notes.

The scene upstairs reads like the product of direct observation, but was not. David did not want anyone in the room except the doctor. And, frankly, I would not have asked to be there. So how did I get the material? I debriefed the doctor, a highly trained observer who was required to take second-by-second notes and had the family’s permission to share them with me. I had interviewed him before. We had established a rapport. He read his notes to me. I followed up with specific questions. I had previously seen David’s room and had notes describing it. I had several conversations with his daughter both before and after his death. I had met his dog.

The scene of Tom in court was written after I watched and rewatched the tape of that testimony.

A scene can be written only if the journalist has the material, however that material is ever-so-carefully gathered. A scene can be written well only if the journalist knows what makes a scene work. And guess what? We all do, even if we’ve never tried writing a scene in a piece of journalism. We read novels and short stories, see movies and watch drama and comedy on the small screen. We know scenes.

The raw material of scenes

A scene puts the reader inside the story. It is both descriptive and evocative. It has tone. It has emotional content. We know, from our own reading and viewing, the key element of a scene: There is setting. There are characters. Something happens. Characters reveal themselves in some way. The story — the plot — is advanced in some way. That’s the guts of a scene.

Scenes are most often a mix of description (describing the setting, the character or characters), narration (the telling of what happens) and exposition (explaining what might be necessary to help readers understand). The trick — and of course, it is not a trick — is to choose and use just what is needed to paint a picture and pull readers into the moment. Too little and the picture is fuzzy or incomplete or, worse, confusing. Too much and the reader is overwhelmed, not knowing where to look, what to pay attention to or, worse, bored.

Good choices rely on having more material than you need and then extracting the small details and precise actions that capture the moment and the purpose of that moment in the story. In the scene with David, for example, there is no physical description of the man. Of course, I had this in my notes, but I chose instead to describe what he was wearing — the thick, richly colored bathrobe. To me, this one detail caught the softness, the hominess of his death at home. I chose not to spend words describing what his bedroom looked like. Did that matter? Instead, I wanted reader to see his dog, Scooter, on the bed, the Nembutal on the bedside table. At the end of that first paragraph,  I came in with a bit of exposition about “Lonesome Dove.”

The narration, both of David upstairs and his family downstairs, is presented as simply as possible, unadorned by adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, whatever. The moments themselves were dramatic; I did not want to force more drama into the retelling. I wanted the drama, the emotion to come from what the readers took out — not any extras I put in.

In addition to detail, understatement and appropriate tone, consider two other “tricks” to making a scene work: the position of the “camera” and pacing. Our words control the camera — and thus the reader’s attention. Upstairs, the scene is a close-up: David. Downstairs, the camera is pulled back allowing the reader to see the circle of family in one shot. Upstairs, the pacing is deliberate and slow: The actions David takes when he ingests the medication. Downstairs, the pacing is brisk: We don’t hear what every family member says. We get a quick summary.

Scenes are a wonderfully satisfying challenge to write. More important: They are essential to narrative and a powerfully compelling way to connect with readers.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Reporting and writing scenes: The foundational building block of stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In coming weeks, narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler will identify and explore the key elements of nonfiction storytelling, including scene, character and endings.

There was something of a Camelot — a brief and shining moment — for long-form narrative journalism in newspapers. This “American Literary Movement” (thus proclaimed by the Encyclopedia Britannica) explored and blurred the boundaries between traditional news journalism and nonfiction storytelling, resulting in iconic pieces of reporting published most notably in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Other daily newspapers — from the Portland Oregonian to the Detroit Free Press to the St. Petersburg Times to the St. Paul Pioneer Press to the Baltimore Sun — stepped in, giving reporters the time, resources and sophisticated editorial guidance to do this work. The pieces were often long, often part of a series and usually woven through with universal human experience or emotion.

It’s hard to find much evidence of this movement in today’s shrinking newspaper landscape. As newsrooms contract and news deserts grow, magazine-style journalism is again a luxury in daily journalism. Few newspapers still publish Sunday magazines, and many have folded their features sections.

Does this mean narrative journalism in newspapers dead? With fewer newspapers, smaller staffs and the press of a 24/7 reporting cycle, you would think the answer is yes.

The answer is no.

Or rather, the answer is that the vital elements, the key components, of narrative journalism can be (and are being) incorporated into news features, investigative journalism and even breaking news. And storytelling is alive and thriving in the podcast world.

Narrative on deadline

So-called traditional journalism and the art of nonfiction narrative are not mutually exclusive. The crafting of a piece of narrative journalism and the work of reporting on deadline are not mutually exclusive. When we read a lengthy piece in The New Yorker or The Atlantic (anchors of long form narrative), we know that the work demanded days, weeks, maybe months of time and an editor who will grant that kind of time. We might think all narrative is long form. That to do it right we need words, words and more words — thousands of words. We think there will be some magic moment in our careers where we will have that time and that editor and the heady freedom of those many words, not to mention the perfect story. In the meantime, narrative is for those who write for a handful of elite magazines. In the meantime, shoulder to the wheel and fingers to the keyboard.

Allow me to disabuse you of these assumptions. I just rediscovered a glorious example of narrative written on the fly with an economy of words. This piece testifies to the short-form, deadline possibilities of narrative journalism.

It is a column written by Jimmy Breslin after he got a call at his home on December 8, 1980, that John Lennon had been shot. Breslin went out to report it. He went back to the office, the New York Daily News, to write it. It was in print and on the streets the next the next day.

This event-to-published-story speed may seem glacial now. But for a moment, forget technology. Forget that today’s Breslin — you or I — could write in the field on a phone, take photos and record audio with the same phone, upload it all and have the story posted before the ambulance bearing Lennon’s fatally wounded body reached the ER.

So forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was. How, in the midst of breaking news, in the chaos of an unfolding event, he saw a story. Not a “John Lennon Shot” news flash but a story — one that no one else saw. He saw it in that moment. He reported it in that moment. He wrote in on deadline.

Building a story in scenes

Breslin’s piece has everything we look for in the narrative approach to journalism: scene-setting, character development, dialog, plot, arc and detail. It has heart, but not the bleeding kind. And it does all that in less than 700 words.

Here’s how it opens:

That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18 and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life. Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a 34-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at 82nd St. and Columbus Ave. and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, 1 West 72 St..” Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.

Here’s what we have so far: A snippet of culturally rich backstory. A hint of character development. A sprinkling of specifics. The inciting incident. The curtain-goes-up moment that introduces what promises to be a scene. And consider that quietly ominous end to the paragraph, a nod to the readers who, that morning, already knew what had happened the night before in front of the Dakota.

The story continues:

Another patrol car was at the scene, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.

“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.

“In the back,” one of the cops said.

Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood. Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street.

Here’s what we have: A you-are-there scene with terse dialog, the drama of it delivered clinically. Anti-drama drama. The kind that chills you. “A guy in a red shirt.” The guy, that body — John Lennon, the focus of every other story written about that event — is in Breslin’s piece an object. Note that Breslin writes the mouth, the face, the legs — not his mouth, his face, his legs. The cops are the subject. This is their story.

The scene continues to unfold. There’s another patrol car in front of the Dakota, another cop. His name is Jim Moran, and the first thing we learn about him is that back when he joined the force in 1964 he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. The guy in the red shirt covered in blood? His body is put in the back of Moran’s car. Breslin writes:

 “As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”

Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in
the back nodded and groaned.”

It reads like a short story, a polished gem of a short story. The brilliance of the piece — on deadline, remember, in the midst of a media circus, remember — is that Breslin saw the event through a storytelling lens, not a breaking news lens. He employed classic reporting skills — observation and interviewing — but in the service of story. And so what he noticed, whom he paid attention to, what he asked, what he wrote down, was different than what the news hound was doing. Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Breslin had already made a name for himself as a street reporter interested in “the little guy,” the ordinary citizens of the city; he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for a collection of such stories. The story he saw in front of the Dakota that night in 1980 was not about the famous man who had been shot but about the cops on the scene who picked up the bleeding body, and the cops who transported that body to the hospital.

Narrative as elements and process

Breslin’s brilliance was also his simultaneously muscular and graceful practicing of the key elements of storytelling. The guy knew how to write a scene. He knew what to look for. He knew what to include and what to leave out. He knew how to pace it. He knew how and where to insert exposition. In the craft-centered essays that will follow this one in coming weeks, I’ll focus on the essential elements of narrative journalism that Breslin and others have mastered. I’ll begin with scene-setting, the heart of the enterprise, and then move on to character development, structure/plot/movement, dialog and conversation (and even, gasp, internal monolog), and finally endings.

…forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was.

Breslin’s piece is a showcase for all this. It is also a reminder that narrative work begins with the concept. Narrative is a lens first, an approach to reporting second, and only then a series of (very important) writing decisions. His column is also an argument in favor of the practice of “everyday” narrative journalism: shorter pieces, even deadline pieces, not waiting for the BIG story, the multi-parter, the one that takes weeks to produce.

I want to leave you with the final scene in Breslin’s column because it is that good.

Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.

Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.

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Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 books. 

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