{"id":2145,"date":"2021-05-11T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/05\/11\/how-narrative-moments-can-elevate-a-non-narrative-story\/"},"modified":"2025-03-24T16:22:26","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T16:22:26","slug":"how-narrative-moments-can-elevate-a-non-narrative-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/05\/11\/how-narrative-moments-can-elevate-a-non-narrative-story\/","title":{"rendered":"How narrative moments can elevate a non-narrative story"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Two foundational definitions of news are proximity and immediacy. The closer and more urgent an event or issue, the more likely it is to grab a reader’s attention. That can make it challenging to draw readers into stories about things happening far away in distance and time. Add complexity to the equation, and the journalist has a heavy lift. Just ask anyone who writes about climate change and its complex weave of political, economic, environmental and aesthetic impacts. It can be especially hard to help readers understand the urgency of dealing with those issues now.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\"Hal
Hal Bernton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times found a way in an opening paragraph that puts readers in the tractor seat with a wheat farmer in south central Washington, in the middle of a dispute over wind turbines<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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KENNEWICK, Benton County \u2014 Back in March, Chris Wiley passed a long day in his tractor sowing wheat. He had the controls set to automatic steering and scanned social media. He did not like what he found.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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In post after post, people raged about a renewable energy project that would put wind turbines and solar development in the Horse Heaven Hills where he farms. Critics from Pasco, Kennewick and Richland attacked the plan as an outrage that would blemish cherished vistas to the profit of an out-of-state developer looking to export power to Western Washington, Oregon or California.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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The project unleashing such passions would be one of the region\u2019s largest renewable energy installations of the past decade with an estimated cost of $1.7 billion.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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Wiley is a big supporter. It would generate lease fees that would be a financial boon for his family and dozens of other wheat-growing lease holders in a hardscrabble part of South Central Washington where farmers have long struggled to coax profitable yields from the arid land. So, he decided to compose a kind of farmer\u2019s manifesto, which he drafted on a keyboard inside the cab while the tractor kept on planting seed.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Taken together, those four grafs outline a vast issue that is vexing a certain patch of Washington state, just as it is other open, windy swaths of the U.S. Maybe none are near you, so the relevance doesn’t feel acute. But the last line of that first graf \u2014 “He did not like what he found.” \u2014 has to make you wonder: What did he find?<\/em> In lede-writing, I think of it as a sophisticated version of walking up to someone and saying, “I had a dream about you last night.”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But a good lede does not a full story make. Once you get a reader in, you have to hold them. So consider how this one, even if it’s not a back-yard issue for you, works to keep you moving forward:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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