Professional Feature Writing

Bruce Garrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780805847659, 9780805847659
• eBook ISBN: 9781135618742
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This text offers the basics of news media feature writing and guides motivated beginners down the right path toward success as professional feature writers. This fourth edition gives advanced writers and reporters a thorough look at newspaper, magazine, newsletter, and online publications, with emphasis on daily newspapers and consumer magazines. Three primary aspects of feature writing are emphasized: introduction and writing skills/basics, article types, and the collegiate and professional writing life. Each chapter includes excerpts and complete articles from some of the nation's leading publications that illustrate points made in the text. Professional Feature Writing provides a wide variety of perspectives and experiences of both young and experienced writers, editors, publishers, and professors. Emphasizing writing values that will strengthen a new writer's journalistic practices, readers will gain insights and expertise from the narrative, the advice of professionals, and current writing examples. The book offers lists of tips, observations, in-depth looks at both young and veteran writers, guidelines, sources, and story ideas. As such, this volume is a solid tour of the forms and approaches to feature writing. Building on introductory writing and reporting skills, this text is written for advanced students, and is filled with practical advice for writing a wide variety of features.

Part Two
Types of Articles

Chapter Six
Descriptive and Color Writing

Dallas Morning News editorial writer Debra Decker went to the extreme for depth of information, detail, and color for her recent feature package about Islam. She traveled from Texas to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uzbekistan. Decker was part of a group of journalists who visited the Middle East to learn about Islam. The Dallas Morning News serves a region of the United States that is heavily Christian, particularly Baptist, so Decker and her editors felt the trip would generate greater understanding of religion and values in the Middle East.

Decker focused a cover story for the newspaper’s Sunday Reader section on the roles of women in Islamic countries. To do this, she applied storytelling techniques that included descriptive and color writing to allow readers to imagine the scene and setting for her descriptions of the culture and special lifestyles of Islamic women. Here’s how she began her collection of three portraits:

RIYADH—The iron gate in the white outer wall of the home swung open to a wide front patio, bare except for a small bicycle peeking from the side of the house. Farther on, double doors to the house were ajar and hinted of a welcome refuge from the relentless summer sun.

This could be any upscale neighborhood in America. But it was Riyadh, and I was entering a Saudi home to lunch with Muslim women. The afternoon afforded me a surprising glimpse of them unveiled—physically and intellectually.

The practice of Islam differs among countries. The five basic pillars of the faith are the same. . . . (Decker, 2002, p. 1J)

Decker’s approach to the story is simple. She took three separate looks at the role of women in three different countries. She wrote different sections of the two full newspaper pages article on each. She described how these women live and pointed to pride in their culture as well as a generational divide between mothers and daughters. Although the package is well illustrated with color art and photographs provided by the Associated Press, Decker described certain aspects of the way Muslim women live:

The group of about a dozen Saudi women at one lunch may not have been totally typical—they were relatively well off and were expecting to lunch with six American women journalists—but nonetheless, they and the Saudi home were not what one might expect. In the home, the first object greeting visitors in the entry hall was a 6-foot by 10-foot mirrored fresco of a woman’s profile, face thrust up and forward into the home and her hair flowing back in waves. The art indicated the contradictions of Saudi culture—women glorified yet sequestered. (Decker, 2002, p. 1J)

The next passage described how her hosts were dressed:

As for the Saudi women themselves, they were gorgeous, even by Dallas’s exacting standards. Most of the women wore glamorous full makeup. Some had on tight low-cut tops and slim-fitting short skirts, backless heels and tasteful but abundant jewelry. Like America, dress did vary. A student was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. And a sweet, plain-faced teacher from the eastern provinces kept on her red head scarf during the meals.

Their opinions varied even more than their outfits did. . . . (Decker, 2002, p. 1J)

Some feature stories need to set a scene or establish a mood as their most important objective for readers. Decker’s story, through her use of description, does this. We, as readers, cannot be there with her. She shares these observations with her readers to provide a fuller impression of the lives of these Middle Eastern women. If something like this story is your own assignment, your goal may include making the reader “see,” “feel,” and “touch” the subject of your writing. You want to create mental images of the person, the place, the scenery. You want to present the opportunity for the reader to use his or her “mental senses”—that is, to imagine the smell, sound, feel, the emotion, the physical appearance, and even the taste of the subject.

This is what descriptive and color writing are all about. These types of articles are published often in newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. They are also beginning to appear in features in online formats. This approach to writing can be applied to every feature subject you care to mention, yet the approach is best suited for specific subjects and types of articles. This chapter discusses these approaches and outlines the best ways to use the technique in writing features. This type of writing requires great concentration and highly tuned observational skills on your part. An alert writer will notice the colors, odors, the noise, and other elements of a setting and put the reader in the middle of the action by describing these in depth. You accomplish this by using precise adjectives and adverbs, as well as exact nouns and verbs to convey that right image.

Writers achieve descriptive effects in their articles in a variety of ways with a wide range of writing tools. Some like to focus on their observations and use adjectives, and lots of them, throughout their writing. Others work hard to find the right nouns (for example, dirge instead of song). This requires a superior command of the English language. Using a broad vocabulary is not enough. This type of writing also requires timing—you must be able to determine when to go heavily into description and when to back away from the temptation. Some like to let the story be told by the well-chosen words of others in direct quotations.

The primary rule is simple. When you think description helps a story, make certain what you are writing about is distinctive. The description and color should have a purpose. If you can find unique characteristics instead of the ordinary, then the additional color, or atmosphere, you add to a story through detailed descriptive writing usually works. Certainly, the way you write also makes a difference. Choosing words and putting them together also affects the impact description has on your readers. Organization, or order, of the information has a similar impact.

Jack Hart (1990a), an editor and writing coach at The Oregonian in Portland, feels description and color add spice to writing. He wrote the following:

Ordinarily, descriptive color or interesting details brighten news writing, helping draw readers into stories by sparking vivid images in their minds. When used skillfully, such details help motivate readers to make the paper part of their daily routine. But color, like everything else in a story, should serve some larger purpose. Well-chosen details may help to create a mood important to the story. They may serve as evidence for a generalization. Maybe they reveal something about the personality of a key character. Or they introduce an object that will be important to an action line. (p. 3)

Creating Images in the Mind

As Hart (1990a) noted, detail and color must do something for a feature article when a writer uses them. Ultimately, they should advance the story or contribute to the main theme, he said. A good feature article is enhanced with strong artwork such as photographs or drawings when the artwork and story come together as a unit on the page. Yet, you often have to write as if there is no art with the story; you must write to allow your readers to create images in their minds from reading your article. It does not take much to illustrate this point. Pick up most magazines and you will find at least one article rich in description and detail that give a certain color or atmosphere to the article.

Michael Vitez is a columnist and former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has worked for newspapers in Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Connecticut before arriving in Philadelphia in 1985. He specializes in general assignment feature writing, which means he writes about a wide range of subjects and people. In recent years, he has specialized in writing about aging, but he has said that his favorite aspect of journalism is storytelling. In the late fall of 1996, Vitez wrote a five-part series of feature stories about terminally ill individuals who seek to die with dignity. With him, photographers April Saul and Ron Cortes documented the stories that were told and the individuals involved in them.

The series was titled “Seeking a Good Death.” The first story in the series described the agony of families trying to determine when to let a loved one die. The second story described how families say good-bye to a loved one who is terminally ill. The third story examined the longer lives people live today, but also related longer lives to the longer decline in health experienced by some older persons. Vitez’s fourth story looked at issues related to the decision about when to die and whether doctors should help. His fifth story in the set profiled a “long-lived” winner at the end of her life. The set of stories earned the three individuals a 1997 Pulitzer Prize for their abilities in explanatory journalism. “I try to celebrate ordinary people around us by showing how ordinary people sometimes do extraordinary things,” Vitez (1998) said. The first story in the series opened this way:

Patricia Moore read a poem to her husband in the intensive-care unit. She stood beside him wearing a surgical gown, holding the dog-eared book in her latex gloves.

Through her surgical mask came the tender, muffled words of “Knee-deep in June,” by James Whitcomb Riley:

Orchard’s where I’d ruther be—

Needn’t fence it in fer me!

Gene Moore lay before her, unconscious. An IV line entered a vein in his neck and ran through his heart, into the pulmonary artery. It measured blood flow and carried five medicines into his infected body.

A ventilator tube ran like a garden hose down his throat. A feeding tube pushed through his nose and into his stomach.

Bags on his legs inflated and deflated every few minutes to prevent clotting. A catheter drained urine from his bladder. He wore orthotic boots to keep his feet bent so that, should he ever, miraculously, get out of bed, this retired 63-year-old steelworker would be able to stand.

Mrs. Moore stood beside her husband of 44 years, her heart aching with indecision.

Were she and her two sons doing the right thing putting him through this torture? Or should they stop?

Should they tell the doctors to let him die? (Vitez, 1996, p. 1A)

Vitez’s story continued with a discussion of the main issue: U.S. medicine is now so effective at keeping people alive that uncounted numbers of life or death decisions are made each year by the patients and their families. “They want control at the end. They want a humane death, a good death,” Vitez (1996, p. 1A) wrote, defining the theme of the series. Writing with a feel for the sensitivities of strangers such as was done in the “Seeking a Good Death” series can be achieved by using honed observation, interviewing, and information collating skills. This means using one’s senses, in other words, and it does not come automatically to feature writers. It takes considerable effort and experience to write well to convey color and atmosphere in a story, any story. You have to get out and look around. Pay attention to detail. People have to be persuaded to talk, to open up.

Clearly one goal is to provide information to readers through the description and color in feature articles. In this way, color and description do something significant for the article. They are not padding or simply there to impress editors. A contribution of value to the entire piece occurs in the lead to Vitez’s article because it sets a scene. It might seem to be stating the obvious, but to get the detail and description needed, writers have to get out of the office. This sort of information can hardly be gathered by telephone. To do it effectively, leave the office. Leave home. Leave town if possible. Writers need to get to the location of people and events to get the right stimulation for this level of detail and description.

Journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker Bill Belleville also used powerful description to take readers with him deep into the waters of a 120-foot deep limestone spring. Writing for the quarterly Florida Humanities Council magazine, Forum, Belleville guided readers on a personalized underwater tour where most cannot go on their own:

I am somewhere inside the vortex of Blue Springs, way past the “Prevent Your Death: Go No Further” sign at 60 feet, and far beyond the muted glow of surface light.

The river that Blue feeds has been gradually warming, and the warm-blooded manatees that winter here have just left. Except for a few snorkelers back up in the shallow run, my dive buddy and I are alone in the spring.

The only illumination down here is portable, hand-held. And like the trail of exhaust bubbles from my regulator, it tethers me to the surface with my own limitations. Scuba tanks, face masks, containers of light—they are all reminders of how unsuited we humans are to immerse ourselves in the most primal and universal element of all.

Here, near the 120-foot-deep bottom of this limestone chasm, I am as aware as I have ever been of the pervasive power and magic of water. All but invisible, it arises from a slot in the rock, flailing me like a rag doll with its energy.

If underground water is the veins and capillaries that sustain our Florida physiography, then I am squarely inside a natural incision, a place where the liquid transports itself to the surface, where science meets myth and culture head on. . . . (Belleville, 2002, p. 8)

Writers must also, as Rivers (1992) argued, make the effort of reading a rewarding experience. Some element of satisfaction should result for readers.

Success [of your article] pivots almost entirely on whether readers finish a descriptive [article or passage] with the feeling that they have been through a satisfying reading experience. The most evocative descriptives—those fashioned by writers who have developed and refined a talent for using visual words—are also viewing experiences. (Rivers, 1992, pp. 242–243)

Although they were written more than three decades ago, these two short passages from Tom Wolfe’s now-classic article in Esquire about stock car driver Junior Johnson illustrate that point as they set the scene for the profile:

Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-Cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.

Seventeen thousand people, me included, all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile stock car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front. This is not to say there is no preaching and shouting in the South this morning. There is preaching and shouting. Any of us can turn on the old automobile transistor radio and get all we want. (Wolfe, 1966, pp. 105–106)

Not much further into the same article, a different but equally powerful image-provoking passage by Wolfe appears:

And suddenly my car is stopped still on Sunday morning in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in the history of the world. It goes for ten miles in every direction from the North Wilkesboro Speedway. And right there it dawns on me that as far as this situation is concerned, anyway, all the conventional notions about the South are confined to—the Sunday radio. The South has preaching and shouting, the South has grits, the South has country songs, old mimosa tradi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• I The Basics
• II Types of Articles
• III The Collegiate and Professional Writer
• Appendix A. World Wide Web Resources
• Appendix B. Pennsylvania Angler & Boater Guidelines for Contributors
• Appendix C. Vermont Life Magazine Writers' Guidelines
• Appendix D. Operations & Fulfillment Magazine Writer's Guidelines
• Appendix E. Operations & Fulfillment Magazine Content and Style Guidelines
• Appendix F. Operations & Fulfillment Magazine Story Evaluation Checklist
• Appendix G. Freelance Letters of Agreement
• Appendix H. Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists
• Appendix I. American Society of Journalists and Authors Code of Ethics and Fair Practices
• Appendix J. Protecting Yourself in the Magazine Recession (or Any Other Time)
• References
• Index