Many different parts comprise an article. Understanding how they work can help organize your articles and streamline the thoughts and ideas you are trying to get across. Here are resources to help you structure your articles.
Ledes
The lede is “a flashlight shining down into the story.” In a few seconds, it’s your best chance to convince the reader to stay with you. It takes lots of practice to learn which ledes work best for your story, but it’s always easier when you’ve decided where you want your story to go. Click here for more on ledes.
Nut Graf
See above. This graf alerts readers to what your story is about and why they should care. It provides context and importance. It also will be your organizing tool throughout the story. List the main elements of your story. Then mention each one in the nut graf, the sine qua non of structure. Click here for more on nut grafs.
Global/Barnburner quote
This is your absolute best quote that affirms/supports/crystallizes the premise of the story. It immediately follows the nut graf. Not every story will have it, but more often than not, it’s there, particularly if you’ve decided early on what your story is about. You’ll then ask questions that prompt your sources to speak to your main premise. To keep readers engaged, weave in other storytelling quotes throughout.
Paragraphs/Main Elements/Topic Sentences
If you’ve written a strong nut graf, backed it up with a global quote, then your story uses each paragraph to explain and buttress the main elements of your story. Each paragraph should be a coherent whole, with a beginning, middle and end. Don’t jam a string of unrelated facts into the same paragraph. Start with an assertion, or topic sentence, then add 2-3 sentences to back it up, and one more to wrap it up. Pay attention, too, to your sentences. Mix up the length. A short sentence can stop the reader. A long one will allow you to string together important bits of information. Don’t start sentences with attribution; start with the strongest element. End your paragraphs strongly, too. Make it surprising, punchy or, at least, something that moves the reader onto the next graf.
Connections/Transitions/Hooks/Threads
A story’s flow will be immeasurably enhanced if each graf reads out of the preceding graf. Compare it to stitching, how the needle and thread pass from one graf to the next, seamlessly leading the reader to the next thought. Nothing loses a reader faster than unconnected paragraphs that don’t relate to one another. The simplest transition can be the repetition of a keyword in the preceding graf or “signal” words such as “meanwhile” or “instead” or “then” (Caution: Don’t let these words become a crutch; often there is a nimbler way to stitch together your grafs).
Endings
There’s not enough attention paid to endings. Some news stories just stop but most, with planning, don’t need to just die off. My favorite device is to bring the reader back to where you started, the lede. Come full circle, and tie it up in a nice bow for the reader. Sometimes, another quote that looks forward or summarizes your story will work. However you do it, remember that a graceful ending is a sure way to satisfy the reader.
Endings
BY BRUCE DESILVA, TELLING TRUE STORIES
Every story must arrive at a destination; the purpose of a story is to lead your readers to it. The ending is your final chance to nail the point of the story to the readers’ memory so it will echo there for days. Among those who write for a living, newspaper writers are the only ones who do not seem to understand this fact.
Screenwriters know that if a movie doesn’t have a good ending, people will leave the theater feeling like they wasted their money. Novelists know that you can’t write a good book without a good ending. Speechwriters always try to end on a high note. And everyone knows that when you write a love letter or a letter asking for a raise or a letter of complaint to the phone company, the tone and substance of the last line is crucial.
But most newspaper stories dribble pitifully to an end. This is the enduring legacy of the inverted pyramid—a form that makes good endings impossible. The inverted pyramid orders information from most important to least important, robbing stories of their drama and leaving nothing to reward readers who stay with it to the last line.
It is important to recognize that the inverted pyramid never had anything to do with writing or readers or the news. Those of us who have studied the history of the form trace its emergence to the invention of the telegraph. Reporters covering far-flung news about, say, a sinking ship or a Civil War battle now had a speedy way to transmit their stories to their newspapers, but they found that they could not always rely on it. Sometimes the line would fail; sometimes their messages would be preempted by urgent official business. So, they learned to transmit their information in bursts, with the most important facts first.
This proved to be the perfect form to accommodate the manufacturing process in every newspaper’s back shop. Stories were written and edited on paper and then sent to typographers, who set them in lead type. This type had to fit into a designated space on a newspaper page, but often it was too long. The only practical way to cut lead type was to trim it from the bottom.
We don’t send our stories by telegraph anymore, and it has been more than thirty years since U.S. newspapers used lead type. Today, most are fully digital, so stories can be trimmed anywhere with the stroke of a key. Furthermore, stories for online use don’t have to be trimmed to fit a preexisting hole at all. The only appropriate use for the inverted pyramid today is briefs, but old habits die hard. The best journalists know this, but the form persists. Many editors still routinely cut from the bottom. If you are stuck with such an editor, keep writing good endings while you look for another job.
Your ending must do four things: signal to the reader that the piece is over, reinforce your central point, resonate in your reader’s mind after he or she has turned the page, and arrive on time. The very best endings often do something else: They offer a mist that readers don’t see coming but that nevertheless strikes them as exactly right.
There are many ways to do this well. A good ending can be a vividly drawn scene, a memorable anecdote that clarifies the main point of the story, a telling detail that symbolizes something larger than itself or suggests how the story might move forward into the future, or a compellingly crafted conclusion in which the writer addresses the reader directly and says, “This is my point.”
Sometimes you may want to bring the story full circle, ending with an idea or words echoing the beginning. Symmetry appeals to readers. Occasionally, you may want to end with a quote that is superbly put, but don’t do this often. After all, you are the writer; you should be able to say it better. It’s your story; why give the last word to someone else?
This advice applies to all stories, but narrative writing has an additional requirement. Every narrative tale—from The Iliad to the latest Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper serial—has the same underlying structure you have read about elsewhere in this book: A central character encounters a problem, struggles with it, and, in the end, overcomes it or is defeated by it or is changed in some way. If the story, as it unfolds in life, lacks one of these elements, you should not attempt to write it as a narrative.
In narrative, the resolution of the problem is your ending. Once you arrive at it, find the nearest exit. Readers devour narratives to discover how the problem will be resolved. Once they know, they stop reading—so you had better stop writing.
Here are some examples of effective endings from stories written by Associated Press reporters.
At the beginning of “What Price the News?” a first-person story by Ian Stewart, he is drifting in and out of consciousness. Something terrible has happened to him, but he doesn’t know what. Ian had been shot in the head and his friend killed covering the war in Sierra Leone. The story follows Ian as he struggles to understand what happened and to overcome this terrible injury. It also explores the macho world of foreign correspondents and the importance of getting news of remote wars to the public. But Ian ends his story this way:
Miles, David and I were naive to hope our reporting could make people care about a little war in Africa. In fact, Freetown might never have made your daily newspaper had it not been for the death of one Western journalist and wounding of another. Will I continue to work as a journalist when I am well enough? Yes. And most likely I'll go back overseas. Will I risk my life for a story again? No, not even if the world cares the next time.
This ending works because you don’t see it coming, and yet at the same time you realize: Of course this is how he feels.
In “A Town Is Born,” Ted Anthony describes how the denizens of an unincorporated patch of New Mexican desert go about forming a local government. Near the beginning he presents readers with a nutgraf: “In a few hours they would become fathers. The new arrival would be rambunctious, assertive and self-determined, ready to make the kind of glorious mess that only democracy can.”
The bulk of the story is details: How much land should be included in the town? How should they set the tax rate? Do they need a road grader? At the end, Ted nails his point home this way:
For now, they’re simply crafting their own community: negotiating workaday squabbles, liking and disliking each other, dealing with constituents, hop scotching forward, and doing it themselves. Everything is theirs, even the mistakes. Big ideas on a small canvas, laws in action. People deciding together how they want life to be. The glorious mess that is American democracy, alive and kicking, just off Interstate 40 on a plateau under the vast New Mexico sky.
Here, Ted directly tells the reader the story’s point. He also pulls the camera back, away from the tight shots of the road grader and the tax rate. Suddenly, you’re on a plateau under the vast sky, viewing the historical and constitutional context in which this story unfolds.
In “Mysterious Killer,” Matt Crenson and Joseph P. Verrengia chronicle New York City's 1999 West Nile epidemic. The story begins with dead birds mysteriously falling out of trees. Before long, human beings are dying, too. Epidemiologists race to discover the cause. By the end of the story, they’ve identified the exotic virus carried by mosquitoes breeding in kiddie pools, birdbaths, and abandoned tires. And suddenly the outbreak stops, not because of human action but because the mosquito season ends. The story concludes this way:
In the New York City neighborhood where it all began, barbecues and kiddie pools have been put away for the season, and many of the old tires have been carted away. But here and there, tires missed during the cleanup, or discarded since, lay in the grass, ready to become mosquito nurseries with the first spring rain.
The ending is an ominous peek into the future. Think of it as the Godzilla ending: The monster has been destroyed, everyone is celebrating, and then the camera pans to the monster’s egg at the bottom of the sea.
For a story called “In Case We Die,” Tim Sullivan and Raf Casert traveled to Conakry, Guinea, and Brussels, Belgium, to re-create the lives of two 14-year-old boys who died in the wheel well of a jet airplane during a desperate attempt to escape the poverty of their country. On one of their bodies Belgian authorities found an envelope bearing the words: “In case we die.” Inside was an eloquent plea for the world to help the children of Africa.
Tim and Raf described the boys’ lives in Africa, their plans to escape, their ill-fated journey, and the outpouring of emotion their case initially caused in Belgium, a country still torn with guilt about its colonial past. They ended the tale this way:
Now the boys’ letter rests inside dossier number 4693.123506/99 of the Belgian State Judiciary. And on another continent in a public cemetery, two graves ten feet apart mark the end of the journey for two boys who had a message for the world. The small mounds of dirt in the Conakry graveyard are edged with rocks and rotting chunks of palm trees. Staked to each grave is a small metal marker. Both are blank.
This is not the ending we would have hoped for. We would have wanted these boys’ deaths to have meant something. But in the end, the boys are forgotten, the poignant point made starkly with two small details: the letter filed away in the bowls of a bureaucracy and the unmarked graves.
In “God and Country,” Richard Ostling and Julia Lieblich explain why the same conflicts over church and state go on generation after generation in America. The piece, datelined Ecru, Mississippi, starts this way:
Long after the high school football game ended, Lisa Herdahl and Pat Mounce sat on wet bleachers talking intently under a shared umbrella. The fivo 36-year-old mothers were discussing something they cared deeply about: the prayers broadcast over the intercom of their children's schools in the Pontotoc School District. Herdahl opposed the prayers and was taking the county's school district to court. Mounce had organized the town to fight back.
The story explores the enduring debate over the sixteen words about freedom of religion in the U.S. Constitution. It is a story of conflict—until the very end:
Americans disagree, and perhaps always will, over matters of church and state. But the debate is never over the fundamental right to religious freedom embodied in those 16 words from two centuries ago. What Americans argue about is how best to practice it. Unlike so many people throughout the world even today, Americans do not settle their religious differences with blood. They debate them in legislative chambers and mannered courtrooms, or even while sharing an umbrella.
The story takes an unexpected turn as the writers suddenly pull back, putting the debate in a global context. They accomplish this by returning to the umbrella, a metaphor for the Constitution that shelters Americans from violent religious strife.
One final piece of advice: When your story is a narrative, write the ending first. Remember, the ending is your destination. It is a lot easier to write the rest of the piece when you already know where you are going.
Additional Resources:
Stories Matter by Jacqui Banaszynski, TELLING TRUE STORIES
I want you to travel with me to a famine camp in Sudan on the Ethiopian border. You have seen the dreadful television footage of the starving babies, their bellies bloated. Flies crawl in and out of their eyes and mouths, jealous for the last drops of moisture that cling there as long as these babies cling to life. Now you are among them, as a reporter for a midsized daily newspaper in the upper Midwest, charged with writing about a place you have never been before, about an event you can't possibly understand, for readers who will never go there and don't know what it has to do with them—beyond writing a check to charity.
You've been at the camp for several days. You walk its ground each day, stepping around and over 100,000 people who have come because they heard there was water. By the time they arrived—some of them walking three weeks from their Ethiopian villages—the water was no more than a well of mud in a dry riverbed.
You watch the little girls walk to the river and dig in the mud, soaking their rags with moisture that they wring, drop by drop, into their plastic jugs. You sit in the clinic where the waiting line is hundreds long. Desperate fathers thrust their babies at you, thinking that because you are a khawaja, a foreigner, you must be a doctor. You must be able to help. But all you have to offer is a poised notebook and some questions—suddenly too little to accommodate this reality.
You wander to the edge of the camp, to the vast defecation zone where those healthy enough to walk go to heed nature's call. It is oblivious to the need for a little human dignity. Women squat inside their skirts, their heads covered in veils, trying to create some sense of cloister. You stumble to the rocky hillsidewhere clusters of men claw at the hard earth, creating holes just deep enough to cradle the shrouded bodies they gently place there. The holes don't need to be deep, for the bodies are very thin. They bury seventy-five each day, sometimes more. Most are babies.
At night you retreat to the other side of the straw wall that encloses this awful world. You collapse—ashamed of your small and temporary hunger, of your selfish fears—on a cot in a small straw hut. You're grateful that it's dark, that you will not have to look at things for a few hours, but you can still hear. You hear coughing and vomiting and whimpering and keening. You hear shouts, angry bursts of life, and rasps that rattle to silence as seventy-five more people die. Then you hear something else: singing. You hear sweet chants and deep rhythms. Each night, over and over, at about the same time. You think you are hallucinating. You wonder if you have gone quite mad from your fear. How could people sing in the face of this horror? And why? You lie in the dark and you wonder until the mercy of sleep claims you. Daylight comes again, and you open your eyes.
I went to Africa in 1985 to report on the Ethiopian famine for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. I had never been outside of North America. The singing intrigued me. It took me several days to find out what it was. I had to go through several translators before someone finally told me that it was storytelling. When the villages in Ethiopia and what is now Eritrea finally got too parched or too bombed for people to survive there, they got up, en masse, and walked to the famine camps. Then they settled, in whatever little huts they could find, as a village. They continued whatever rituals they could. One of their rituals was their nightly storytelling. The elders gathered the children around, and they sang their songs.
It was their version of school. It was how they carried their history and culture and law with them. It may have been my first conscious awareness of the power, history, and universality of storytelling. We all grew up with stories, but do we ever stop to think about how much they connect us and how powerful they are?
Even, or especially, in the face of death these stories live on, passed from elder to younger, from generation to generation, carried with as much care as those precious jugs of water. Events pass, people live and die, life changes. But stories endure.
Several years after I went to Sudan, I stumbled across what has become one of my favorite books, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. He writes, "Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
I asked Tomas Alex Tizon, who used to work with me at the Seattle Times, why human beings need stories, and he replied:
Thank God for stories—for those who have them, for those who tell them, for those who devour them as the soul sustenance that they are. Stories give shape to experience and allow us to go through life unblind. Without them, everything that happens would float around, undifferentiated. None of it would mean anything. Once you have a version of what happened, all the other good stuff about being human comes into play. You can laugh, feel awe, commit a passionate act, get pissed, want to change things.
My friend and fellow writer Katherine Lanpher, who wrote for the Pioneer Press and is now with Air America, told me this about stories:
Stories are the connective tissue of the human race, whether you are dissecting a school levy or South Korean politics. At the heart of every issue is a human element that leads to the three most beautiful words in the English language: What happened next? If you answer that question, you are a storyteller.
They say language makes us human. That notion is being challenged as we discover that apes have language. Whales have language. I welcome them into our fold. I'm not threatened by them, quite frankly, because I think that stories make us human. Only by telling them do we stay so. Stories are our prayers. Write and edit them with due reverence, even when the stories themselves are irreverent.
Stories are parables. Write and edit and tell yours with meaning, so each tale stands in for a larger message, each story a guidepost on our collective journey.
Stories are history. Write and edit and tell yours with accuracy and understanding and context and with unwavering devotion to the truth.
Stories are music. Write and edit and tell yours with pace and rhythm and flow. Throw in the dips and twirls that make them exciting, but stay true to the core beat. Readers hear stories with their inner ear.
Stories are our soul. Write and edit and tell yours with your whole selves. Tell them as if they are all that matters. It matters that you do it as if that's all there is.
Writing Profiles by Jacqui Banaszynski, TELLING TRUE STORIES
Why write profiles? Successful ones contain all the essential elements of narrative journalism. The writer must learn how to describe people and place: to locate characters, to describe them physically, to explain their motivations. Good profile writing demands good interviewing, a skill that transcends the form, and teaches responsible reporting.
When you are writing about one other person and that person knows it, you must get it right.
Profiles provide specificity—the micro that illustrates the macro. In my "AIDS in the Heartland" series, I wrote very intimately about two gay farmers from Minnesota who were dying of AIDS. The story was not just about those two individuals but also about how people live and die with AIDS and how their community deals with it.
Profiles allow us to work at both ends of the ladder of abstraction. The story's specificity—Dick Hanson and Bert Henningson, farmers and political activists—sits at the bottom of the ladder of abstraction. What these two men represented—commitment, love, death, and family struggle—is at the top of the ladder. Many newspaper stories are boring because they stay in the middle: There are no specific people and no great themes, either. These stories have nothing to ground them and nothing to raise them above the mundane.
The key to reporting for a profile is figuring out the questions. Interviews are crucial, and not just with the person being profiled. Who are the people around him or her? Who will reveal something about that person? Who knows the defining moments that shaped his or her life? You need to interview those people.
You must ask deep questions. What has defined this person? What is this person's motivation? Value system? Approach to life? Who is this person? To reach this deeply, you must ask questions that seem rather abstract. I once asked six men who were crossing Antarctica on foot—and almost died in the process—whether Antarctica was male or female, and why. The question helped them relate to the continent in a new and personal way. Ask people what they worry about most or who matters most to them or what makes them most afraid. Always follow these abstract questions with concrete ones to elicit specific anecdotes.
Some people love to talk about themselves. A few people love to talk about themselves but don't say much that is useful. They say such things as "The Lord made me do it" or "I've got to hand it to my teammates." Your job as an interviewer is to turn the subject into a storyteller. Ask questions so layered, so deep, and so odd that they elicit unusual responses. Take the person to places she wouldn't normally go.
Ask questions that require descriptive answers. If your profile hinges on an important decision the subject had to make, ask her everything about the day of the decision. What kind of day was it? What was the first thing you did when you woke up in the morning? Do you remember what you had for breakfast? What was the weather like? What were you wearing? Who did you think about that day? Did the phone ring? Walk me through the first two hours of your day. These things might not seem relevant to the story, but they serve to put the person back in the moment. Push a bit. Make some assumptions that require the person to validate what you say or to argue with you.
Immerse yourself in your interviews. You must focus so intently that your mind is fully with the person you are interviewing. You need to listen so hard that you can move with the person, take another step forward or pull back. Don't worry about your list of questions, your editor, or your story lede. Worry only about the person in front of you. A friend of mine calls this full-body reporting. If you do it right, you will feel exhausted when you leave the interview.
The most important thing to any writing, and especially profile writing, is the telling detail. Reporters complain that editors remove the telling details from their profiles. Sometimes editors do that because the details weren't relevant enough. If it is not showing some thing important, it's not essential. Keep reporting until you find the absolutely essential details. In "AIDS in the Heartland" I described the type of flowers the two men planted around their farmhouse, impatiens and sweet williams. I noted that the last food one of the men ate before he went into the hospital was a neighbor's moist zucchini bread. And I wrote about peony blossoms set in bowls of water around the house. All those details painted a portrait of the traditional rural Midwest in summer.
Reporting for profiles requires moving in close and then pulling back. When you shift from reporting to writing, you must distance yourself from the characters. When you sit down at your desk, your allegiance switches. It feels as if your characters are looking over your shoulder, but you must turn your back on them. You don't lose respect for your subjects or their story, but your allegiance must be with the reader.
After I have edited a profile, it must pass a test before I consider it finished. I ask the writer to give the piece to a reader who knows nothing about the subject. That new reader must be able to answer two questions, each in one sentence. First: How would you characterize this person? Second: At the end of the piece, do you know whether or not you like the person? If the answers aren't what the writer expected, the profile isn't finished.
There are many different kinds of profiles. I'll describe just three. In my own terminology they are cradle-to-current, niche, and paragraph profiles.
Cradle-to-Current Profile
After Gary Ridgway was arrested as the Green River Killer, responsible for murdering forty-eight women in Washington State, the Seattle Times wrote a profile that included everything about his life: where he grew up, when he first showed signs of pathology, when the police started chasing him. This type of profile requires knowing the full sweep of a person's life. It demands a huge investment of time. A cradle-to-current profile is needed only in rare circumstances.
Niche Profile
The niche profile is one of my favorites. It gets profiles in the newspaper quickly. You can do a niche profile under one thousand words in just a couple of days. The key to the niche profile is figuring out exactly why a person is in the news and then building on that.
While we had to do a cradle-to-current profile of Gary Ridgway, we might have included a niche profile of the defense attorney who had to represent him. The niche profile doesn't need to include where she was born or what she did in fifth grade unless that directly relates to her role as Ridgway's attorney. Her biographical information can be compressed, run as a small box or in tight form within the story. A niche profile describes how she came to the role and whether deending a serial killer presents an internal conflict for her.
To write a successful niche profile you must have a very clear idea of what you are looking for: telling detail and quotes that serve the story's purpose.
Paragraph Profile
The shortest profiles aren't really profiles at all but single paragraphs within larger stories. A paragraph profile transforms a fairly flat story into one with real characters. It helps your readers move through the story because names are no longer merely names. The paragraph profile reveals something about a person's character that is germane to the broader story.
While writing the most mundane beat stories, paragraph profiles allow you to push yourself to do the kind of reporting required for narrative writing. They force you to dig deeper and focus on what is truly relevant about the subject.
Again, if you were covering the Ridgway case, rather than just name the detective who finally cracked the case, you might include a paragraph profile of him. That profile might say that the detective had turned the hunt for the Green River Killer into a twenty-five-year obsession that had haunted his dreams while he filled dozens of boxes with dead-end leads. You might mention that the judge said a prayer or listened to a favorite song before he came into court that day.
There are many kinds of profiles, including those in which the essential character is not a person but a place or a building or a meeting. You don't profile a city council meeting by reporting on the results or who voted on what, but by profiling the personality of the meeting, its pace, even its silliness. If you profile a snowplow driver, the main character could be the truck, the road, the snow, or the driver. Regardless of the subject, regarding people carefully will allow you to elucidate it.