Readers approach features very much as they approach food. Some want simple grub, some fancy cooking, some heavy stodge. Very few relish stale cheese sandwiches or froth. To labour the simile, good ingredients and preparation are essential.
- Wynford Hicks, Writing for Journalists
My first course assignment was to write a profile of my classmate, Kate, based on a 20-minute interview conducted on the first day of class. The piece took a while to write, for several reasons:
- I didn’t ask good questions at the interview
- I took poor notes
- I didn’t have any quotes
- I had no idea what I wanted to say
Unsurprisingly, my first few writing attempts were entirely frustrating. I suddenly realised how little I knew about writing articles for newspapers or magazines. I didn’t know the “formula” for writing profiles, or anything for that matter.
The importance of a good brief
Frustration inspired me to pick up Writing for Journalists by Wynford Hicks, a book I’ve had for a while (thank you, Tim) but had little prompting to read until now.
I read the chapter on “Writing features” (the “profile” is one category of feature; other features include background features, product stories, and opinion pieces). The first few pages introduced me to the brief, a fairly detailed outline of the requirements, usually provided by the newspaper or magazine. A good brief includes
- Deadline
- Length
- The angle
- The tone
- The scope
- What’s wanted
- Questions you want answered
- Questions the editor wants answered
- Research sources
- Extras (pictures, tables, bullet points, etc.)
After reading this, I saw plainly the many sources of my misdirection: I didn’t figure out what question I wanted to answer before I interviewed Kate; I hadn’t decided on a tone or angle; I hadn’t decided what to include or exclude from the story.
Although this story wasn’t for a particular publication, I decided to pretend it was and wrote up a brief for an imaginary magazine for writers. The audience is my class, mostly 20-something professional women.
The brief:
- Deadline: January 25, 2008
- Length: 300 words
- Angle: This is the first in a series of articles that profile one aspiring writer’s quest to become a freelance journalist.
- Tone: Entertaining and hopeful
- Scope: Include a brief informative bio, a slice of her personality, why she’s in the class, and how I feel about it; omit any details about physical features
- What’s wanted: Background, quotes, color
- Questions you want answered: Why is Kate in the class?
- Questions the editor wants answered: Why is Kate in the class? Why does she want to be a writer? Does she have what it takes?
- Research sources: Interview with Kate
- Extras: none
Deciding on the angle and tone provided me with huge relief; I finally felt like I was getting somewhere.
In theory, the next stage would be research and interviewing. Since I already had the interview, I decided to write down all the facts and quotes that I had to work with:
Fact gathering
- Bio: 48 years old, unemployed, literature professor
- History: Grew up in Manchester; father was a journalist so they traveled a lot, mostly in Eastern Europe. Moved to London as a teenager. At 25, she went to New York for a year, then Vermont for bit, then came back to London. At 30, she went to Norwich for 12 years, and then returned to London with a PhD in literature. Always lived in South London, but moved north after Norwich to be near the British Library. Has primarily worked in the arts and education, teaching literature and a bit of film studies. Has written academic essays (her thesis). Is currently unemployed, but is looking intermittently for a university job.
- Favorite newspaper: The Guardian (and the Manchester paper, which she grew up on)
- Why she’s in the class: wants to write about “cultural politics”. A phrase that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me (this science dork) but she illustrated a bit with her article idea.
- A story she’d like to write: I asked Kate if there’s something she’s always wanted to write about, and she dove right in: “I’ve been thinking about this on and off all day.” There’s been a story going around the news about an Ipswich truck driver who murdered five prostitutes, leaving the bodies of two in a “cruciform state”. The story reminds Kate of the book, Shadowdance, by Angela Carter. The novel is horror, but with “didactic purpose”. I was only vaguely familiar with the story, and had never heard of Angela Carter, so it was hard to get a handle on how she wanted to explore the connect. But the cool part is that she saw the connection, which put a completely non-obvious spin on a story that the media was eating up with a spoon. Relevancy. A unique angle. It had all the things that are supposed to make great news. (She did this earlier when we tried to generate ideas from an article on Couscous.) So why isn’t she writing this stuff down? “I’m worried I don’t have the guts.” Or the skill. This is a piece that needs to be written well (not just “pretty well”). Kate repeated that she didn’t think she had the guts to do it.
- Quotes:
- On becoming a journalist: “oh you know, girls and their fathers”.
- “don’t write that down”. “off the record” – you get the feeling with Kate that everything is off the record
- “It’s like a scene from Blade Runner, or Alien, or… you get the point.” - Led us to our class, will she lead us to being better writers?
- “Life” – on spending some time in NYC and Vermont
Writing the article
Before writing, I decided to take some advice from Wynford:
Once you’ve completed the research and interviewing, pause. It’s too soon to start writing. Best work out your plan first. You don’t have to follow it slavishly, but forethought pays dividends and saves time.
So I waited a couple days and let my subconscious stew on things. Then, when I sat down again with the brief and my notes, writing was much easier.
I’ll spare you the gory details of the process. In a nutshell, a feature has an intro hook, main body, and an end. It took me a while to come up with a good hook (I tried a few approaches before settling on an anecdote). The jury is still out on whether not it actually is any good. I still have lots to learn.
A couple tips from Mr. Hicks helped me work in my meager quotes:
Writers can animate an ordinary quote with description, movement, colour, which act like stage directions.
And…
When a quote is less than hoped for, context can give meaning.
This helped me to write:
“It’s like a scene from Blade Runner” she said as we scanned the dark halls of City University for our freelance writing class.
And…
“But don’t write that down” she keeps telling me, as if it has nothing to do with her being in this class. “It’s boring.”
In the end I wrote 410 words, a bit longer than was asked for. You can read the whole piece here; I’d love any and all feedback, good or bad.
- Link to Kate’s profile
- Link to Writing for Journalists by Wynford Hicks and Sally Adams on Amazon.com
- Link to all articles in my Freelance Writing series
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