Plot arc: get complicated!

Once you’ve pinned down the message – the essential nature of the post– draft a one-sentence summary. This needn’t be flashy, as it’s for your eyes alone. Many writers pin this declaration to the wall or paste it into the top of their computer file. A few examples:

1. The ostrich jockeys: running the big birds in the Valley of the Sun
2. Is it fair to take children on a gambling holiday?
3. Tea time: faded colonial splendor in Candacraig, Burma

This "capsule sentence" introduces your theme, the thread that leads you through the post. Your first paragraph (the "lead" or "lede") and conclusion will most likely reflect this key information. And all the bits between should be in harmony. Cut the retired showgirl anecdote, if the entry’s about children in casinos. Don’t get sidetracked by hang-gliding, if the subject at hand is mountaineering. Be ruthless – but don’t despair. All that excised material can be spun into other stories, so nothing’s ever wasted.

Professor Jon Franklin takes this a step further in Writing for Story. He encourages students to plot pieces by crafting two sentences in a noun-active verb-noun format. The first is the problem, the second its resolution. Then note three steps that advance the tale. For example:

Complication: Company fires Joe

Development:

1. Depression paralyses Joe
2. Joe regains confidence
3. Joe sues company

Resolution: Joe regains job

The telegraphed style focuses the writer's thoughts on the relationships in the story, he claims. Plus, "if there's anything wrong with 'Company fires Joe,' we need to discover it now, before we've written several thousand unusable words."

Avoid statements that are weak or static (includes the verbs be, am, was, were, have, has, being, been, do, does, did, could, would, should). "Stories consist of actions! Stories consist of actions! Stories consist of actions!" Franklin writes (he gets a free pass on the exclamation marks for helping to invent narrative nonfiction).

Not all journalism is plot-fueled, obviously; this approach doesn't suit every wearable-blanket brief and hotel review. Yet even a service piece benefits from a theme and an outline. Not the hideous textbook sort with nested subsets in Roman numerals like "I.E.iii.a". Rather a simple list of topics that need coverage, roughly in order. The "five boxes" stratagem – a sort of slapdash structure – remains popular with many journalists and bloggers.

Writing for narrative or thematic continuity

The web offers instant publishing with few parameters. No editor dictates story topic, length or deadlines. That, of course, is a blessing and a curse... Where to begin, when all the world's a potential subject and all cyberspace your canvas?

As we discussed earlier in the course, bloggers need to pick a theme. That could be homeschooling or mp3 reviews or Buenos Aires restaurants ... anything that curls your toes, really. But your site needs to have a raison d'etre, a backbone of continuity, to attract a broad audience of repeat readers.

Diary-style blogs certainly deserve a place at the table. But unless you're a celebrity or a very dynamic writer, these generally attract less traffic. As the book title No One Cares What You Had For Lunch illustrates, some musings do not grip readers' imaginations.(Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter better satisfy the minutia-reporting urge. In fact, they're often called "microblogging" platforms for that reason.).

But this isn't to say stop chronicling your life. "Write what you know" remains an authorial mantra for a reason. Just ponder how to isolate a theme from the bit-torrent of your existence. For example, Road Remedies centers around travel writing. I omit outings, social mishaps and wacky pet stories (well, most of 'em, anyway). The material's good, sure, but it remains on the cutting room floor nonetheless. My blog's a tool to give editors, readers and students a glimpse behind the scenes. It also allows me to trot out some of the anecdotes that don't make it into the mainstream media. In times of travel-drought, I will occasionally post photos or babble about my neighborhood. But I try to keep things on track. Readers come expecting insight about the trade or places I've been, not a recap of my pedicure.

Mike recently started a blog recalling his trip to Patagonia 10 years ago: an interesting technique. Mimi Smartypants may meander off topic, but she always returns to the "three-pint playdate" experience of raising her adopted Chinese daughter in Chicago. Food writer Jess Thomson spent 2007 creating, cooking and blogging a recipe a day for Hogwash. She beautifully interweaves episodes from her life into accounts of new dishes. Still, food's the common thread binding everything together.

Exceptions exist, of course. My friend Marie Javins seems to break the rules – and get away with it wonderfully. Her blog No Hurry ranges from South American chickenbus adventures to editing Muslim-superhero comics and DIY plumbing triumphs.

Home Depot and clogged U-bends? Not my thing. But Javin's a great enough blogger that I hang in there ... and soon I'm rewarded with more tales of Bolivian salt flats and Cairo during Ramadan.

When pressed, she did, in fact, point to an idea that underpinned her work. "They are thematically linked, of course," she wrote. "They're all about me expanding my horizons in a quest for life's meaning and love. The plumbing is about empowerment. The sewing serves the same function as plumbing. I theorize that women searching for similar stuff read, but also people who just like to read about scrapes and silliness read."

Her secret: Original, snappy material, frequently updated. An early adopter, Javins coded her way around the world in 2001, and has built a loyal following over time. Note the emphasis there. Unless you're Paris Hilton, people – aside from Aunt Erma and that barista with a crush – won't have an inherent interest in you. Readership will grow slowly and gradually, as search-engines funnel folks onto your site, and some are intrigued enough to return. Commenting on related blogs helps this cause, as does promotion. But we'll explore all this in more detail later. Now, let's focus on different modes, tones and paces to delight audiences.

News vs. features vs. opinion

 

Traditional journalism splits into three broad groups: the inverted pyramid format, commentary and feature-style, also called narrative writing. Northwestern University's Readership Institute discovered that the latter increased satisfaction, as well as comprehension and retention of the material, even for accounts of traffic accidents.

Its landmark Impact Study also revealed that the public craves more “go and do” information, nitty-gritty details like phone numbers, times, dates, addresses, contact names and Web sites. Women, especially, want to understand how other people live. Dry as the study's report can be, it's worth a peek to understand what motivates readers of newspapers, a group increasingly turning to blogs and website for a daily dose of content.

Business and marketing writer Seth Godin divided the blogosphere into similar slices: news blogs, writer's blogs and our blog's ("the tip of the community iceberg. A posting ... is nothing but a firestarter, a chance to start the conversation and see what happens.")

Features-style: Spinning a good yarn

Vivid storytelling – a.k.a. as narrative writing and creative nonfiction – was once the norm. Mark Twain was a newspaperman, as well as a novelist. The “yellow papers” – led by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal – teemed with color (much of it tawdry tabloidism, but color nonetheless). The practice continued until WWII, when Ernie Pyle's compassionate columns resembled “letters home”.

Boston University Professor Mark Kramer observed in Literary Journalism: “James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, and John Steinbeck tried out narrative essay forms.” He continued, “Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion followed, and somewhere in there, the genre came into its own – that is, its writers began to identify themselves as part of a movement, and the movement began to take on conventions and to attract writers.”

Authors like Hunter Thompson and John McPhee applied these techniques – and won great renown. But newspapers – on the whole – fostered a drier, more factual style. “Storytelling went out the window,” complained Jack Hart, managing editor of The Oregonian. “We had only the inverted pyramid and the standard news feature: quote, transition, quote, transition, quote, transition, kicker ... you're outta there!”

Then New Journalism blazed and helped banish “the pale beige tone of the inverted pyramid,” Hart insisted. Best of all, readers connect more with this personable style. They comprehend complex topics easier, retain information and even buy more papers, according to Northwestern University's Readership Institute.

So what is this miracle fix, exactly? Experts bicker on the finer points, but travel writing guru Don George nutshelled it well: “Essentially, a good story is like a good work of fiction, with a beginning, a middle and an end, characters and conflict, dialogue, telling details, a narrative arc. The full range of literary techniques should be employed.”

Kramer confirms this: "scene setting, dialogue, and sensory description can improve every article." Read more insights from top writers in Chip Scanlan's coverage of the the sixth annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

Finding the right format

The Readership Institute discovered that US newspapers use inverted pyramid style for 69 percent of all stories, feature-style writing for 18 percent and commentary for 12 percent. Magazines, books and the Internet mix techniques a bit more. But a simple truth emerged from the Impact Study: publications “that run more feature-style stories are seen as more honest, fun, neighborly, intelligent, 'in the know' and more in touch with the values of readers.”

Not all topics merit the narrative treatment. A 250-word restaurant review, for example, rarely manages rising action. Some pieces are bulletins, some are stories. However, even a fact-based brief can borrow powerful tools, such as the universal theme, from features style. Likewise, a hint of inverted-pyramid prioritization or a nut graf can clarify a piece with a looser structure. The important first step, especially for a blogger, is to consciously choose a category for each post, then refine the concept.