FEATURE STORY HOW TO WRITE ONE

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Each morning for 5,546 days, Jabbar Collins knew exactly what he'd wear when he awoke: a dark- green shirt with matching dark-green pants. The prison greenies of a convicted murderer, he says, were "overly starched in the beginning, but as time wore on, and after repeated washes, they were worn and dull, like so many other things on the inside.” For most of those 15 years, Mr. Collins, who maintained his innocence, knew the only way his wardrobe would change was if he did something that's indescribably rare. He'd have to lawyer himself out of jail. There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. "'Needle in a haystack' doesn't communicate it exactly. Is it more like lightning striking your house?" says Adele Bernard, who runs the Post-Conviction Project at Pace Law School in New York, which investigates claims of wrongful conviction. "It's so unbelievably hard…that it's almost impossible to come up with something that captures that." Mr. Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at the trial where he was convicted of the high-profile 1994 murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack. The improbable result of that decade-and-a-half struggle was evident on a recent morning in a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper. Mr. Collins sat in a small office he now shares, wearing one of the eight dark suits he owns, a white shirt with French cuffs, a blue-and-gray striped tie and a pair of expensive wingtips. "Every day is beautiful" now, he said, smiling. "I don't have a bad day anymore. I think that my worst bad day out of prison will be better than my greatest good day in prison." On March 13, 1995, as Mr. Collins was led by officers through a side door of a Brooklyn courtroom to a holding cell, his mother let loose a wailing sound that he'd "never heard before or since." Her son had just been convicted of murder.

WHAT ARE FEATURE STORIES? Feature stories are human-interest articles that focus on particular people, places and events. Feature stories are journalistic, researched, descriptive, colorful, thoughtful, reflective, thorough writing about original ideas. Feature stories cover topics in depth, going further than mere hard news coverage by amplifying and explaining the most interesting and important elements of a situation or occurrence. A feature story is not meant to report the latest breaking news, but rather an in-depth look at a subject. Feature articles range from the news feature that provides sidebar background to a current event hard news story, to a relatively timeless story that has natural human interest. Features generally are longer than hard-news articles because the feature penetrates deeper into its subject, expanding on the details rather than trying to concentrate on a few important key points. In a feature story, on the other hand, the writer has the time and space to develop the theme, but sometimes postpones the main point until the end. The whole story does not have to be encapsulated in the lead.

NON-FICTION STORIES Feature stories are journalistic reports. They are not opinion essays or editorials. They should not be confused with creative writing or works of fiction. The writer's opinions and attitudes are not important to the story. The writer keeps herself or himself out of the story. Writing in the third person helps maintain the necessary distance.

TELLING STORIES Feature stories give readers information in a pleasing, entertaining format that highlights an issue by describing the people, places, events and ideas that shape it. Feature stories are really more like nonfiction short stories than hard news stories. While there should a news peg for the existence of a story at a particular time, the immediacy of the event is secondary in a feature story. In fact, sometimes there is no immediate event. The power of a feature story lies in its ability to amplify the focus on an issue through first-rate story telling, irony, humor, human appeal, atmosphere and colorful details. Features have a clear beginning, middle and end and are longer than hard-news stories.

HOW LONG? Newspaper features often are 500 to 2500 words in length.

BUNDELL TECHNIQUE William E. Blundell who pioneered the technique for the Wall Street Journal (and later wrote a book entitled The Art and Craft of Feature Writing). 1. The Lead (Intro) 2. Nut Graph (Angle) 3. Main Body (Blocks) 4. Conclusion (Ending)The Art and Craft of Feature Writing

ANECDOTAL LEAD The best kinds of leads are anecdotal in nature. The short story is meant to be a microcosm of a bigger issue. Here’s an example of a three paragraph lead followed immediately by a Nut Graph. (Three para intro) For five days, Alice's husband, high on drugs, threatened to kill her. He hit her and abused her. Terrified, Alice fled the house when she finally got the chance and ran to a local business to call the police. “He would kill me. He's very scary,” Alice said. “He would walk through walls if he had to.”

2. The Nut Graph is a paragraph that explains your entire article in a nutshell. Many writers find the Nut Graph to be the hardest aspect of feature writing. Once they’ve figured out their Nut Graph, everything else falls into place easily.. (Nut Graph) The police advised her to contact the Domestic Violence Resource Center in Hillsboro, and Alice found her way there.

(Three para intro) Physicists are just like the rest of us in at least one respect. When they go online to search for information, they expect the earth. Bebo White, who runs the website for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a high-energy physics laboratory in California, knows this all too well. "They get very frustrated if we don't return good results, and quickly,” says Mr White. And what do the expert visitors to the centre's website look for most often? That day's cafeteria menu, says Ruth McDunn, another technician on the site. (Nut Graph) Call it the Google Effect. Expectations of search engines have skyrocketed. Whether it involves complex specialist knowledge or the completely trivial, there is a general belief that everything should be available instantly, at the click of a mouse.

The relationship between the lead and the Nut Graph can be thought of in this way: The intro highlights an individual case. The Nut Graph, meanwhile, illustrates how that individual case is actually representative of a bigger trend or how it fits into a bigger overall picture.

BUILDING BLOCKS 3. The main body of the article consists of several blocks, each representing a different aspect of the main story. It's always a good idea to pepper your blocks with quotes and examples to make it more interesting and credible.

6 KEY BLOCKS The block structure pares a big, overwhelming writing job into manageable chunks for writer and reader alike. Each block should make its point with three examples, proofs or illustrations. (Two are too few; four are overkill) Blundell has six key blocks that he would use in his feature articles: History: What’s the background to this situation? Scope: What is the extent of the problem? Cause: Why is this happening? Impact: Who and what is affected by this? Action of contrary forces: Who is doing what about this? The future: How is it going to be in the coming days, weeks, months and years?

GOOD ENDINGS 4. The conclusion is something that ends your story with a punch. There several types of conclusions. The best kind usually contains a passage that either sums up and/or reinforces the central message of the story

TELL THE READER THE STORY IS OVER Nail the central point of the story to the reader's mind. Resonate. “You should hear it echoing in your head when you put the paper down, when you turn the page… It should stay with you and make you think a little bit.” There are three conventional types of conclusions. The default one – used by many writers – is to end with a snappy quote from someone mentioned earlier in the story. But it's the lazy man's approach to conclusion writing (although I must admit, I've been guilty of using this technique, usually when the deadline is fast approaching). A better approach is to tie the conclusion to the lead. So, if you start off with a particular anecdote, you also end with something related to that anecdote. I occasionally use this approach. But be aware that it can get a bit corny if you don't do it well or use it too often. The best approach is to provide some solid facts to sum up and reinforce the central message of the story. You can use a specific detail, a concrete image, a fact or a statistic to conclude the story. But it must be impactful and memorable.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES Below are the five different approaches you can take for a topic like the harmful effects of smoking: Profile: People who have suffered diseases as a result of smoking Explanatory pieces: How smoking leads to diseases Issues and Trends: The rise of smoking among women in urban areas Investigative: How cigarette companies use innovative marketing to target teens Narrative: The story of the first person to successfully sue a cigarette company for causing him to develop cancer.