The Art and Craft of Feature Writing - Chapter 1

FROM INITIAL IDEA TO FINAL SELF-EDITING, A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO REPORTING AND WRITING AS A CONTINUOUS, INTERRELATED PROCESS— WITH EMPHASIS ON STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES 

The art and craft of feature writing based on the wall street journal guide by William Blundell

A PROFESSIONAL'S PRIMER FOR SUCCESSFUL FEATURE STORIES

Whether it's a general profile on big-tree logging or a feature on a minor league relief pitcher, William  Blundell shows writers how to create a story that grabs the reader's attention and doesn't let go. Used to teach Wall Street Journal writers the tricks of the trade—and a system for producing top-quality articles—this guide was created by a working newsman for working newspeople. It deals with the nitty-gritty of coming up with ideas, gathering the right kind of information, and getting past the most common roadblocks that crop up during the writing process. Chock full of ideas and expert instruction, it is an invaluable book for both beginning writers and experienced pros alike.

THE ART AND CRAFT OF FEATURE WRITING

William Blundell, currently a news editor for features at The Wall Street Journal, has been a reporter, page-one writer, Los Angeles bureau chief, and national correspondent for the paper. He is a winner of the Mike Berger Award, granted by the trustees of Columbia University, for distinguished metropolitan reporting in New York; the Ray Howard Public Service Award of the Scripps-Howard Foundation; and the Distinguished Writing Award for non-deadline feature writing, granted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Introduction

During arid stretches of meetings I attend—which is to say, an appalling amount of the time—the rumpled, morose figure of Mel Bookstein plods into my daydreams. He lives only in these imaginings, but his plight is real enough. Bookstein is a reporter in the worst kind of trouble, and he doesn't know how to wriggle out of it.

Usually, I picture him slumped in a chair, staring at a phoney needlepoint sampler on his wall that says, "Cubicle Sweet Cubicle." Along with a jumble of empty Styrofoam cups, the debris of another ill-starred project litters his desk: documents that now seem irrelevant, notes on uninformative interviews, jottings on half-formed thoughts.

He can't say what this snowdrift of material adds up to if it adds up to anything. Having read through it, he's only sure that too much still is missing. Lacking a fix on his story theme, he can't begin to write because he doesn't know where to start. So, hagridden by angst, he waits for lunch and a brighter afternoon, only to find—again—that time is his enemy, not his friend.

Is there anyone in the writing game who hasn't been in his shoes at one time or another? I've certainly shared his depression and anxiety, his belief that he won't be able to do justice to the story before him. And in teaching hundreds of other reporters and writers I've seen the syndrome again and again.

Granted, there's always a pain in good writing; if you're not hurting, you're not stretching. But that pain is supposed to buy, in the end, the deep satisfaction that flows from a creative task well done. The sorrowful thing is that so many writers know so much suffering and so little satisfaction.

This book aims to reduce the pain a little and increase the pleasure a great deal, by offering a new kind of systematic, progressive instruction on how to tell true stories well. It is adapted from an internally published manual used by feature writers of The Wall Street Journal, particularly those doing the major features appearing on the paper's acclaimed front page. But it has nothing to do, really, with business writing (only a couple of the examples cited are business stories) or with the unique difficulties of Journal reporters. It's more concerned with the central problem that faces everyone who wants to write nonfiction—newspapermen, magazine and book writers, you and me.

How can we make the truth as interesting to others as it is to us? That's the nut of it. Some of us roam, as I have, over whole nations or regions, doing stories wildly different in topic or character. Others stay at home and specialise. But all of us share one frequently neglected responsibility: We're supposed to be tellers of tales as well as purveyors of facts. When we don't live up to that responsibility we don't get read.

In this, our interests are interwoven with those of every storyteller who ever lived. We're modern, well educated, computerised and still no different from those men who wandered from one rude village to another in ancient Greece, enchanting people with tales of an Odysseus driven by storm and the gods' caprice across Homer's wine-dark sea.

From their time to ours, the challenges of the trade have never changed. What elements make a story intrinsically interesting? How can the attention of the audience be seized instantly? How should the tale be shaped to hold that interest, and what can be done to nail it into the memory?

Journalism students learn too little about all this. They learn reporting and editing, but not much about the country around and between, places pretty much left to fiction writers. Once on the job the journalist may gain some knowledge of this territory, but only in bits and pieces gleaned over many years. Too often he learns nothing at all about it. No wonder poor Bookstein agonises so; he's unequipped to do his life's work well and knows it.

We can learn a great deal from fiction, and this book makes at least a modest start at connecting some techniques of fiction to the work we do. But it differs most from other writing books, I think, in two other important respects: It denies absolutely the presumption that writing can be taught without considering reporting, and it treats the whole effort as a flowing process and not a series of discrete steps that can be analysed in isolation.

Reporting and writing can't be divorced. All the instruction available on how to bang sentences together gracefully (and there's a powerful lot of it) will produce nothing but glitz if the right material, and a pleasing variety of it, is missing—or if it's been collected without regard to what readers like and need. So while there is little in this book about the techniques of reporting, there is much about the nature of the material a reporter should strive to get, as well as the way he ought to present it. (In referring to the typical reporter, I use the masculine pronoun only out of convenience and tradition; the contributions women have made to journalism are beyond counting.) 

As for reporting/writing as a flowing process, that idea still hasn't gained full currency in teaching. But what good writer can deny it? He knows that what he's done before powerfully influences what he can do now and that what he does now governs to a great extent what he can do next. Decisions made early, when his idea is being shaped, wind through all the rest of his work. As a whole, that work can no more be divided into tidy, discrete steps than the waters of a river can be sorted according to their tributary sources.

This book reflects that indivisibility. It's meant to be read from beginning to end. I suppose a reader could pluck out useful items here and there by hopscotching through certain chapters and sections, as he might even more profitably do in other writing books. But I don't recommend it. He'd miss a great deal of the material needed to put his fragments into proper perspective. More importantly, he'd miss the whole idea of writing as a process, one that begins with the first flicker of an idea in the reporter's mind and ends with the last jot of self-editing.

We'll move through that process, using Journal stories as illustrations. They're good stories as newspaper pieces go, but none is perfect; each was picked because it illustrates one or more teaching points, not because it's a paragon of journalism. Much of the work cited is mine. That's because the method I teach stresses a lot of hard thinking about the story during its development, and I don't know how other people think when they work.

Throughout, the book emphasises the ingredients, structure and craftsmanship that make stories a pleasure to read. The reporter/writer, not his editor, carries almost the entire burden of providing these. Editors can smooth, shorten and clarify, but they can't supply the qualities that make a piece vivid and truly alive, that transforms it from superficial chatter into a tale with the power to strike deeply into a reader's consciousness. Yes, that reader does require specific information, and our first priority is to provide it. But he has deeper and more universal needs that have to be met at the same time or he'll flee. Nothing is easier than to stop reading.

We often forget about those needs, if we knew them to begin with. And if we do acknowledge them, it may only be with bare scraps of so-called colour (most of it irrelevant) dropped willy-nilly into our stories as we scurry to finish them, our attention fixed on the immediate perceived demand of the reader for information. So we fail to heed the unspoken commandment that undergirds all others, the only common demand of readers everywhere: For Pete's sake, make it interesting. Tell me a story. That first and greatest commandment is what this book is all about.

Chapter-1 Raw Materials

Bereft of new ideas, a reporter spies his boss approaching with a glittering eye. The editor presents him with an idea. It's a terrible idea, but the reporter is stuck with it because, having nothing better to offer, he is so enfeebled by guilt that he can't argue forcefully against it. So he drags himself out of the office in pursuit of a grail whose existence he doubts to start with. The prognosis for the story is poor.

The feature writer who doesn't have two or three projects bubbling on his own stove is doing only half a job. As the party closest to the action, he and not his editor has the primary responsibility for generating ideas. Yet many reporters are chronically starved for them or pursue vaguely, hastily formed notions that fall apart during the reporting or writing stages; a mountain of effort produces a molehill of a story or nothing at all, and before long the reporter is being force-fed assignments like a Strasbourg goose. He has lost control of his most important creative function. He is not having much fun, either.

In generating ideas, a vivid imagination is a big help, and if our unfortunate reporter doesn't have one, we can't supply it. But most of the time, something else is wrong, something that can be fixed: he doesn't do enough thinking or reading, and he doesn't talk to the right people. He is suffering the journalistic equivalent of sensory deprivation.

"Rubbish!" our man cries, ticking off his regular reading Time and Newsweek, the New York Times, one or two local papers, Forbes, Business Week, several trade publications on his beat (if he has one). And when he isn't reading these, he adds, he's talking to people, hordes of people. His Rolodex is full of people. What more can he do? A lot.

Besides those few people who see story possibilities everywhere, anyone who hopes to maintain a steady flow of ideas has to be an omnivorous, gluttonous reader, including in his diet publications few others read. It's not enough to scan mass-circulation papers and magazines; they keep a reporter abreast of events and the competition, but their coverage of a story often kills or limits his chances of doing anything similar.

Usually, the best he can hope for in pursuing the story is a piece that might be more complete but that still has a staleness wafting from it, or one that develops only a secondary angle of the main story others are running. Straining at this gnat, the reporter may pump it full of hyperbole and phoney portent to build up its importance. The editors usually aren't fooled. If they are, most readers won't be; they know a short beer in a tall glass when they see one.

One way out: Pick broad subject areas that interest you, that appear to touch the lives of many readers, and that the paper covers sporadically or barely at all (religion and family relations, perhaps, two areas undercovered by practically everybody). Identify and read publications that cover them—professional quarterlies, association newsletters, academic, think-tank and foundation reports, and the emanations of government agencies involved.

These may be excruciating reading and much of their contents dross, but such publications are not competitive, meaning we can steal ideas from them with impunity, and they often carry the latest developments and most original thinking long before the general press.

When reading, make quick notations of possible stories that the material suggests and file these with the clips; data may be stored in the brain for later recall, but inspiration disappears like the morning mist, without notes, you may reread the clipping months later and wonder why you kept it.

Without an organised system of files, you may not be able to find them at all. A feature writer needs idea files, and he should cull them regularly. How the files are set up depends on his subject area and his tastes, but each system should include a tickler file. Into this go idea hinging on events that will happen at specific times in the future or ideas that just look hot—meaning that if they cannot be done quickly, the opportunity will disappear or very likely be skimmed off by competitors.

In doing these things, you are voluntarily creating a beat where none existed before and beginning to cover it the way a beat reporter should. For further instruction, let's peer into the Rolodex file of the fellow who has trouble getting ideas.

As he said, there are hundreds of people in there: platoons of PR types and an impressive array of sources at or near the tops of their power pyramids. New names go into the file with every story he does, names of more and more topsiders. Fine. They belong there. But a closer look reveals a shortage of another type of source, the middleman. He is not at the top of the heap, but close enough to know policy. He is not at the bottom, but close enough to know about what is happening on the ground.

Sources at high levels are certainly useful, but that utility often is limited by their rank. They may be so high above the pavement that they can no longer see what is happening there, so busy (or swell-headed) that they have little time to educate the grubby minions of the press, and too protective of their own positions and organisations to give honest and complete appraisals.

Conversely, middlemen often are better able to provide specifics that bring stories to life or to guide reporters to them. They are less apt to be suspicious; indeed, many are complimented when interest is shown in their work and respond well to reporters. Finally, some middlemen get to be top men, and they remember old contacts.

Finding these and other sources, a reporter may file and forget them until another story they can help with somehow materialises. This is what our man has done. He hasn't talked to most of his non-PR sources more than once or twice, and some haven't been called in years. If he phoned them today they might not know him from the Fuller Brush man. He has lost access through neglect.

"But I didn't have any reason to call," our man whines. Like so many others, he has been counting on plucking ideas out of the air through some kind of immaculate conception. When this divine event occurs—and he has no doubt it will then he'll plug sources into the idea. But this is backward thinking. He should be using his best-informed and most cooperative sources—the Wise Men, whom we shall meet again—to help him originate those ideas. He gnaws a tuna on rye at his desk, congratulating himself for his frugality and long hours, when he could be sharing a sole Veronique and an interesting chardonnay with someone better informed than he. This sort of cultivation can be more productive than an interview on an idea already developed. The latter is a commercial transaction: The reporter wants information that will advance (or preserve) his career while the source, faced with seeing what he utters in print, must decide whether it is in his interest to cooperate or obfuscate.

The chemistry changes when the reporter explores general ideas with a source who knows he is not being dragooned into a story just yet. The reporter now is a student, the source a guru; the object is not to squeeze pellets of information out of him but to create an idea with the help of his special knowledge and insight. This transaction is an intellectual challenge, and the reporter's interest now is flattering rather than threatening. This kind of flattery will get you everywhere.

Having greatly increased his flow of raw material for ideas, our man must now think about that material in ways that will produce those ideas. A few possibilities:

1. Extrapolation
2. Synthesis
3. Localisation
4. Projection
5. Viewpoint switching

An event occurs that may not be worth a feature story in itself. By applying extrapolative reasoning, the reporter may be able to infer that beyond the event lies a broader, more significant story. For example, let's inspect that old chestnut, the story about how well the local United Fund drive is going. The piece says contributions are far above targets, and there is much back-patting and hosannas for the energy and vision of those responsible. This boilerplate seems to promise nothing more.

But the story fails to note that a big income-tax cut will occur next year. This means people have reason to give most heavily now, to get maximum tax deductions under the current higher rates. This may have more to do with the fund drive's success than the quality of its leadership. It further suggests that next year the United Fund people may have to sweat bullets to bring in less.

In extrapolating, the reporter asks himself two questions:

1. What is the probable principal cause of this single development? It may be apparent, it may be played down, or it may be omitted entirely, just as the background about the tax cut was left out of the United Fund story.

2. Is it logical to think that this cause is a common driving force likely to create similar effects in other places on other people and organisations? In the United Fund story, the answer is yes, because the tax cut applies to everyone everywhere. It's probable that a wide variety of charitable organisations, from museums in Bangor to churches in Bloomington and rescue missions in Seattle, will benefit.

The reporter should spot-check his reasoning with some phone calls before touting a cosmic story about charity windfalls nationwide. Sometimes events don't follow logic, or something else is involved that the reporter didn't or couldn't foresee. 

But logic prevails more often than not, and the reporter who trains himself in extrapolative thinking adds a sharp tool to his kit. Using it, he can begin to shape major stories out of seemingly innocuous, isolated events.

SYNTHESIS

The reporter adept at synthesis sees and exploits the thread unifying several developments that to others appear unrelated. He assembles promising story ideas from what looks like a junk pile of spare parts. He does this by staying alert to possibilities of commonality in the material he reads and discusses with sources; he thinks of events as being potentially linked and tries to spot the connections that will provide a story. G. Christian Hill did that in preparing this 1974 story about San Diego, which was going through a particularly bad period.

SAN DIEGO—If awards were given for civic embarrassment or bad luck, a number of candidates would spring to mind. There is Washington, home of Watergate, or Detroit, home of the troubled auto industry. Or that perennial front-runner, Philadelphia, home of Philadelphia.

Then there is this beautiful seaside town of 771,000, the longsuffering victim of a whole string of bumblings, scandals and disasters that make it seem almost like a city accursed. The problem has gotten so bad that Doug Porter, ex-editor of an underground paper named The Door, now refers to any noteworthy job of bungling or failure as "typically San Diesque."

Take, for example, the problem of daylight saving time, which became mandatory nationwide last January as an energy-saving measure. In San Diego, however, there may be some baffled residents still walking around two hours behind the rest of the country. That's because the San Diego Union urged them to set their clocks back an hour instead of forward an hour. How could the paper have made such a mistake? "I have no comment, and don't quote me on that," says City Editor Al Jacoby.

The muddle over time is nothing compared to what has happened to the leading elements of the business and financial community—or what is left of them after a wave of scandals and failures. The crash of collapsing companies and the cries of fraud recently led the San Diego Tribune to comment that the town has seized a leading position as a "West Coast distributor of flimflam men and holder of the national record for suede shoes per capita."

The story then proceeds to list the more spectacular business scams and failures (even the owner of the building housing the bankruptcy court went belly-up), which led to both the largest IRS tax lien ever filed anywhere and the biggest chapter 11 reorganisation ever attempted. After that Hill dwells lovingly on the heroic incompetence of the San Diego Padres, whose furious owner seizes control of the P.A. system at a game and castigates his butterfingered employees, and the NFL Chargers, entangled at the time in a drug case. Noting the squad's 2-11 record, a sportscaster figures the drug has to be formaldehyde.

The story finishes by noting that none of this has done much to enhance the image of San Diego, which was not exactly famous as a dynamic power centre, to begin with. A critic describes it as "a body of land surrounded on two sides by water, on two sides by mountains, and on all sides by apathy." (For the full text of this story, see Appendix 2.)

The unifying element in this confection was a common location; all the action was in San Diego, so the theme adapted was that of a city that seemed cursed by bumbling and bad luck. The events were different, their causes vary, but they all operated in one place.

Sometimes the events will differ and the locations will differ, but there will be a common cause behind all. Spotting it, the reporter gathers the disparate story elements under this umbrella. Are there alarming rises in juvenile epilepsy, truancy and petty theft? Maybe growing teenage addiction to video games has something to do with that. Are steel companies trimming inventories of sheets while glass companies are slowing the production of safety glass? Maybe the auto industry is planning production cutbacks.

Finally, locations may differ and causes may differ, but a common class of people, institutions or places is involved in a similar way.

In the 1970s, a big natural-resources boom was creating tens of thousands of new construction, mining and energy jobs in remote areas. At the same time, blue-collar retired persons began seeking new homes in towns with cheap housing and little or no crime. Also, younger families began fleeing deteriorating city schools and living conditions to seek better lives elsewhere.

These different migrants were moving for different reasons, but the net effect on one common class—rural towns and their inhabitants—was the same: After decades of steady population loss, they suddenly confronted all the problems and promises of overheated growth. Focusing on these towns, the writer could tie together the diverse streams of the migration.

By helping to broaden story themes and unify scattered developments, extrapolation and synthesis can give the reporter a jump on competitors who are lolling about, waiting for news to jump up and bite them. But opportunities to be original are limited. "There are no new stories, only new reporters," the saying goes, and some truth lies behind the cynicism. Too many of our rivals do not loll about. They are imaginative, energetic and out to beat us to stories. Often they do. Then the challenge is not to retell a twice-told tale but to expand it, freshen it or change its character.

Some ways to do that:

LOCALISATION

Thinking big, a reporter who has been grouping small events to create a broader idea is distressed to find others already at work on his big picture. He can still profit by reversing course and thinking small. Let them be muralists. He will become a miniaturist.

His rivals are using most of their space and effort to establish the scale and importance of the story. Their copy is full of statistics, commentary by august experts and lists of people and places affected. These elements are all necessary, perhaps, in staking out the farthest boundaries of the development, but they are hardly the kind of materials that readers identify with emotionally.

Readers can see the magnitude of a change in Social Security law when told that 1,143,000 pensioners will have $6.3 billion less to live on this year. But they cannot feel the meaning behind it; the people are faceless units, the numbers too large to be visualised. The information is abstract. It becomes concrete only when the reader is taken, for instance, to the porch of a decaying old hotel in St. Petersburg and introduced to a few elderly residents who despair because they can't buy food or pay the utility bills on $40 less a month. The reader learns nothing about magnitude from this and everything about meaning.

So the miniaturist nods ingratitude toward his colleagues, who have proved that the story is important, and goes off to St. Petersburg to breathe life into it. They have left him the chance to do a piece of a different character on the same subject, and he snatches it. A free lunch is hard to find.

Inputting events under his magnifying glass, a reporter needn't limit himself to doing only those stories hooked to broader developments. An event may have no such connection but make a marvellous tale in itself because it has some of the values that make good fiction: a protagonist struggling with an antagonist, lots of action, drama, mystery, and humanity.

Many of these little passion plays occur down the street from the newsroom, but a reporter's instincts may be so dulled by the familiarity that he misses them.

Marilyn Chase didn't miss, and produced a funny, touching 1981 story about an unusual park in San Francisco. A few excerpts will give you the flavour of it (for the full text, see Appendix 2):

San Francisco has long been toasted as one of the world's easiest places to get drunk and stay drunk. It has the requisite amenities: relatively cheap liquor, a temperate climate, and legions of tourists who are easy marks for a practised panhandler. Now, to these attractions is added another: a park dedicated exclusively to winos. . . .

Wino Park, officially called Sixth Street Park, is a transformed sandlot tucked amid the transient hotels, pawnshops and liquor stores of the city's tough South-of-Market area. There, a wino can recline with a bottle of Thunderbird or Night Train Express wine, build a bonfire, cook a meal, sleep, loiter or play a game of sodden volleyball without being arrested. A brass plaque commemorates famous people who liked their drinks. The winos like to read it aloud, like a roll call of heroes: "Honoring: Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, W. C. Fields, John Barrymore, Betty Ford, Janis Joplin, Dylan Thomas. . . . ," they intone. . . .

On a mild and sunny afternoon, they are among the three dozen regulars who congregate in the tiny park. To an outsider, the first sensations suggest that this is some kind of crazy, landlocked beach party: blowing sand from the arid planters, the smell of woodsmoke from a midday bonfire, outdoor cooking, the blare of a radio tuned to soul and gospel music, and people drinking from styrofoam cups. 

S.Q., 60 and grey-bearded, is the park's elder statesman. He occupies a chair next to the bonfire and despite the balmy spring day wears a fake Persian-lamb hat. It is adorned with a button that reads, "I'm alive," the slogan of Glide Memorial Church. "Winter was rough," he says slowly, "but it's all right now. All right." Hogshead, glowering and blind drunk, sits alone in a corner. He is the park's wood gatherer.

Ben, about 50, assumed the leadership role from S.Q. He is a robust black man with salt-and-pepper hair, a print polyester shirt and a vest with a nametag reading "Glide staff. My name is Ben." He surveys the park with a proprietary eye and says the winos are holding their ground in perpetual turf battles with drug traffickers.

"I be here every day, seven days a week, from 6:30 in the morning. If I pick up a broom, everybody here will do the same," he says with an expansive gesture.

Ben's steady lady is Peggy, 34, a plump, freckled, toothless, ponytailed bacchante attired in fuzzy slippers and a shapeless plaid shirt. Her conversation indicates that somewhere, there lurks a proper, middle-class upbringing. She asks a reporter for a stock tip, and when none is forthcoming, explains: "My broker is in Connecticut, and anyway, I don't trust him. But if I were investing, I'd buy Kimberly-Clark, because of the Rely tampon scandal. ..."

* * *

Mickey, 36, is a merchant seaman with a wife somewhere that he dotes on. He's trying to go straight for her and has been dry for one day. "I'm afraid of getting the shakes, Fran," he confides to Mrs Peavey, "But so far, I'm feeling okay. I'm eating and drinking a lot of water." Last winter, when an outsider brought in lice, Mickey obtained a half-case of the delousing agent from a nearby clinic and took his friends up to his apartment and bathed them. Mrs Peavey points to such acts as vindication of her idealism. "If you had lice, would your friends bathe you?" she asks. "Mine wouldn't. . . ."

* * *

The winos know well that their park hasn't attained its ideal state. But to keep their goal in sight, they have designed a mural that will depict the park looking as green as the Garden of Eden, and themselves looking like exemplary stewards.

"Then we can always look up," says one wino, "and say: This is the way it's supposed to be."

The story of Wino Park had been beaten almost to death by the Bay Area press, but this didn't deter reporter Chase. She knew that while her piece in The Wall Street Journal might not be read by the tiny fraction of the paper's readers who live in the Bay Area, the millions who don't live there would find it new. She also gave the story freshness and humanity by telling it through the park denizens, while others stressed the controversy the park had generated. A moral emerges: When doing miniatures, try setting up the easel in your own backyard first. It saves airfare.

PROJECTION

Perhaps the most useful of all story-development tools. Declining to follow the media sheep to a pasture already overgrazed, the reporter adept at projection can move past them into new territory. He does this by passing up detailed coverage of the central development itself and fixing instead on its results. He anticipates.

It's important to remember that many stories unroll in stages over a period of time, roughly in this fashion:

1. Central development. Something begins to happen. It may be a single concrete event, a more subtle trend or societal development, whatever.

2. Impacts. As the development advances, it begins to affect people, places and/or institutions in specific ways. Its impression is being felt by them, for good or ill.

3. Countermoves. As the impacts become more apparent and more forceful, those affected may try to slow, halt, deflect, mitigate or enhance them, depending on whether they benefit from those impacts or are harmed by them.

Now, terminology: When a story is just beginning, when impacts and countermoves haven't had time to take concrete shape, that story is a juvenile story. When they have had the time to jell, the story is mature.

Keeping this in mind, a reporter who comes late to a story can often break new ground anyway. While his competition is clustered around the main development, he can move on to some of the impacts they haven't had to time or vision to cover, or he can jump all the way into countermoves.

During a surge in mineral and energy development a few years ago, for example, the press generally remained fixated on the so-called boomtown syndrome, the enormous strain felt by some small communities near new oilfields, mines and powerplant sites. Since the competition was already covering the boom and one of its principal impacts, The Wall Street Journal jumped ahead to countermove. What was being done to alleviate the problem?

A great deal, it turned out. Towns and counties that once were pathetically grateful for any new jobs that came along had stiffened up and were forcing companies to pay in advance for new schools, roads, sewage-treatment plants and policing. Many other companies were voluntarily aiding towns with grants and creative financing because they had learned that degraded living conditions for workers prompted high turnover and low productivity. And taxes by states on extracted oil and minerals, previously low, had been jacked up and more of the increased cash flow was channelled to affected areas. The inescapable conclusion: This boom would cause far less damage than those before it, an important thing for the reader to know. Coverage of the subject had been stretched through projection.

That broad story was mature: Enough time had passed to allow both impacts and countermoves to form. When a story is still in its juvenile stage, the reporter who has no appetite for copycat coverage of the main development can always wait in the weeds until they occur.

He also can use the elements of projection to shape the multistory treatment of that happiest of discoveries, the mature story that the competition hasn't yet discovered. His first major piece might dwell on the development itself, his second on its impacts and his last on what was being done about the impacts. The progression is natural and easy, not strained.

VIEWPOINT SWITCHING

Think of a story scene as a piece of terrain with varying topography. Over there, in the thickets to the west, workers are striking a key industry; the good reporter travels there briefly to tell part of his tale from their turf. To the east, in the city on the plain, managers are plotting counter-measures. The reporter visits, again briefly, to tell us what they see from their office windows. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, he spends on the snowy summit of Mount Objectivity, apart from the action but able to view it widely in a general way. He can also discuss matters with Olympians who live there full-time and share his wide view—labour consultants, union presidents and field marshals of industry.

This is the time-tested way most good stories get told. But if a latecomer finds the high ground occupied, it only makes sense that he move to another, different vantage point from which to work. George Getschow did so in this outstanding 1980 piece on immigration from Mexico. Read it carefully, for it will be referred to in other contexts later.

NAPIZARO, Mexico—An astonishingly effective U.S. trade program is operating in this rural hamlet of 1,200 people—but Uncle Sam knows nothing about it. He wouldn't like it if he did. Nazzaro has street lights, new brick homes with TV antennas sprouting from their rooftops, a modern community centre and infirmary, and a new bullring named "North Hollywood California." It is a fitting name. The money for the bullring and all the rest came from North Hollywood in exchange for Napizaro's main export: its male population.

For decades this town has systematically sent its men north to work as illegal aliens in small plants and businesses in the California community, and for decades they have sent their pay home, part of it earmarked for civic improvements.

"Our town is a monument to our workers. None of this would be possible without them," says Augustin Campos, a 61 -year-old town elder and an early migrant himself. It was Mr Campos's success in North Hollywood (the first year he went there to work he earned $4,000, or more than all the Napizaro villagers combined) that attracted all the others to North Hollywood, where they now work in a number of factories, including one started by a Napizaro villager.

The price of the newfound prosperity is high. Napizaro is a town of children, old men and lonely women. More than three-quarters of its 156 heads of household are in the States, and they return only briefly for the town festival in January if they can come home at all. After many years of such separation, they will finally return for good to houses built with their savings, some of the stunning homes with landscaped courtyards and even saunas. "The boys want nice places to retire to," Mr Campos says. In Mexico, a nice place to retire can be built for $8,000. 

Napizaro's wealth is an anomaly in poverty-stricken rural Mexico. It stems from the town's unusual system of self-taxation and the willingness of its men to spend so much of their lives away from their village. But the extent of its migration is no anomaly. It is the norm. Pushed by poverty, pulled by the lure of jobs that pay at least 10 times what they can make here, men throughout rural Mexico are going north in numbers that may even exceed the highest estimates, about five million crossings a year, with some men making several crossings in the course of a year. A journey through central Mexico shows town after town almost stripped of working-age males much of the year. In a country that on the whole can't create enough jobs for its people, so great has the rural migration become that farm fields lie untended and local businesses suffer severe labour shortages. Now some skilled workers from the cites, lured by U.S. pay scales, are joining the northern migration too.

The Migrants' Plight

Most of the workers, however, are poor peasants who trek north because they must. Otherwise, they face lives so wretched that few Americans can imagine them.

One such migrant is Teofilo Gomez of the village of San Nicholas de Los Agustinos, 250 miles northwest of Mexico City. He, his wife, Teresa, and their 10 children live in an adobe and log hut 10 feet wide and 30 feet long. There is no stove, no heating system, and rib plumbing. Their only possessions are two broken-down beds, three chairs, a picture of The Last Supper and a skinny chicken that combs the dirt floor for crumbs. Seldom are there any to find.

The 39-year-old Mr Gomez is better off than some in the village. He has worked. Twelve hours a day every day, he milks cows and cleans stables at a nearby farm for a salary of $40 a week, enough to buy beans and tortillas but little else. "Hunger is something we have learned to live with," he says, dispatching a son to scavenge a nearby potato field for anything the harvesters have missed. His wife has been ill and a loan to pay her medical bills hangs over his head. The children are half-starved. It is time to go north again.

A 1,500-Mile Journey 

He has made the 1,500-mile journey 14 times in the past 12 years, pushed always by necessity. It is lonesome away from home, but in California, he makes more in six months picking vegetables than he can get in four years milking cows here. To Mr Gomez, a small, soft-spoken man, the U.S. is simply the difference between meat and milk for his family a few times a month or a diet virtually devoid of protein, and between rags and clothing.

"If I didn't go north we would live in worse misery than we do now," he says. His son comes back from the potato field empty-handed. This means the chicken won't eat either. It isn't fed when the children are hungry. There are millions of Campesinos, landless peasants, like Mr Gomez. They are living testimony to the failure of Mexico's land distribution programs, a failure that day by day drives more rural Mexicans over the border. Agrarian reform, which was supposed to provide every Mexican peasant with his own small farm, has collapsed under the onrush of the nation's rural population growth. There just aren't enough arable acres to go around.

Government efforts to control the birthrate have met with some success in urban areas, but the rural rate of about 5% a year has been altered hardly at all. Many peasants are illiterate and cannot read what the government tells them about avoiding pregnancy. The women who can read, one Mexican population expert says, won't go against the teachings of the Catholic Church by taking birth-control pills. So new generations of the landless are born in poverty and move eventually to the border.

Contrary to common belief in the U.S., they aren't quite the bottom of Mexico's barrel, economically speaking. "The poorest of the poor cannot afford to migrate," says Jorge Bustamante, a migration specialist at Mexico City's Colegio de Mexico. These are called the morosos, "those without hope."

They don't have the will, the energy or the money to go north. The coyotes, smugglers who transport groups of migrants to the border and slip them across, often charge several hundred dollars, an impossible sum for many. So those without hope struggle on in the towns where they were born or drift to the teeming slums of Mexico City in search of work. Every day, 1,400 more arrive there.

Most of them who can migrate—some estimate 80%—come from the six central states of Michoacan, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, Jalisco and Queretaro. These states have a dark and bloody history of conflict between the government, the church and landowners, a conflict that devastated the land in the revolution of 1910 and again in the late 1920s, sending countless peasants fleeing all the way to the U.S. There they found new opportunities, and a tradition of migration began.

Ironically, the migration was helped along by the U.S. government. In 1942 Uncle Sam began the Bracero Program to bring in Mexican labourers to relieve wartime manpower shortages. Under pressure from agricultural interests enamoured of the cheap farm labour, the program was extended until 1964. Some migrants who received their "green cards" to work in the U.S. during that era continue to use them legally today. But most migrants must sneak across the border, with or without the help of the coyotes. Many get to the border town of Juarez from the central states on a train nicknamed "The Wetback" because of the large number of illegal migrants it carries.

The roots of the migration are apparent even today in such places as Yotatiro, a decayed village of 550 people brooding in the mountains of Michoacan. As dusk falls on a recent evening, Padre Poncho Amaya celebrates Mass by candlelight for a congregation of women and children. During the sermon he implores the women, fidgeting on hard pews, to be "firm in their faith" even if their husbands aren't.

"The Church Is Our Cross"

Where are the men? Most are working in the States, Padre Amaya says after the Mass, and those remaining are "not religious." Outside, old men returning from the fields wearily ride their donkeys down a mud road lit only by moonlight (there is no electricity here). They have toiled all day on land they never owned. "Greetings," says the padre, but the men ignore him and hide their faces in the shadows of their sombreros. Later, a village elder mutters, "The church is our cross." His bitterness goes back more than 50 years, to an event that cut off the peasants of Yotatiro and many other villages from any chance at free land.

The event was the Cristeros Rebellion of 1926-29, a war between the government, then seeking to break up the estates of big landholders, and the church, which backed the landholders. The peasants were stuck in the middle.

In 1927 the conflict came to Yotatiro when Antonio Cortez, the owner of the hacienda embracing the village, was ordered to distribute his acres to local peasants. Their priest at the time told them they would be excommunicated if they took the property. Torn between the temporal and spiritual powers, the villagers, like many others elsewhere, obeyed the church—and lost their opportunity. The land was given to peasants from nearby villages who had backed the government against the supporters of the church, the Cristeros.

So today's villagers have no choices. "The priest told our parents they would go to hell if they took the land, so now we have no means at all to support ourselves. We go to the U.S. or go hungry," says 40-year-old Fidel Rodriquez, who spends half of every year working fields in California.

Anguish about Leaving 

A recent stint in the vineyards brought him enough to restock the bare shelves in the tiny grocery he runs out of his home. The money was welcome, but Mr Rodriquez says he is "full of fear and anguish" every time he must leave here. Both his mother and father have died while he was away in California, and his wife has had to bear two of their eight children alone. When he is in the U.S., he worries so much he often cannot sleep.

Those left behind to wait in this flyblown hamlet fare no better. Surrounded by her 10 tattered children, Julia Mendoza, 40 and pregnant again, complains that they cannot survive on what her husband sends back from the U.S. She has moved in with her in-laws, but they too are impoverished and depend on remittances from her husband and two other migrant sons.

"We have nothing but tortillas and water," she laments. As she speaks, a rat creeps boldly toward a small pouch of corn on the Mendozas' dilapidated porch. Her 69-year-old father-in-law grabs a broomstick and smacks the rodent over the head. "One less mouth to feed," he says.

Though hunger and deprivation in the villages remain the strongest forces stimulating migration, urbanites have joined the flow, too. As a street urchin in Netzahuacoyotl, a squalid slum of 2.5 million people on the fringe of Mexico City, Jose Louis once scavenged garbage cans for food. He is still there—but now as owner of a grocery store and a modern two-bedroom home full of appliances, a color TV and a stereo system.

All this has come from regular trips to Oklahoma City, where he picks up $15,000 a year painting cars by day and washing dishes by night. Mr Louis has learned English ("call me Joe"). His store is named "Oklahoma City." He loves America. "I wanted a good life here, and the U.S. has given it to me," he says. "The U.S. is a dream come true."

Home Away from Home

But he has no thought of moving there permanently, and neither do an overwhelming percentage of other migrants. They are Mexicans first and always. Besides, why live in the States when the dollar buys so much more here? Their feelings for the U.S. are akin to those of a dairy farmer for a prize cow; he may have a real affection for an animal that reliably yields rivers of milk but feel no inclination to move into the barn with her.

Sheer economic opportunism, not poverty, is what brings a small but growing number of skilled and semiskilled Mexican workers to American cities. They can earn a decent living here, but 10 times as much up north. Some trained glassworkers have left, along with many construction tradesmen; it is estimated that a third to a half of Houston's construction workers are illegal Mexican aliens. Meanwhile, the ICA Group, a big Mexico City construction company, is already having trouble finding enough skilled workers to meet the needs of Mexico's own rapid industrialisation.

That buildup, based largely on the nation's oil boom, is helping Mexico in its long struggle to provide enough new jobs to keep its people working and at home. About 800,000 new positions were created last year—but that still didn't match the 1.1 million to 1.3 million newcomers entering the labour force. And the lure of the dollar, always seductive, now is more so; the devaluation of the peso has given U.S. paychecks even more purchasing power in Mexico than they had.

Manpower Shortage

So the flow northward continues and expands, practically emptying the central Mexican countryside of its prime manpower. At the local slaughterhouse in Purpero, a Michoacan town of about 20,000, women and old men pluck chickens and slice the throats of pigs. There simply aren't any other men around to do the work, says a plant official. Even the oldsters, too aged and poor to migrate, must be bused in from neighbouring villages. The local gas company, construction firm and hospital all report similar labour shortages.

Ironically, even prosperous little Napizaro is feeling the pinch now. So many men are going to North Hollywood that cornfields are left fallow and construction of a new water system—funded by several hundred dollars a week collected from the migrants—hasn't even started. To retain some of its men, the town has considered putting in a clothing factory, but the notion was dropped when elders sadly agreed that they couldn't afford to pay their own young men enough to keep them here.

The government has pledged to correct the economic conditions that lie behind the growing mass migration. President Jose Lopez Portillo says rapid industrialisation is closing the job gap, and he vows that employment will stand at 4% in 20 years.

Economists are sceptical. Almost half the workforce is jobless or underemployed now, they note, and there is an ominous bulge in the population of 68 million; almost half are 15 or younger. In coming years they will be pouring into the labor market in numbers so great that even a continuing boom economy may be utterly swamped by them. If so, pressure on the border can only increase.

Migrants' Factory 

In such places as Napizaro, the migration to the north is already becoming institutionalised, ever more deeply embedded in the life of the village. One prosperous migrant has opened his own clothing plant in North Hollywood, and he hires fellow-townsmen at $5 an hour. The village offers prospective migrants an orientation course on life and works in America, and the school director is considering adding English to the curriculum—at the grammar school level.

But beneath the prosperity of Napizaro there is always a note of sadness. It is a town of leave-takings, a place where women must endure much.

Ricardo Campos, son of the village elder, Augustin, has just returned from North Hollywood to marry the girl he left behind nine long years ago. Like some, he has been unable to get enough time off to visit. There will be no honeymoon after the wedding. He must return to work. Tears welling in her eyes, his pretty fiancee says: "When he leaves, my heart will be full of misery."

Illegal immigration stories were all over the papers done secondhand from various peaks on the U.S. side of the border when this piece was written. But Getschow's perspective from his base in the poor, arid villages of central Mexico gave his work power and graphic value that overshadowed everything done by his rivals.

Spending so much time there, he also was able to see and tell elements of the broad story that others did not: the bitter legacy of the Cristeros Rebellion, the irony of depopulated towns and jobs going begging in a nation with, overall, a crushing labour surplus, the ambivalent attitudes of Mexican peasants toward the U.S., and above all individual lives so wretched we understand immediately and completely the reasons for migration. A mountaintop would have provided a wider view, but from there we could not have seen the faces of the people.

So often we simply must see their faces, hear their voices, in order to really be convinced of the truth of what we are being told—and so often we do not because the reporter has failed us as a storyteller. He has not been sensitive to what readers like, to those high-interest elements that separate a good story—or story idea—from a tedious, unengaging one.

My own selective list of what readers like, in descending order of preference:

1. Dogs, followed by other cute animals and well-behaved small children. A reporter may do a skull-cracking analysis of talks on arms limitation and await the praise of an admiring readership. He gets one phone call from a nitpicker in a defence think tank who chides him for misstating the throw weight of the SS-20 missile. Meanwhile, a colleague tosses off a light piece on a three-legged collie that has rescued a child from an ice floe and gets a sack of mail and 40 calls. Life is unfair.

2. People/Actors. Lacking a dog (and it's a shame how often we do) this element carries the most intrinsic reader interest, provided the people meet two criteria. First, by actors I mean people who are either pressing the buttons and pulling the levers, or those getting ground up in the gears. They are not uninvolved: analysts, consultants—a consultant has been defined as a man who knows 123 ways to make love but doesn't know any women—researchers, lawyers who fight to the last nickel of the client's resources. Actors are those people who make things happen or who are directly affected by what happens.

Second, they ought to be doing or saying something interesting and germane. Some reporters shoehorn people into stories that don't lend themselves to personalisation or insert dullards whose testimony or experience fails to grip the reader. Having chucked a human being or two into his story, the reporter feels he has done his duty. But he's only genuflected to human interest, not served it. A piece about, say, warehouse inventories don't benefit by having a forklift operator drive through it. His presence makes the story appear strained, if not ludicrous.

If this is a sin, however, there is a graver one: Failure to get off the mountaintop and mix with the actors in a drama when the nature of the story idea cries out for on-the-ground reporting. I believe this is the greatest deficiency in newspaper reporting today. It is simply impossible to do a convincing piece on the root causes of, say, Mexican migration without going to the villages of the people who are driven north and showing why they leave—yet hundreds of writers have tried to do the impossible.

3. Facts, when they are relevant and move the story forward. Again, the distinctions are vital. Trivia and information of tangential worth often get shovelled into the stories of reporters who are unconsciously or consciously trying to cover up story flaws— lack of action, direct human experience, or clear story theme. Such facts are clutter, not information, and only slow the tale.

4. People/Observers. Now we're getting into elements low on the reader-interest scale. As opposed to actors, these people don't have direct involvement in what's happening; they are the aforementioned consultants, analysts, commentators, lawyers, experts of every stripe, and what they do is talk. When Ronald Reagan invades Grenada, he is a high-level actor in that play. When he castigates the Russians for invading Afghanistan, he is only an observer in a different drama.

The insights and interpretations of observers are helpful in many stories, but the reader regards them coolly. Other things being equal, he would rather hear a farmer talking about the damage boll weevils had done to his own cotton field than suffer the ramblings of a professor at the University of Arizona who offers the expert and painfully obvious opinion that the insect is becoming a threat to Southwestern cotton crops. The farmer has more credibility because he has suffered. He is an actor in the play.

This suggests that observers should be used sparingly and that sources with direct experience get prominence instead. After all, it is the sum of their experiences that is the story. But the opposite happens. The reporter inflicts upon his reader's batteries of experts but fails to illustrate the reality that these experts can only comment on second-hand. A high-interest element (the actor) gets replaced by a low-interest one (the observer), but the reporter sees only that he has put people into his story. The trouble is that they are the wrong kind of people.

5. Numbers, especially big numbers and comparative sets of numbers densely packed in consecutive paragraphs. This is cyanide to reader interest, but don't take my word for it; test the assertion by reading a story with a paragraph or two larded with statistics. Don't slow your reading speed when you come to them. Then try to remember the information. You probably won't be able to. You may not even recall the general meaning the swarm of numerals was meant to convey.

Big numbers are abstract, not concrete. Encountering them, the mind pauses, reflexively trying to translate the data into something it can picture. If too many abstracts assault it simultaneously, it gives up, and the rest of the story goes unread.

The moral of all this ought to be apparent, but too many of us remain far too dependent on a gross excess of statistics and expert testimony. It's time to jettison some of the numbers and the more gaseous effusions of the experts, replacing them with fresh factual information and the direct illustrations from life that hammer stories into the reader's memory.

These principles are most important in the reporting and writing stages of storytelling, but they must be considered in idea selection too. If a reporter has several ideas of roughly equal importance and topicality beginning to germinate, he should develop first those with most potential for introducing highinterest elements. And he should shy away from those likely to rely on statistics and a lot of gabble by experts.

He should prize above all those ideas with action in them. Something is happening, it is having specific effects, and perhaps a counter-action is under way. There is no substitute for such built-in movement in a story, and ideas centering on action are more likely to succeed than analytical thumbsuckers or static profiles. A reporter must do a superior job to make the analytical story interesting, but an idea with action in it can cover some sins of execution—especially if a relevant dog is present, too.