A writer has a great idea they want to explore. They’ve done the research, the interviews, and possibly some writing. But what about the vivid scenes that readers remember the most?
Scenes are essential for any great narrative. Seasoned writers have different methods of how to report and write them — but all of them involve careful planning, presence, interviewing, and detail-gathering.
From the Nieman Storyboard archives, here are eight acclaimed journalists sharing their techniques on reporting and writing their most memorable scenes.
In the second installment of a four-part series on narrative, Lauren Kessler — author of 15 books and educator at the University of Washington — delves into her 2007 piece for the Los Angeles Times, “The End in Two Acts.” She recounts using three different methods to report scenes from the lives of two terminally ill men.
Whether it's witnessing a moment directly, or meticulously asking the right questions to recreate a scene, a journalist needs to have every detail at their disposal, even when it isn’t all used. Kessler elaborates:
“Scenes are most often a mix of description (describing the setting, the character or characters), narration (the telling of what happens) and exposition (explaining what might be necessary to help readers understand). The trick — and of course, it is not a trick — is to choose and use just what is needed to paint a picture and pull readers into the moment. Too little and the picture is fuzzy or incomplete or, worse, confusing. Too much and the reader is overwhelmed, not knowing where to look, what to pay attention to or, worse, bored.”
Kim Cross, a New York Times bestselling author, Nieman Storyboard contributor, and editor-at-large for the Sunday Long Read, is obsessed with story structure and cinematic scenes. One way she gets them is through in-depth interviews.
Interviewing for scene comes near the end of her process. She explains:
“At this phase of the process, the questions get very granular. I start interrupting and saying, Wait. Let’s back up. Do you mean…? As the character is speaking, I’m constantly pressing for more specificity. More detail. The more concrete the detail, the more crisp the image in the reader’s mind.”
Cross wants to get into the mind of her subject and try to see what they see in a certain moment. She wants their internal dialogue. She coaxes out strong details. She asks them to provide photos or draw something from memory. She wants to see a scene just as vividly as her subject did.
Mary Melton is an award-winning writer and editor who in 2009 profiled famed architecture photographer Julius Shulman for Los Angeles magazine. She took a unique approach chronicling Shulman in 36 exposures, or snapshots — an ode to the subject’s illustrious photography career.
Melton shares how she organized this story and other longform stories she wrote:
“For larger pieces I strictly abide by the index-card method. After I’m done reporting I start jotting down every scene I’ve got, every description I have, every person I’ve interviewed, every point I want to make, onto a series of cards and lay them out on the floor. Which pieces support one another? What’s the right rhythm of long and short? How does the puzzle fit together? I move them around a lot during the planning process until they feel right and then go at the writing. It makes it so much more manageable. So it’s not an outline, per se, but a moveable feast of vignettes that together need to make a meal.”
Mark Kramer — co-editor of the Nieman Foundation book, “Telling True Stories” — gave advice in his 2005 piece on how to craft a compelling narrative, from idea to final draft. He focuses on “sensory reporting” to make the scene come to life:
“Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste will, if you record details of these things, allow you to set strong scenes. The biggest basic mistake that beginning narrative writers, and even fairly accomplished writers, make is setting scenes too casually. You have to set a scene so the reader gets a feeling of volume, space, dimension and has sensory experience there. You don’t need to report on measurements and details in the detail that would be required if you were writing for Scene Diorama magazine. Nobody is interested in building a diorama of the scenes, but everybody wants to know what it feels like to be there.”
Former Minnesota Star Tribune book editor Laurie Hertzel compiled snippets from several narratives to illustrate a well-crafted scene. But she noted that, while we can “write with a camera angle,” journalists have something in their toolbox that TV and movie directors don’t: summary.
“It’s useful to know the structural difference, so you can decide if something is worthy of a scene or if it can be dispatched in summary. A shorthand way to look at the difference between scene and summary is to think of the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘telling.’ You tell in summary. You show in scene.”
Summaries are shorter than scenes but can be effective to tell the reader background information that they need to know but don’t need to read about in detail. Hertzel cautioned narrative writers to look over their work to see if their stories are primarily summary or scene. It’s good to have a mix of both.
“Your job is to figure out when to use one device and when to use the other. In narrative, you’ll work primarily in scene. But you still have to be judicious. One thing I tell writers is, ‘Think of stepping stones rather than a sidewalk. The reader will follow you. You don’t have to show them every step of the way.’”
In this conversation and annotation, Jon Franklin tells Paige Williams how he reported and wrote his 1978 narrative for the Baltimore Evening Sun, about a brain surgeon's operation on a 57-year-old woman with an aneurysm. The story won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and Franklin authored one of the essential books on narrative, “Writing for Story.”
Franklin only spent about 40 minutes with the woman, who described the aneurysm as a “monster.” It becomes its own character in the story. Here’s what Franklin said about that choice:
“Anthropomorphizing things—we do it. It’s a human trait. It’s not necessarily a super idea, but we believe in agencies. If there’s a lightning bolt, somebody must have thrown it, which is where you get Thor. When a tree falls, the tree god knocked it down. It’s very deep in our mind … The fact is, we take life personally. You might as well not deny it. And when you deny it, I think we get a skewed picture of what the world was like. And in that respect journalism is guilty as charged—the definition of news is what happens in front of the reporter.”
What if you weren’t at the place of a scene you want to include in your story — or weren’t even born before it happened? Adam Hochschild gives an example of how he was able to reconstruct scenes from the antislavery movement that occurred more than 250 years ago, in his 2005 book, “Bury the Chains.”
Specifically, he talks about the formation of the first antislavery committee in London on May 22, 1787, which happened in a Quaker bookstore and printing shop in a small courtyard called George Yard. He wanted to “evoke this moment, time and place, and trying to describe what the scene was like.” Here’s what he did:
“We know what happened at the meeting, because we have minutes that were taken, but we don’t have a description of the scene. However, there are building blocks that you can use to put together a scene like that. I spent a lot of time scanning newspapers of the time. I began to see advertisements for other businesses in George Yard. There was a pub there. I saw an ad from a fellow who gave dancing and fencing lessons. These were some of the things that took place right in this little courtyard where the printing shop was. I could not find a description of this particular printing shop, but there is a vast amount of material on what 18th-century British printing shops looked like – and also a great many paintings and drawings. I spent some time studying books on the history of printing.”
Walt Harrington, the beloved writing coach and former reporter for The Washington Post Magazine, offers advice on gathering dialogue, embedding yourself in the subject’s life, and recording the “interior monologue” of the subject to best describe how they feel in certain moments.
At the heart of any scene or reporting, Harrington reminds us of the ultimate goal:
“Always being aware that no matter how artful our stories may be, how specific they are to the lives of our subjects, they are primarily meant to enlighten, caution, criticize or inspire, and always resonate, in the lives of readers. The eternal verities of love, hate, fear, ambition, dedication, compassion are still our bread and butter. Always remember: Scene, detail and narrative bring a story to life, while theme and meaning imbue it with a soul.”
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Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.
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