News Feature v. Narrative: What's the Difference?

A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader's mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question—something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens. Newspaper narratives are also entirely true and factual in every detail.

A traditional news feature starts with an anecdote or scene, moves to a nut graph that tells the reader where the story is going and then spends the rest of the piece explaining and supporting the nut graph.

A narrative, on the other hand, lets the story unfold through character, scene and action—usually without summing up the story and telling readers what it's about. A narrative also attaches a little story (a legendary gardener can no longer go into her garden) to a big story (the cycle of life stops for no one)—it is built around theme.

Here is the opening of Lori Basheda's story on Hortense Miller, lover of plants:

Tulips drop their petals, mums fade to brown and foxtails simply blow away. Hortense Miller is ready. "Well, there's an end to everything," says the self-taught botanist. "Good God, I'm 96 years old. I ought to die. And I don't do it. I don't know what's wrong with me." But then Miller has never followed convention.

This could be the opening of either a narrative or a news feature. What happens next is crucial. In a news feature, the writer would let the reader know what is new with Hortense, something like: Miller can't go into her garden these days. Since she broke her hip while showing the garden, she uses a wheelchair.

But in a narrative, the writer withholds how the story turns out and instead goes back to the beginning:

When she realized as a child of 12 back in 1920 that animals were killed for meat, she turned vegetarian. When she later read that the world was heading toward overpopulation, she vowed never to have children. When bookshelves arrived at the St. Louis schoolhouse where she taught, she filled them with plants and bugs. And when, approaching her 50th birthday, she began searching for land on which to plant her dream garden, she settled on 2.5 acres of steep, rugged slopes descending into Boat Canyon—conditions that would have even the most daring gardener wringing her hands.

Then the writer follows the character as she encounters obstacles. In this case: having no heirs, finding ways to protect the garden after her death, setting up a fund and volunteers to take care of it, a broken leg, a fall from her walker, a bobcat eating her beloved bird, a wildfire.

The narrative needs a couple of pivotal scenes where the writer slows the action down and takes the reader somewhere—to the garden, in this case. At the moments of change (where the protagonist changes or the reader's view of her changes) the writer needs to take the reader there and show. This is the place for dialogue, description, scene-setting. Let the reader see from her action and speech what kind of person she is. Here is where it is crucial to elevate the language—use specific nouns, muscular verbs, metaphor. Let us see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, feel it.

Miller led the troops (longtime friend Marsha Bode recalls that her first day working in the garden, she watched Miller climb onto the roof to rake off leaves—at age 82) until several springs ago when she broke her leg. It happened while showing the garden, in fact. "I think it just cracked," Miller says. And before she knew it, she was eye to eye with a pot of geraniums. Now she sits in a wheelchair at her kitchen table, at once funny and philosophical. "You don't really have any choices. You get old whether you want to or not," she said.

If the writer isn't there seeing it, she needs to reconstruct the scene, from the memories of those who were there, making sure to triangulate it to make sure it is completely factual.

The end is what Miller learns from all those adversities. It's also what the reader learns about her.

She writes without bitterness about the bobcat that snatched her screaming cockatoo, Dody, while the bird, a pet of 31 years, strolled through the garden one day. Her beloved friend's feathers are displayed in a shadow box over her desk. Another essay is titled "Thanks to the Fire." It was written after the 1979 fire that scorched her hillsides. In paragraph after paragraph she counts the blessings the blaze brought to her doorstep, from new growth of never-before-seen whispering bells and lupines to her first glorious view of Boat Canyon Creek tumbling far below. The circle of life, she says, shrugging. She's ready.

Here's the whole story:

Tulips drop their petals, mums fade to brown and foxtails simply blow away. Hortense Miller is ready. "Well, there's an end to everything,'' says the self-taught botanist. "Good God, I'm 96 years old. I ought to die. And I don't do it. I don't know what's wrong with me.'' But then Miller has never followed convention. When she realized as a child of 12 back in 1920 that animals were killed for meat, she turned vegetarian. When she later read that the world was heading toward overpopulation, she vowed never to have children. When bookshelves arrived at the St. Louis schoolhouse where she taught, she filled them with plants and bugs. And when, approaching her 50th birthday, she began searching for land on which to plant her dream garden, she settled on 2.5 acres of steep, rugged slopes descending into Boat Canyon—conditions that would have even the most daring gardener wringing her hands. But it's what she has done with those slopes (1958 price tag: $20,000) that earned her a spot in the book "America's Great Private Gardens'' and magazines like Horticulture and Sunset. In a 1978 newspaper article, Miller says she moved with her husband Oscar from Chicago where he practiced law (and she attended the Art Institute of Chicago) to Laguna Beach because "I wanted to be the mother of a bougainvillea.'' Instead, she gave birth to a living, breathing Monet. Beyond her house a tangle of Burmese honeysuckle, wisteria, jasmine vines and wild roses ramble down the slopes for hundreds of feet before fading into the coastal sage scrub-covered canyon, turned velvet green with recent rains. People cross the ocean to wander her footpaths that are padded with bark and pine needles. Depending on the season, they might encounter a stand of 9-foot hollyhocks, a hillside of purple African daisies, a carpet of bacopa like tiny snowflakes. Somewhere hundreds of feet below the switchbacks, Boat Canyon Creek gurgles. Ravens caw overhead. Sage scents the air. Steps of stone and wood dot the steeper slopes. "I couldn't live without it,'' Miller says. "I'd be at a terrible loss if I didn't have plants.'' But, alas, she confides a nobler cause. Miller told a newspaper reporter decades ago that her garden is an attempt to "save a corner of the Earth. Not because I like people. Because I like the Earth.'' It's why in the '70s she gave the city the title to her property, provided it remains true to her vision of a wild garden—and pledges to keep it open for the public. Her motivation, she said at the time, was to block a "theoretical rich man'' from splitting up her property after she died and selling it off. (She has no heirs and her husband died of a long illness a few months after they moved in.) Out of the deal grew Friends of the Hortense Miller Garden. Members raise money for upkeep and volunteer time to take visitors on tours. Miller led the troops (longtime friend Marsha Bode recalls that her first day working in the garden, she watched Miller climb onto the roof to rake off leaves—at age 82) until several springs ago when she broke her leg. It happened while showing the garden, in fact. "I think it just cracked,'' Miller says. And before she knew it, she was eye to eye with a pot of geraniums. Now she sits in a wheelchair at her kitchen table, at once funny and philosophical. "You don't really have any choices. You get old whether you want to or not,'' she said. So garden enthusiasts, many she's never met, have begun arriving at her doorstep, offering to pull her weeds and dig in her dirt. When a plant puzzles them, they head back to the house holding leaves for Miller to scrutinize. Last month, Bode told Miller that wild South African irises, delicate and blue, were blooming along the path. Miller couldn't stand it and asked her caretaker to drive her to the lower gate. Leaning on a walker, she pushed up the trail a ways. Buoyed by the beauty, she decided to keep going. She made it to the foot of the California redwood she planted 40 years ago. Exhausted, she lay down on the ground. Friends were summoned to help her back to the house. "I haven't gone down the hill since then,'' she says. She finds comfort, though, at her giant picture windows. From practically any spot in the house, including her bathroom, she can see canyon hills, or gnarled tree trunks, or flowering vines or the ocean off in the distance. Not another house in sight. If it's not too cold (she is often cold these days), Miller lies on the bench swing in the shady courtyard garden of camellias and azaleas just outside her bedroom. She dozes and reads. This week it is a book about Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Miller is a writer, too. Her garden essays are part poetry, part plant appreciation (she dedicates one to the marvels of mushrooms), part journal, part botanical history of Boat Canyon (she has documented clouds of migrating butterflies and the disappearance of quail), and part philosophy. Peppered with quotes from Cleopatra to Huck Finn (she is "addicted'' to Mark Twain), they are tough on "meddling'' mankind and forgiving of nature. She writes without bitterness about the bobcat that snatched her screaming cockatoo, Dody, while the bird, a pet of 31 years, strolled through the garden one day. Her beloved friend's feathers are displayed in a shadow box over her desk. Another essay is titled "Thanks to the Fire.'' It was written after the 1979 fire that scorched her hillsides. In paragraph after paragraph she counts the blessings the blaze brought to her doorstep, from new growth of never-before-seen whispering bells and lupines to her first glorious view of Boat Canyon Creek tumbling far below. The circle of life, she says, shrugging. She's ready.