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The Master Narrative

this place, this time

From the post from Roy Peter Clark at the bottom of the frog and the cheese thread: "I'm wondering if there might be a test we could apply to these kinds of stories, a kind of 'master narrative' test. In other words, if there were a hundred little narratives like this one in the paper, what would be the larger picture we would get of this place, this time?

"The cool feature obits running in the Times might provide an example. Each obit might cast a little light on this or on that, but 100 of them tell a larger story, that each life is important, that not only bigshots should get prominent obits, that the community is glued together by lives such as these."

Just recently I started this "Night" feature and another running feature called "Their own words." I've said to some around here in Tampa Bay that we won't really know how well they work or even IF they work until at least a year or so in. The goal is not necessarily to write winners each and every time but to be able to have a body of work 12, 18, 24 months from now that put together and over time tells the people of Pasco County something about where and when and how they live. Roy's "master narrative."

Let's talk about this.

Comments

Re: The Master Narrative

Just to clarify: When I say let's talk about this, I don't mean "Night" and "Their own words" -- rather, the idea of the "master narrative," and how to make it work in newspapers.

Re: The Master Narrative

When I worked at The Burlington Free Press, we did a "Day In The Life" special section for several towns. These sections took small slices of life -- stories that didn't necessarily have a news hook -- and displayed them throughout the section. We wrote a main story that talked about what that town is, but really we tried to capture the character of these places through the vignettes.

We worked hard to make sure we represented as many facets of the town as we could. (Here's an example: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/specialnews/daylife/old/mainbar.htm) It included a main bar and lots of little vignettes and photos with extended cutlines.

We had positive reactions from folks around town. It was different and something you didn't expect to see in the newspaper. A true documentation of the ho-hum of life.

I'm not naive: I know the paper did it as an advertising initiative, as part of Gannett's plan to expand its advertiser base. But we ignored that and tried to produce something worthwhile.

Can these be woven in on a daily basis to give you a regular reminder of what everyday folks are up to? I don't know. Personally, I haven't been a huge fan of these non-news narratives. But maybe it is a part of our duty to be the mirror held up to the community at large.

Re: The Master Narrative

At Mizzou, we once did this with the Twilight Festival: 14 reporters, 42 vignettes, pick the best 20 or something and run them on the front.

It was an interesting idea, something I think the boss came up with on the fly. It got a mixed reaction -- "what, exactly, is the point of this?" -- but the people that took it as an unusual approach to writing and reporting got something out of it, I think.

The lesson was, it's more about getting the audience used to the concept than the actual writing and reporting; once the uneasiness wears off, I think people will take to it.

Re: The Master Narrative

I think this works best in a relatively short amount of time and space. You might get a few people reading a series through a year or more, and some of those people may put together the larger puzzle, but a lot of people aren't going to get it.
I thought Kruse's coverage of a fair a while back gave you that bigger picture of the fair and community that weaves in and out of it. The projects described by Andy and Nigel would do that too because of, I think, the relatively limited scope.
Maybe a series header with a short editors note is enough to hold it all together. I don't know. There has to be something to let people know to keep track and look for something larger.

Re: The Master Narrative

And I agree with Doyle. Anything like this needs a clear ongoing tag at the top. So the reader can say: Oh, right, this is one of those things.

Re: The Master Narrative

I'm getting started on something that I think fits Roy's description. I initially saw it as a cool way to profile the whole justice system one person at a time. It's a series of day-in-the-life pieces, probably to run weekly, on people involved in crime. Cops, prosecutors, victims, criminals, etc. Each piece will focus on one person's day, a typical day, told as a narrative. Over time, it should provide a larger picture of what's going on in the courts and such here. I hope.

Re: The Master Narrative

"When you read my pal Jeff Klinkenberg, for example, and take his body of work on Florida, it amounts to this larger story: "Old Florida was a garden of Eden destroyed by technology, tourism, and over-development.""

I think you're saying this larger-story approach is a good thing?
If so, I agree.
It helps when approaching any beat, I think, to have a "master narrative" in mind. It's the framework on which you hang all the daily stuff. The context that informs everything you write. It can usually even be boiled down to one of those squishy, one-word themes we love so much: Hope. Decay. Hubris. Growth.
You don't always need to include the "context graf," I think, and certainly not the bullet-point list of every 2007 homicide in Montgomery. Better, I think, to approach those homicide stories with a framework in mind about what they mean (respecting, of course, that they're not all going to fit neatly in that framework), and use the details and scenes to get that sense across, story by story, until you've built that master narrative.
But then I'm not sure that's what Kruse was talking about when he started this thread, so perhaps I'm a little mixed up too.

Re: The Master Narrative

You don't have to figure out what the master narrative is, you just have to embrace the idea that you're a part of recording it. And we do that by giving everything we write elements of consistency, be it through characters or sense of place.

Think of it like chapters in a loose and long book. Or song on an album.

Mike Levine talked about this. Covering a community and making your dispatches like chapters. This happened, then this happened, then this happened, story to story to story.

Hell of a challenge, but worth keeping in mind.

Re: The Master Narrative

And I disagree that it needs anything to identify it at the top. This can be true for beat coverage, for crime, for whatever. The tag should be the dateline.

Think Steve Israel. Pete Hamill. Think Breslin. Dan Barry. Klink, like Roy said.

Every story is a new chapter.

Re: The Master Narrative

Yesterday evening I stopped at my Publix and got some groceries. The chubby teen girl at the register was dragging my stuff across the belt when her ring got caught on something and she grimaced and pulled up and looked at her finger. There was a red mark. But then the grimace turned into a smile, and she looked at the bagger, also a chubby teen girl, and she said: "I've been playing a lot of DDR and I'm losing weight. My ring is too big."

Now to me that told me more about the time and place in which I live than most any story about a crime or a hurricane or whatever.

But should that moment in my Publix have been in this morning's newspaper?

Re: The Master Narrative

Ben is right, and it sounds like the Klinkenberg/Fla. stories Roy Peter Clark brought up are a good example, too. I used to think, and pretty much still do, that every story I was writing was just a continuation of the last one I did, with a new character, a change of setting. I was always a g.a. reporter. The strange, unarticulated feeling that it all went together was what made it possible to do some of those stories. It was what I guess you're calling a master narrative. Without knowing it, I was talking myself into a sensibility. I was working on things like tone, context, meaning and most of all voice -- long before I sat in a writing workshop and had these things named and discussed for me.

I think master narrative is the only way to really discover Mister Narrator. (Or Ms.)

I never told anyone (certainly not my editors) that each story was, to my mind, part of a larger deal. I don't think it mattered, and if it had, there's a small chance they might have wanted to label it, format it, run it every Friday at 735 words (no more, no less, the design desk requests). That would have been dreary. Then the master narrative would just be a "quirky" column.

The cashier in Publix: That to me is like one of those characters who pop up in a longer story about someone/something else -- a story about the grocery store in the wee hours, or a longer story about someone and this is the scene where they go grocery shopping, and the cashier says something that, in its odd way, resonates with your main character, or just tells the reader more about the place and the people. Your eyes are always alert to these moments -- not because each distinctly belongs in tomorrow's newspaper. I think it's more like your mind is attuned to those things because every story can be enhanced by smaller, revealing moments like that.

Re: The Master Narrative

I recently offered a note to the editor about roles and rhythms at our paper.
"This town is my town," it said.
Every word I write or edit is a color in a portrait of this town, the things we sense, the words and moments. Most folks miss these things; they don't let those words and moments linger in their head long enough to make a "master narrative" themselves. That's where we come in.
So then when I write, I write for the people who believe the same: This is my town. And in an ink-smudged and cosmic way, every word on A1 is connected to every word on B3 and D8. And after 18 months, that portrait becomes a little more complete, complex and layered.

Re: The Master Narrative

Thoughts on slice-of-life stories …

A story at its most basic level must move. To be a story, that string of verbs has to pick the reader up in one place and put him down some place else. There are lots of ways to do this: Information – I started not knowing, and now I know. Emotional – you moved me. Narrative – you took me on a journey. Insight – I see the world differently now. Something at stake – I didn’t care, now I do. Any one of these will work, get them all in and you will go home singing that day. But somehow a story, to be a story, has to move.

Active verbs are good, but they don’t guarantee movement. Sometimes we can make readers feel like they are sprinting when really they are just running in place. This tends to piss readers off.

Kruse, I think what your readers found missing in the frog story was movement. Breaking news moves of its own accord, as a writer you just have to get out of the way. But those quieter moments sometimes need a stronger guide, or narrator, to grab the reader’s hand and pull them along.

Re: The Master Narrative

That moment was not pedestrian.

Re: The Master Narrative

So let's see the braid story, C. Can you post it?

Re: The Master Narrative

I know I am a dork, but I am not sure how to post from the TU archives. I am leaving town for three days. I will try and figure it out when I get back.

btw, now that it is late and I'm getting giddy, I just remembered a conversation with Chris Mele about movement in stories. He told me I made stories sound like bodily functions.

Re: The Master Narrative

I love this discussion, and I'm moved to post here for the first time because this is something I've actually been thinking about a great deal lately, and I think Hank nails it perfectly when he writes about imagining that each story is really a continuation of his last.

It hit me recently that while I want each story I write to stand on its own, to feel complete in its own way, I also want them all together to add up to something more. It's like each piece should carry an unspoken promise to the reader (and to myself): This is actually part of a much larger story that will continue to reveal itself every time I write.

It seems to me that at the end of the year, I should be able to gather everything I've written, and even if they're about scattered, seemingly unrelated subjects, they should read like an intentional collection of work. Like intersecting short stories.

I think too often we shoot for that single fabulous, perfect story. Or we fret and ache over each story in isolation. When really, we should be thinking about how to make our work feel like it is always moving the reader along toward something bigger.

Re: The Master Narrative

Since when does the banal moment become news?

One can always try to justify turning a grocery store scene into a news story, but one runs the risk of a "frog doesn't eat cheese" story if we try too hard to force a grocery store moment.

Re: The Master Narrative

The "banal moment" becomes news when you haven't read it before. But of course that's the job of the writer, isn't it? to write it in such a way that you haven't read before.

Re: The Master Narrative

Figuring out our Master Narrative in advance runs two risks: Bending the story to fit the MN. (Reporter to editor: “I think I’ll go out an find me an old timer whose life’s gone to hell because of all this technology!”) Or laying out an MN that’s so broad it doesn’t really mean anything. (Reporter to editor: “Boy, Florida has really gone to hell, hasn’t it? I’m going out to report that story.”)
The alternative, of course, is to report the issue, the MN, and pray that somewhere along the line some good narratives will turn up, which happens more often than you’d expect. (Reporter to editor: “I was covering the Florida Anti-Tourist League, and I found this old coot who shoots tourists on sight!”)
We journalists perhaps have an advantage over fiction writers, here, in that we may have some idea of our MN going in. (Often it’s called ”The News.”) But the fictioner has an advantage over us in that he or she is more open to surprise, to things that hijack the narrative off in unexpected directions. (Reporter to editor: “Hey, I found a Seminole Indian who’s made a zillion dollars off tourists! And he’s used it to discover a technology that cures cancer!”)
The trick, then, is maintain the freshness and openness of the writer who doesn’t have a Master Narrative, or doesn’t know she has one, even though she does have one. There are ways to do this. If you discover a MN in your work, pretend it isn’t there. Write to the contrary. Put yourself in circumstances where your MN is almost certainly not true. Or irrelevant. Write a series of short narratives in which immigrants fail miserably. Abortion foes are pillars of wisdom. The institution was right, the individual a noxious crank. Let the the little narratives unshape the big one.
After all that, I suspect, any notion of a Master Narrative will fuzz out and disappear. All that will be left will be the writer’s sensibility. And the news.
Ezra Pound said literature is news that remains fresh.

Re: The Master Narrative

Somewhere in this discussion we should mention Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell.

Re: The Master Narrative

To respond to Pat from a few comments up:

Okay.

The moment in Publix could be the start to a story. It could be the end to a story. It could be a scene in the middle of a story. It might even be able to be -- maybe? -- the story in and of itself.

At the very least it's a memorable little part in one of those too-tidy trend stories in which the reader is told that the kids these days are playing this game called DDR and -- get this -- some of them are losing weight because of it. And also, and this just in, there's this thing called Wii, and we'll be sure to get to that story about two days after most of the kids have moved on to something else.

That's the easy, "newsy" way to use that moment in Publix.

A slightly harder way: Tell the girl's story on a tight line and in a tight frame. She's your character. Your only character. Start her fat, show her sad, have her struggle. Then she loses the weight playing DDR. Then she catches her ring on that belt that day in Publix. Perfect: She can tell somebody she knows -- the same-aged bagger -- that she's lost weight, and she can have somebody she doesn't -- me -- hear it. Her finger hurts. But she feels good. The end.

Or ...

What if you just threw it out there?

Here it is:

Yesterday evening I stopped at my Publix and got some groceries. The chubby teen girl at the register was dragging my stuff across the belt when her ring got caught on something and she grimaced and pulled up and looked at her finger. There was a red mark. But then the grimace turned into a smile, and she looked at the bagger, also a chubby teen girl, and she said: "I've been playing a lot of DDR and I'm losing weight. My ring is too big."

That's 86 words.

What if you ran that? Just like that.

You're saying to the reader: There's meaning in here. You might see it one way or you might see it another or you might wonder what the hell that was. That's okay. It's up to you to take what -- if anything -- you want from it.

Re: The Master Narrative

Is that prose? Or poetry? Or prose poetry ...

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_poetry)?

Whatever it is ... I like it.

And I'd pay good money to read a batch of it every morning ... whether or not it's on newsprint.

Re: The Master Narrative

Collectively, without much narrative guidance, those moments may make up a character in the middle of a story, like this one from Kruse, which ran on Thursday.

Re: The Master Narrative

just a friendly note: we kinda let ben montgomery choose the stories that go up. It's kind of the beauty of the site: one man who loves narrative ( or his designees) choosing what to read and think about.
ben works for the st. petersburg times in fl. his e-mail is a google news search away if you want to buzz him about something you'd like to see up here.
cheers.

Re: The Master Narrative

Thanks for posting, Candace.

You're right -- this is great material. It's easy to see why you chose to tell this story.

Here's something to think about regarding stories like these. This stuff happened a long time ago. You're reconstructing the scene. What that means is that you want to do whatever you possibly can to put me -- the reader -- on the boat with Mr. Cox.

I need as many sensory details as you can muster: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Through the right kind of interviewing, you can get some of them from Mr. Cox. You can get others through historical research into what it was like to be on one of those boats.

More importantly, though, I need you not to break in with quotations. If it was something he said at the time, great. Keep it. That heightens the illusion of being there. But something he's saying now, about what happened then, well, that jerks me out of whatever illusion you've managed to create.

It's OK to quote him. Just don't drop a present quote in the middle of a past scene.

Be encouraged. We're all trying to master new parts of the craft. E-mail me if you want to talk more about this.

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