Sad but
true: Secrets to writing good narrative
Jason Hidalgo |
By Jason Hidalgo
Reporter
Reno Gazette-Journal
Posted: May 13, 2003
Related article: Narrative tip sheet
Hi, my name is Jason, and I’m a mawk.
My problem started out slowly. A teary source here. A
sob story there.
But then it began to take hold of me, to dragging me deeper
and deeper into the sad, sappy recesses.
Soon I was combing my source list and working the phones
for the saddest, most mawkish story I could get.
I wanted angst. I wanted conflict. I wanted a story that
would make the Book of Job look like "Pee Wee’s
Big Adventure."
But I digress.
As a health reporter, not only am I privy to enough health
information to make someone a hypochondriac. (You know
you’ve reached your limit when you consider drinking
cranberry juice to quell fears about your uterus, and you’re
a guy.) But I also have no shortage of potential sources
calling the newspaper to spill the details of their personal
tragedies.
Some actually have stories worth telling.
Therein lies the problem. How do you convey the emotion
in those stories without losing objectivity? Without writing
one of those tear-jerking sagas that have no real substance
or meaning? Without writing mawkish stories?
Frankly, I hadn’t even been aware of my mawkish tendencies.
I took calls. I wrote stories. I was versatile. But then
the sad, sappy truth dawned on me when I attended the Nieman
Foundation Conference on Narrative Journalism.
There was Roy Peter Clark from The Poynter Institute in
his snazzy Hawaiian shirt, telling us about the narrative
yet mawkish qualities of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." (To
summarize, you have a complication via the main character’s
red nose, leading to adversity. Then you get the payoff
when the character overcomes adversity at the end, or something
like that.)
I was crushed.
I thought to myself, "Could it be? All this time,
I’ve actually been writing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer Gets a Torn Ligament Before his Olympic Bid?’ Or ‘Rudolph
Suffers a Myocardial Infarction?’"
Oh no, I’m a mawk!
Then an interesting thing happened: Clark confessed to
being a mawk as well.
One by one, several of the guest speakers stood up and
confessed that they, too, were mawks. It was like an intervention
featuring some of the best writers in the country.
I was ecstatic. There’s hope for me yet, I thought.
Finally, the Nieman Foundation’s Mark Kramer stepped
in with a reality check on the difference between mawkish
writing and well-done narrative.
It’s not that emotional stories are bad, he said.
But they become bad when they are overly sentimental while
being devoid of substance and meaning -- signs of shoddy
reporting.
So the moral of this story is twofold. First, your best
defense against becoming a mawk is good reporting. Second, "Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is jolly good reading.
"Well jeez, Jason," some of you probably are
saying. "That’s great and all. But what’s
the point of this long-winded sermon just to convey that
tiny lesson at the end? Just what kind of a reporter are
you?"
I guess the answer would be "a bad one."
But you, on the other hand, don’t have to be.
Jason Hidalgo, a 1995 Scholar at The Virginian-Pilot in
Norfolk, covers health for the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal
and writes the monthly column "A Guy’s Life." Reach
him at JHidalgo@rgj.com.
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