Editor’s Corner
June 6, 2008
Going beyond the “human interest” cliché
By
Constance Hale
We at the Digest frequently receive a certain kind of submission that summons the echoes of all the city editors we’ve known. “Great human interest!” these pieces scream. “Let’s run it on A-1! Give it 60 inches.” Such stories often depict an accident victim’s painstaking recovery, a child’s heartbreaking illness and treatment, or a war veteran’s struggle for redemption. They are the equivalent of the movie-theater “tear jerker”: tragedies that hit us in the gut, whether or not they are told artfully.
Once we get over this initial reaction, we find ourselves questioning whether these “human interest” stories really are great narratives. Are the characters drawn with surprising nuance and paradox, or are they one-dimensional? Has the narrative arc been thoughtfully drawn, or is the piece a mere chronological account? Do the sentences unfold with the rhythms of complex thought, or do they move in predictable declarative bursts? Is the word-count appropriate for the story at hand, or is it just long? Does the writer find the right stance toward the material, balancing reporting, insight, and pitch-perfect tone, or do the words come off as sentimental, mawkish, treacly?
Most importantly, does the piece find the universal in the particular? Does the writer peer through a keyhole at one experience, and render it, however faithfully, through a narrow scope, or does he or she see the deeper themes implicit in the story, and then find the voice to make them explicit?
Joanna Connors’ "Beyond Rape" is the kind of story we often find ourselves hoping for. It is a classic first-person narration, in which the writer provides a unifying presence in a 20,000-word odyssey. But it is much more than a tale of personal catharsis; it is also an ambitious piece of enterprise reporting.
“I wanted to take back control of my story from the rapist,” Connors told us in an interview. Realizing she could do this by using the reporting tools she had developed on countless other stories, Connors met with the rapist’s family. She uncovered three generations of convicted sexual offenders and stories of children hung on hooks and beaten. Ultimately, Connors’s story uses her experience to thoughtfully address a panoply of social issues, from sex, race, and abuse to class, poverty, and the criminal justice system.
“The journey took me across the boundary of the two Americas, which I had only crossed as a reporter, on news stories,” she told us. “The piece turned into a story of what parents pass on to our children, and about the immense privilege of birth that we on this side of the boundary take for granted.”
Connors’ editors took a big risk, electing to devote an entire supplement to this piece, which Connors had originally envisioned as a book-length work. In the newspaper, the story was accompanied by large and evocative black and white photos. Ironically, our digital format allows us to show you only the online version. Connors’ story makes the best argument we can imagine for retaining the broadsheet as a platform for inspiring narrative journalism.
How to edit and package such ambitious stories is one of the many topics we will be tackling at the Nieman Foundation in September. Our three-day conference for editors, “Shaping Stories for the Book, the Blog, the Broadsheet, and the Blackberry,” will bring 10 top editors—including Stuart Warner, one of Connors’ mentors at The Plain Dealer —to lead talks, panels and workshops for 60 mid-career editors from around the country.
Please consider joining us. If you can’t, keep sending your stories and your comments.