Editor’s Corner
March 20, 2009
“Narrative” Is Not a Synonym for “Long”
By
Constance Hale
The dictionary defines narrative as just “a narrated account, a story.” In truth, even a single well-crafted sentence is a narrative, its noun giving it a subject and its verb providing not just a “predicate,” but a predicament, a little drama. Yet, we are always surprised at how few elegantly crafted short narratives are submitted to us for consideration.
And so we are excited when we read a piece like Charlie LeDuff’s “Frozen in Indifference,” published in The Detroit News. One of our editors called it “unashamedly short,” another described it as an “act of bravery.” What impressed us was that LeDuff saw a moment of decay, saw what it revealed—the difficulty of getting anyone in the city to pay attention to a dead body—and disciplined himself to write just about that. He kept his focus pointed and poignant.
As a reminder of how much can be poignantly packed into how little space, we are featuring as Another Good Read a piece from the Modern Love column in the Sunday Style section of The New York Times. “A Student of Intimacy, Step by Step” is just one example of the personal-essay pearls that appear there weekly.
The art of the concise narrative will be the subject of several panel discussions and workshops at this year’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which opens at the Sheraton Boston the day this column goes online. For those eager to learn more from the reporters, editors, bloggers, and videographers who will tackle this and many other subjects, tapes of each session will be available after the conference from Cambridge Transcriptions.
Enjoy!
—Constance Hale