J242 Long-form Storytelling: Profiles

Hey you. I see you. You’ve done your share of news stories and news features, maybe even some smaller magazine pieces. But now you want to level up. Maybe because you’ve got a story that’s bigger: higher stakes, more complex. Maybe because you dream of writing a deep investigative piece, or a heartbreaking human drama, or a fascinating subculture story. How do you pull these off?

Conversely, maybe you’ve stumbled on a Big Important story that matters but is also, frankly, pretty dull: full of technical background or complicated financial minutia. Let me tell you, there’s nothing more depressing than putting months of hard world into a big story and having almost nobody read past the first paragraph. So how can you make sure that doesn’t happen?

Here’s a secret. People think narrative writing is about scenes and characters, but that’s only partly true. The heart of longform is about framing and architecting your story in a way that makes the reader eager – even desperate – to keep going. Master that, and it’s like a skeleton key that unlocks great storytelling, even under the most challenging circumstances. A key that even makes it possible to write incredible, gripping stories with essentially no scenes. Hand on my heart.

Profiles in particular are an open door for exploring a vast range of subjects. What few people realize is that profiles also have a secret taxonomy that can be decoded. We’ll take a close look at how to do this, starting with the critical skill of identifying a story’s potential. (As Ira Glass once observed, “It’s true that everybody has a story to tell. But most of those stories aren’t very interesting.”) Connecting to, but remaining independent from, the person you’re writing about can also be tricky, both personally and ethically – an issue we’ll discuss as it relates to your own work.

This class will cover the core skills needed to do this kind of writing and reporting, both through your own work and by discussing and analyzing different story types to identify what makes them tick. And of course we’ll bring in awesome guests – writers from the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Cut, Wired and others – to get the dish on game-changing stories from the people who wrote them. Along the way, we’ll explore a whole range of fun and powerful techniques: voice vs. style, ledes and endings, ways to weave in moments of first-person, interviewing tricks etc.