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Learn strategies for finding a focus and framing your story to create unity and meaning in your writing. Explore different pronouns and tense choices to set the tone for your narrative.
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Pulling it together Frames and focus
Facing the word pile • Most writers admit the hardest part of getting up an article is the beginning. • We are faced with that jumble: the interview notes, the recordings, the emails, the Web searches, the ideas we scrawled to ourselves or the memories we wrote out. • The longer the story, the greater the pile that needs sorting. • But that doesn’t mean a short story is always easy.
The hook • Some authors call the sorting procedure “finding a focus.” • In the media world, we more often just call it “finding a hook,” or “finding an angle.”
The point • But we’ve already thought about this, when we considered our personal essays. • We asked, what’s the point the author wants to make?
Meaning • Perhaps when we are constructing a simple news story it’s not so hard to find a “meaning.” • The meaning, the angle, is based on news values we’ve learned probably several times: Timeliness, proximity, conflict, prominence, etc.
News values and meaning • News values give us a shorthand to find meaning. That’s good if we’re against a deadline. • But when we move away from hard news stories, and we collect more notes or thoughts for longer stories, sometimes that meaning isn’t so obvious anymore.
Focus through framing • It’s certainly possible to sit in front of the blank screen with your notes and thoughts piled around you, and squeeze out something that may make a focus. • But here’s another way: decide more mechanically how you will frame, or unify, your story.
Framing your story One way to approach this is to think of writing as a problem. • What is the problem? • How will you solve the problem? • Perhaps you’ll begin by choosing a direction toward a solution. I call this your story frame.
Pronouns • To do this, I ask myself not what the story is about, but how the story ought to proceed. For example, how will I address the reader? • Will I write in the first person, using the word I? • Or will I write in the third person, using the word he/she? • Maybe, less commonly, I’ll write in the second person, using the word you.
First person: a participant • Media writers tend to avoid using the word “I,” but if you’re moving out of the hard news genre where it’s (supposedly) forbidden, you do see a lot of it: Overcome by a wave of nostalgia on the last day of my 10th reunion at Smith College, I decided to have just one look at my old house, Talbot. Walking up to the front porch past the bicycles, past the swing and into ‘fussers,’ a sitting room named for the old-fashioned term ‘fussing,’ or necking, I was astonished to feel my eyes mist over a bit.
Third person: an observer • We actually do tend to presume this is the pronoun to use when we’re considering personal essays or memoirs. But we don’t have to. This is actually Charles who is writing: Early in 1989, when he was 7, Charles Simpson, Jr., was taken by his father to the White House to pay a farewell call on outgoing President Reagan. It was a springlike day. He asked his father if the moving men would be around. No, his father told him, when a President moves out, all he takes is his wardrobe.
Third person • But normally we use the third person (he, she, they, one) for less personal narrations. Sometimes we can call on it for amusing effect: Belly dancers in the British Embassy under the patronage of Lady Ramsbotham have danced right sweetly all week long. One is glad one went. One would not have dreamed, for that matter, of missing it. And yet, like so many things that seem at first to lie before us like a land of dreams, it was not quite what one thought it would be.
Second person: an address • Other times a writer can find a voice writing in the second person as if he or she were chatting. Sports writers sometimes like to use this: You knew this had to be the most spine-tingling clash of giants you’d ever seen from a pressbox seat, and you weren’t just some green kid who was still wet behind the ears.
Unity: consistency of pronoun • The choice of pronoun is yours, unless you are writing hard news stories. • Deciding which pronoun to use helps me to settle on a tone for the story. Most of the time the third person is going to be more formal. The second person seems less formal.
Tense • In editing a remind students to pay attention to tense in attributions, as they are commonly inconsistent. • Either choose the present tense (he says) or the past tense (he said), and stick to it.
Past tense • In our writing, too, we need to choose one tense, and avoid switching from paragraph to paragraph. Past tense is most common. Shawn was much younger than Paul, by about 17 years, and they didn’t mix socially. But their professional life together was something that Shawn obviously cherished, although he was not about to dwell on that.
Present tense • Present tense suggests a bit more informal approach. Ruby wanders back past the flower arrangement of cotton balls and points out an antique. She shows off Cornelia’s silver and china and dining-room furniture which she is keeping for her while Cornelia’s in the governor’s mansion. “I’m not too good at interior decoratin’ but Cornelia’s real good. These are her real fancy plates. Ah used ’em one night and she like to have killed me.”
Tenses • Of course, choosing past or present means that you’ll use this as the standard. It doesn’t mean you won’t use other tenses when necessary: When I texted my boyfriend from the Fargo airport I realized that if I had emailed to tell him I would be coming he would have waited for me.
Mood • Are you going to be chatty and informal? • Or are you going to establish a certain level of formality for establish a sense of mood for a more serious story? • There is no rule except this one: don’t mix moods.
Mixing moods • Perhaps the writer is telling us about writing about his study abroad experience. He begins informally: I had always wanted to visit London. One day I found myself looking at a poster in the union and thought, “I’m going!” • The writer continues by describing a funny story of his plane seat next to a professional boxer, and his fumbling with his passport. We’re pumped for an amusing story!
Mixed moods • But then he turns into a city travel website: London is the political, economic and cultural capital of Britain. Visitors can see the Queen’s official residence at Buckingham Palace and tour the Houses of Parliament, historic home of the UK government. • Then we turn back to the original mood, an informal description of his experiences at Leicester Square: We were hopping around dodging pigeon droppings when I spotted something purple and green out of the corner of my eye. A toothbrush-haired punk rocker! I didn’t know they still existed!
Mixed moods • Then it’s off on a new mood, standard guidebook: To enter London it is necessary to have a valid passport but no visa is required for American citizens. Immunization is not required as of this writing. • Nothing is wrong with any of these moods, but the writer needs to decide what kind of story he or she is going to write.
Questions • Here are some questions you can ask to help establish your story approach: • How am I going to address the reader? Am I a reporter? Provider of factual information? Friend or confidant? Just plain folk? • What pronoun and tense will I use to support this? • What attitude do I want to portray: Am I detached or involved? Objective or judgmental? Serious or funny? Ironic or earnest?
How much to cover • How much am I going to cover? • Perhaps we would like to believe our story is going to cover it all, and the reader would go away absolutely satisfied. But I suspect that’s not going to be true. Decide what edge of that big pie you’re going to slice off, do your best on it, and end.
The one point • And lastly, ask yourself, what is the one point I really want to make? • Writing coaches suggest that every writer of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought he didn’t have before. • Not two, not five. Just one.
Focus And in considering that one point we get back to the idea of focus, the “hook” of the story. Aspects to consider as a way to find focus: • What question launched your project? • What’s the conflict? • What is the most important thing you learned? • What would make a good title and subtitle?
Tweet • I suggest one other way to help us find focus: the tweet. • In (about) 140 characters, describe what your story is about.
And one more thing… • Okay, I’ll admit sometimes you begin to write and discover that your frame—that is, pronoun, tense, mood, hook—isn’t really what you thought it was. • Writing sometimes leads us in unanticipated directions. • That’s okay—don’t squeeze the material into your preselected frame if it doesn’t seem right. • Change the frame—and then go back to the beginning and make it consistent.
