How do you make a story great? - tips for editors - Editorial

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 15, 1994 by Leonard Witt

It's easy: Be a great editor. If you're not sure how, start with the 12 steps outlined here - and plan on being a star.

You, as an editor, can make stories great - or at least you can help writers make them great. But to do so, you must be proactive from the moment a story idea is conceived. To wait until stories arrive on your desk means you win most often be talking damage control - not greatness. There's nothing mystical about fostering greatness. It's a logical process that starts at the beginning and works its way through to a finished product. The essential steps are as follows:

Find a great idea. Mediocre ideas do not make great stories. So your first job is to keep abreast of everything that interests your audience. Read, talk to experts, make connections, check the mailbag, go through the slush pile. When a strong idea comes along, you will know it from the excitement it generates in you and among your staff.

Test the idea. Few of us have the money, resources or time to assign stories that might go nowhere. So when an idea strikes, you must test it. Do research and get as much background information as possible. With computer resources like Internet, you have the whole world of research at your fingertips. Even with a medium-size budget, you can get online with services like Viewtext or Datatimes, which will plug you into dozens of newspapers and magazines.

Today, many public libraries have local newspapers on CD-ROM. With CD-ROMs, you will be able to do a fairly complete search in less than an hour. And then you can download your finds onto a disk - all for free. And don't forget public relations agencies and agents. They are often happy to supply recent background articles relating to their clients.

If you are too busy to do this preliminary work, hire a local researcher to do it for you usually at a cost of $10 to $15 an hour). The research will help you define the story. Plus, it will give you a mental picture of how it might unfold in the writing.

Define the story. Mentally, place your story idea on a continuum. That continuum starts with a straightforward news story on one end, moves to a features treatment in the middle, and at the far end becomes full-blown literary journalism complete with scene setting, character development and the other fiction techniques often applied to the best nonfiction writing.

Where does your story fit? Is it going to be primarily a reported story, where facts alone will make it great? Or will it rely on stylistic writing? At my magazine, Minnesota Monthly, a great story for us is one that combines both reporting and style in literary nonfiction. Because we are a general-interest magazine, that makes sense for us. You have to decide what works for you.

Decide on the focus. Now that you have done your research and have a sense of the story's possibilities, give the story a focus. You should be able to define it in one sentence. I find that developing a working title for the story helps a lot. For example, a year after a boy was abducted in Minnesota, we decided to do a first-anniversary article on the abduction. The story could have gone in any of a hundred directions. But I knew, after doing the research, that the real story was about the boy's mother. The working title, "Patty Wetterling's Year without Jacob," told me and the writer exactly what the story was about.

Although stories may change in the reporting and writing, you will reduce the risk of failure by having a sense of where the story is going well before the actual writing begins.

Decide on a length. Next, determine a length. Part of this decision is mechanical - it depends on your page count and imposition. The other part is organic, a gut feeling based on experience. Take the organic measure tempered by the practical restraints, throw in the writing style - and you come up with an approximate length. It is a good starting point - and the writer will need a starting point.

Choose the best writer. By now, you will have a fairly clear image of what this story will look like and how you want it to read. The problem is, you are not going to write it. Someone else is. So how do you know you have the right person to do it? Study each prospect's clips. In my experience, what a writer has done in the past is an almost 100 percent predictor of what he or she is going to do in the future. If the clips indicate that a person is a reporter without much style, don't expect a story that is on the feature or literary journalism end of the continuum. If a writer is a beautiful stylist but hasn't shown an inclination to do much reporting, don't assign a story that requires reporting. To ask a writer to do a story without ever seeing his or her clips is asking for trouble.

Be specific in your assignment. Because you have done the research, you probably know more about the story's subject matter than the writer does. Take the time to write an in-depth description of how you see the story developing and what its elements might be. Tell the writer this is just a working outline and will, of course, be modified during his or her reporting and writing.