William Blundell,
author of "The Art and Craft of Feature Writing," offers these suggestions
Stage 1 Tease me, you devil. Intrigue the reader. Get the reader to invest a little time in reading the lead.
Blundell organizes stories around a main theme statement that may or may not later turn out to be the lead or the nut graph.
He says he is exasperated with writers who say they can't get anything done until they have the lead.
"They have the least organized stories."
THE LEAD
Stage 2 Tell me what you're up to. OK, enough teasing. I'm here, now what is the story really about?
This should be a simple statement to let the reader know what the story is about.
THE NUT GRAPH
Stage 3 Oh yeah?
Prove that what you've just said is true. Show me. this is about 80 percent of most stories.
This is a collection of summary-quote bits and pieces plus transition to tie them all together.
THE BODY
Stage 4 I'll buy it.
Help me remember it. Make it forceful. Put an ending on it that will nail it into my memory.
Often, the ending ties back to the beginning, but it can be an impressive quote.
THE ENDING
Anecdotal leads
Newspapers use way too many anecdotal leads, Blundell says. "We are seduced by the lead," he says.
"We have an idea that this will turn a frog of a story into a prince."
Three tests for a good anecdotal lead:
Is it simple?
Does it have relevance to the story?
Does it have intrinsic interest? It must be good by itself.
What to use instead?
Setting the stage
Organize all details from your notes. Examine each and review which will best convey what you want to stress in the story. Once you've set the scene, think of your descriptive eye as a camera that can zoom in for a tight focus, then pan back for a sweeping view of the stage.
The descriptive process
Avoid judgments. Instead of saying your subject is happy, sad, angry or stunned, try drafting a sentence that begins, "He was so angry that ..." Then, after consulting your notes and memory, complete the sentence. Nix the lead-in phrase, and you wind up with something like this... "he hurled a chair across the room and slammed his fist against the wall." That SHOWS anger. Avoid describing the physical characteristics of your setting or subject with vague modifiers. Such words as tall or short, fat or thin, for instance, will be interpreted differently by people. Strive to describe in absolute terms. This can be done in hard terms (6-feet-4, 200 pounds) or a soft approach (his head brushed the door frame as he bounced into the room).
Developing a writing style
Choose verbs carefully: Instead of "read carefully" try "scrutinize." Instead of "drank quickly" try "gulped." Instead of "walk decisively" try "stride."
Work for sounds
Instead of "complain" try "grumble, growl, squawk." Instead of talk incessantly try "jabber, yak, yammer."
Use modifiers sparingly
The words "very, really, so, truly, completely and positively" often add nothing but clutter. Instead of modifying a weak word, search for a strong, precise word. Instead of "very funny" try "hilarious." Instead of "really eager" try "avid."
Use active voice
Avoid clichés
Play with words
Take a cliché and rework it to cause the reader to do a double take. Instead of "fame and fortune," you may use "fame and misfortune."
Play with figures of speech
Use similes (verbal comparisons that use like or as), metaphors (verbal comparison, but the relationship is implied rather than stated) or personification (when you attribute human characteristics, feelings or behavior to nonhuman or inanimate objects.)
Create power with parallelism ‹ Christine flicked her long dark hair away from her face, swallowed, twitched her lips only slightly and reached with her left hand to turn the next page of her script.
Vary sentence length. Consider sentence fragments or a single word for emphasis A shorter word containing the same information as a longer word or a phrase is almost always more powerful.
Gather more than you will need in the reporting stage; writing will be easier.
Emphasizing a date
Adolph Rupp was at Kentucky, Frank McGuire at North Carolina and a 7-footer named Wilt Chamberlain was about to make Kansas a basketball threat.
The year was 1957. (Use research books to find things that happened in that year.)
Everybody liked Ike and Elvis was crooning about a hound dog, when Glenn Wilkes of Mansfield, Ga., left Brewton-Parker (Ga.) Junior College for the head coaching job at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla.
And he hasn't left yet.
(body of the story goes on about Wilkes and his coaching.)
Tie-back Ending: "I enjoy my job every bit as much now as I did when I started. . . Maybe even a little more."
Quote lead
Not considered a good way to begin; however, this is a good example of an acceptable quote lead:
"I have the worst job in the Army."
This is an example of a good quote lead because the reader asks, "What could that possibly be?"
Second paragraph to the quote lead used paralanguage (Tennessee accent) with body motion facial gesture (didn't smile):
Chaplain Col. William J. "Bill" Hughes spoke with his trademark, gentle Tennessee accent.
But he didn't smile. His new job - in the event of a ground war - will be to minister to Fort Hood familes whose loved ones have been killed in action in the Middle East.
Scene-setting lead
Note the present tense. Like a beauty pageant entrant, (original analogy) Donald Hofeditz struts his vital statistics. He curls his thumb in the waistband to show he's a size 36, down from 40. He pats his stomach where 50 pounds used to rest. And he rubs his chest about his now healthy cholesterol level of 177.
Note repetition - beginning sentence with "he" and then using "and" in the last sentence.
Hofeditz even relishes showing his "before" pictures. The pot-bellied 71-year-old in the early 1980s was unable to cut his backyard grass because of the cumbersome weight.
Anecdote
Notice specific details: Nine and a half hours before the war began, the telephone rang in Rami Zamani's small apartment in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Zamani, a 45-year-old construction engineer, lifted the receiver and heard the frightened voice of his sister, 6,000 miles away in Bagdad. Then Zamani's mother came on the line and asked her eldest son to tell her when and if the war would come. "She was crying for help, basically," says Zamani, a ruminative, full-bellied man who spent his first 25 years in Iraq before moving...
Allusion to literary or artistic work
At first look, Paula Greif appears to be lifted out of a sappy Walter Keane painting, all large eyes and long dark hair, with the diminuitive bone structure of a waif. She doesn't look like the type who would wear a bright red bra and a G-string. But it was Greif who lent Madonna the provocative lingerie and directed the underwear-clad, flag-draped Material Girl in an MTV public service announcement that threatens nonvoters with a spanking.
Getting tidbits into stories
Elena Shemetoff wants the world to remember the great span of Alexander Siloti's hands. She mimics their spread, their position at the keyboard; she describes the singing tone their weight brought. Smoke rises from a Dunhill (this is a ritzy, expensive brand of cigarettes) as she says, "Nobility is the most prominent quality in his playing, in his life."
In her West Side apartment, where two grand pianos shoulder each other like rugby players in a scrum, Shemetoff muses.
Description and literary allusion
Anguilla, 10 minutes by air from Saint Martin, (this locates the place )is a Rip Van Winkle of an island, a sleepy sand spit that was dormant until about 20 years ago.
Onomatopoeia
Clang, clang, sounded the new engine for a few brief minutes, and then hisssss, a screeeech and booomm - it exploded.
Pun
Trash collectors at this college have been down in the dumps lately.
Sequence
Professor Jim Martin slipped quietly through the door, removed his rain-drenched hat and coat and dropped them into the corner. He pulled from his pocket his well-worn Henny Youngman joke book... (lead about comedian-professor)
Then and now
Joe Blow's grandmother attended this college in 1949 in the old German school on Alamo Street.
Today, Blow, an architecture major, has designs on renovating the structure into a museum for the Alamo Community College District.
Contrast
Lights in Loftin Student Center burn brightly every day, but the building is wrapped in darkness every night.
Description
Picketers stroll lazily in front of Loftin Student Center...
Break Format
He said he would — and he did. (lead has nice rhythm.)
Some tips from Blundell:
A good writer is merciless in deciding who gets into his article. Each person must have a story purpose or be excluded.
Quotes, too, are better pruned and pared:
"Favor the short and sharp over the long and dull, and trim the statement down to its nubbin of meaning.
Great clots of numbers dropped into a story with a steam shovel create a wall of abstraction.
One of our major failngs is our failure to appreciate the effect of descriptive writing. We do it too often and in the wrong places.
There is tendency to slather everything with adjectives and adverbs when what you really want to do is strip it.
The story flows better if the writer varies the length of paragraphs and uses a variety of attribution.