Feature Writing

Feature writing combines the literary craft of fiction with the fact-gathering and storytelling skills of the journalist, historian, and documentary filmmaker. These true stories can be both timely and timeless; the narrative becomes a vehicle for something more expansivemdash;some key insight, theme, or universal truth. Like literary fiction and creative nonfiction, great features have many layers of truth. These stories must also be factual, written with the highest level of journalistic accuracy. Everything written in this course must be based on verifiable facts documented from reliable sources. All stories will be fact-checked. Students record interviews and annotate their final drafts with sources for fact-checking. Feature stories can take many forms. In this course we focus on the long-form narrative. A narrative is different from an article, which presents information about a central topic in a way that informs, analyzes, or persuades. For this course, think of a narrative as a story about a character who struggles through a central conflict in a sequence of events (scenes) connected through cause and effect in a way that yields insight or meaning. Students report, write, and revise two long-form features: a first-person personal quest (2,000 words) and a third-person reconstructed narrative (3,000 words). A sequence of weekly writing exercises builds up to both. This course simulates the commercial magazine publishing process from pitch to publication. Students practice immersion reporting, narrative interviewing, incorporating primary and secondary sources, structuring a dramatic story, editing, revising, and fact-checking. Students learn how to report and reconstruct scenes they cannot witness in person. The end goal of this course is to complete and polish two feature stories fit to submit to a target publication.