Final Piece Writing Process

This piece posed a challenge in that, as usual, I wasn't really sure how to make it into a "narrative story" other than by giving an attempt at a vivid retelling of the events that took place to make this a story worth telling. As such, there's a lot of recall of events that don't actually take place within the story itself, and I'm pretty sure the piece caught some flak at workshop for that. As it stands now, I think the flashbacks work reasonably well to bring the reader into the moments that caused such controversy on Kalamazoo's campus, despite the fact that they combine to give it a rather long word count. So perhaps this is not as well suited for an Index article, because they don't print pieces longer than 1000 words, and this is about five hundred over that. It would require a great deal of overhaul for an audience other than our campus paper, though - even moving the publication to the Gazette would obviously require some significant changes.

My difficulty in making this into a "narrative story" points to one of the greater difficulties I have with narrative journalism - I just want to get the story out there, I have less of an interest or even tendency to "show" like narrative journalism is supposed to. I just want to give the story in plain terms, tell people what's up, explain things to them, not have to think about developing characters, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and all those other devices storytellers/novelists use. In short, I think I prefer hard newswriting or even arts journalism to the narrative style. Good newswriters and arts journalists, I'm sure, use these techniques, but their work seems to depend less on it, which is fine by me. I'm interested in telling a story, I'm just not always as interested in doing it this way. It's difficult for me, and maybe if I do more journalism in the future I'll grow into it. As this piece perhaps shows, I'm not fully comfortable with the form as yet. I don't write creatively or with these kinds of devices often. I need more time to adjust.

The piece also could use more voices, and part of this is my own failure because I for a long time was unsure of where I wanted this to go. Only having two interviews happened because I didn't have time to follow up on the people I was recommended to talk to, since by the time the interviews happened it was almost crunch time. An interview with the Arcus Center people didn't happen either because of lack of time. So I would like to have more people talking here to tie the two events/people together, but it did not happen. Picking a subject that I have a little more familiarity with and maybe more passion about might have helped in this scenario; I kind of felt like I was scrambling with a half baked idea most of the time. The piece didn't prove itself too difficult to write, because I had good quotes (despite losing most of an audio recording of one interview to technical difficulties), and strong stories for each person, but it could have used more threads linking it together.