This piece was moderately difficult to write. I had a little trouble getting what I wanted to say about the Strutt down into a workable, small enough draft - the piece is aimed at the Index and right now is hovering around 1200 words, so it needs to be cut down a touch if it continues to be written for that audience in my next draft. I had four interviews on the subject, two of which (with Andy and Sean of the Strutt) were pretty dense with information and other things of note, which made it a little difficult to pick and choose what to emphasize.
I also feel somewhat like this is more of a straightforward journalism piece, and while it attempts to tell the story of how the Strutt has developed as a music venue over time, I'm not sure how much dramatic tension, character development, etc. it has. We're constantly told to show, not tell, but I was having a hard time doing much description at all, with all the facts that needed to get on the page crowding that sort of thing out. I didn't have a concrete event to talk about other than the interviews I did, and I'm wondering if some sort of description of a show at the Strutt might help to flesh out how the place actually functions better. Also, I kept thinking that I was supposed to have a Franklin outline for the piece, but simply could not make it work. The only "complication" I could think of was Kalamazoo's music scene becoming anemic after the departure of the Kraftbrau some years ago, and how the Strutt coming into its own resolved that problem, but the piece is supposed to be about the Strutt, not Kalamazoo's music scene.
Other than that I feel the piece works together as a whole and it wrote itself rather smoothly, but it lacks a little life. Perhaps making it more of a story would help with that.
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