“Start Thinking Like a Playwright”
Anne Ryman of The Arizona Republic heard about a war room at Arizona State University during her beat coverage of higher education. She started reporting for her story and then decided to use lessons learned from some recent training in narrative writing. The result is a story that begins:
Six people cluster around an oval table in a conference room at Arizona State University.
Behind them, large pieces of paper cover one wall. Printed on each is the name of a federal agency and how much economic-stimulus money is available from them.
NASA: $1 billion. National Science Foundation: $3 billion. Department of Energy: $30.7 billion.
Another chart tracks the share ASU has won so far: $26 million.
ASU’s war room, in the fight for stimulus money, is in high gear. Three or four times a week, officials gather here for meetings and plot strategies for grabbing as much stimulus money as possible. They file weekly reports to ASU President Michael Crow.
Today’s Tip: Take the camera into the room. Recreate scenes so readers feel like they are in the room. If you weren’t in the room during the action, learn to ask detailed questions – who was where, who wore what, etc. – so you can write about it. Don Drake, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor, was a huge proponent of writing like a playwright. Notes from one workshop he offered can be found here.
Anne says after her initial interview, she asked if she could return during a meeting in the war room. She sat along the sidelines with an audio recorder to capture the details of what was being said.
“I tried to in my notes put down as much as I could of what was happening,” she says. She marked details from the “scene” with arrows in her notebook margins – a technique she learned in her training. She called people after the meeting to clarify acronyms and terminology with which she wasn’t familiar.
