Bubble Wrap anniversary story pops because of specific details
David Porter of The Associated Press puts together a zippy story on the popularity of Sealed Air Corp.’s Bubble Wrap, which is celebrating its 50thbirthday. He shares odd uses for the product — (It’s a wig! It’s a mobile home! It’s a sleeping bag! It’s a flotation device!) — as well as examples of how it has become part of pop culture — movies (Wall-E, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), television (Monk) and high culture (Museum of Modern Art exhibit, 2009).
The power in his anniversary story is in its specific details, including:
- More than 250 Facebook pages are devoted to Bubble Wrap.
- Its inventors originally were seeking to create textured wallpaper. When that idea stalled, one of its inventors “was flying into Newark Airport and noticed the fluffy clouds that seemed to cushion the plane’s descent.”
- Sealed Air’s 100,000-square-foot warehouse, “an obsessive-compulsive’s dream,” has “row upon row of stacked rolls of Bubble Wrap as big as seven feet in diameter.”
- “The [warehouse] temperature is sweat-inducing, caused by the machines that process millions of granules of resin (one box is labeled ‘Munchy Resin’) into clear plastic sheets at temperatures of 560 degrees.”
Today’s Tip: Specific details make a story; record them in your notebook, just as you would quotes.
In an article titled the “Power of Detail,”Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute says: “Writing with details demands reporting for detail. Details show the reporter hard at work, observing, sensing, questioning, noting. But details must be relevant and used judiciously. Like a strong spice, they can overpower a story or mire it in minutiae.”
Scanlan’s article also offers tips from Best Newspaper Writers winners on gathering details.
