Writing
The Breakdown On What Makes A Feature Story Thrive
Know your characters, background detail, and story arc
Writing a feature story can be intimidating because it’s different than a quick op-ed or personal essay. A feature story usually requires much more time-intensive research, fact-checking, and copyediting. It’s more ambitious in scope and longer in depth. But don’t freak out because I’ll discuss a few of the components here.
What I urge you to do is think about some of your favorite feature stories. Mine are “The Jungle Prince of New Delhi” by Ellen Barry, “Secrets of the South” by Kaitlyn Greenidge, or “The Price of Nice Nails” by Sarah Maslin Nir. As you can probably guess from the titles, all three of these stories are different from each other. But they do have some key similarities. Look at the first few paragraphs of each. They all start with a scene. Think of your favorite books. They usually begin with a scene, not some long, verbose monologue on the meaning of life or some other topic to arouse existential dread.
Why is that? Well, even though we are human beings with complex systems, we are actually quite simple. We need something to hold onto. We need an anchor. An anchor is the story. The scene. The idea is the abstraction, the route or path that’s going to guide the reader along the story. The anchor roots the idea. As readers, we need rootedness first before you, as the writer, take off into the broader implications of said scenes. Understand?
And usually when your story takes root (pun intended), then the writer draws back and goes into the history or the background of what they are talking about so that the reader gets even more invested into the story. Now anything — just about anything — can be interesting. It just depends on how your delivery, which is how your voice, tone, and style, come in. But don’t worry. You don’t need to figure this out all on your own — that’s what an editor is for.
But you can always vivify your feature story with having apt organization, moving deftly from scenes to explanations while interspersing your voice with that of others (like dialogue) especially if the story is character-driven.
And once you know that your story is going to get published, if you are on social media, start to plan on how you’re going to promote it. Fiddle around with descriptions that fit within the character count on Twitter. Think about how to showcase it on Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok. And if the story really means a lot to you, reach out to people who you know have substantial profiles — ideally those with whom you have some kind of familiarity — and let them know when the story will go live so that they can share it with their readership.
Now go on and be great.
