The Further Adventures of Germ Girl

Working through a longform assignment

(for Rebecca Burns’ Emory class, 5 April 2012)

Your journey to a complex story starts with a good pitch:

To pitch successfully, you must have a story in mind, not just a topic
A story has a subject and an issue, but also characters, narrative and resolution

To pitch well, you will need to show an editor:

That the story is complex enough to sustain 3,000-6,000 words
Is timely (but not so timely that it will not adapt to magazine production schedules; think about 6 months out)
Has engaging characters

Therefore, you’ll have to have done some work up front

depending on your background, the length of the final story, the difficulty of getting into your magazine of choice, this can take anywhere from 5 hours to a week of work

The work you do in pitching starts you off on the work you will do for the story

So it is necessary to set up an organizational scheme from the start
Most large magazines have a fact-checking process: You will be required to prove everything you say or quote
So keep and store everything at the time you obtain it. Do NOT plan to try to reconstruct later.

Yes, everything. Depending on the magazine, that can include:

pdfs of every article (news, scientific literature)
pdfs or screengrabs of every web page (not live links because they may change)
transcripts of interviews
soundfiles of interviews
Xeroxes or scans of your notebook pages
photographs to prove scenic details
complete contact information, titles, screengrabs of faculty web pages for titles

My process:

initial research outline — what I think I will need, who I will plan to talk to (OmniOutliner)
calendar and reminders of who I am pursuing; often takes multiple asks (iCal)
storage of all materials

To succeed with a long, complex story, you must work on multiple tracks at once

you probably will not have the leisure of doing all the expert interviews before you do all the “real people” interviews
so you should be prepared to go back to people as your understanding of the issue changes
if you are doing a complex story, it will probably take you time to find the right “real people”

While you are researching, you should already be thinking about how you will write this

You cannot write a complex story without having decided in advance on a story structure
Having a structure in mind will help you figure out what you are missing while you are still reporting
One structure reference (just a quick overview): this Storify

When you are writing: You must annotate your draft for factcheck

Some people manage to do this afterward; I don’t recommend (but it depends on your writing process)
I mark up as I go
A story draft is not acceptable if it is not annotated for fact-check, because you do not know at what point in the process they will start fact-check

Usually it is is after second draft, but if they move your story up in the calendar, it could be right away
The factcheckers will make you miserable, but they are your friends. Do not piss them off.

Understand: For a national magazine, your first submit really is a first draft

It should be as polished as you can make it
But there is time to TK (“to come”) if you haven’t yet found good subsidiary characters

Your copy will get ripped up. Try not to have ego about this.

You can fight back, and a good editor will listen and work collaboratively.
But a good editor also understands internals of what the magazine wants in ways that you do not, so listen before you start fighting.

You are not done until the magazine ships (and then you are still not done)

You are likely to be doing fresh rounds of research, and possibly interviews, for every draft
If it is a newsy story, the magazine may want to do media about it when it publishes — so stay alert to new developments on the topic after the story is “done”
Keeping an eye out for fresh developments will also give you something to blog/tweet/tumblr once the story is out