10 "lecciones" que el periodista Jim Collins compartió con sus colegas en la Conferencia de Periodismo Narrativo de la Nieman Foundation, en 2001.

1. ESSAY ON CRAFT & INDUSTRY
Tips for Reporters
Note: The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Jim
Author: Jim
Collins
Collins at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative
Source: Nieman
Journalism. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of
Reports
Nieman Reports.
Date: 03/01/2002
These are things I have learned from my best writers, and
now I pass them on to you in 10 lessons.
Voice is important, seductive, subversive and can be
crucial. It entertains, infuses life, makes us comfortable,
makes us uncomfortable, gives pleasure, and brings us along
for rides we didn't even know we wanted to take. Voice is so
important in just the way you get into material and want to
stay with it or not. Voice is one of the very first things that
subconsciously readers respond to. And if it's someone you
want to be with, you'll spend time with him, even if you're not
sure where the point of the piece is or where the piece is
going or what the subject is even about.
The seductive unfolding of an article could be a very quiet
way that voice works on you. But it can also show up in a
bare phrase or a single word or even a sentence. And one of
the most efficient ways that I have come across the way the
voice is used is in one of Mark Kramer's books, quot;Invasive
Procedures,quot; when he spent a year with a couple of surgeons
in central Massachusetts. He was in the operating room when
they had somebody on the table opened up, and he just had
this phrase where he said, quot;This smell, to my regret,
reminded me of steak.quot; That quot;to my regret,quot; is just so, so
wonderful and so powerful and kind of disturbing at the same
time. There are just three words there and that gives so much
voice, that little phrase right there.
Voice can be invisible. It can show some slyness or wryness
even if the author's voice isn't present in the words. You can
see that in the way quotes are sometimes used or facts are
juxtaposed.
Writing in the first person can infuse personality and
voice, add credibility, depth and perspective, but only
when it has something to say. Yankee Magazine hired a
journalist from the north country to write about the deaths on
Mount Washington and talk about geography and weather and
the logistics of search and rescue. We went after a guy who
had actually worked search and rescue as a teenager up on
the mountain. He writes in the very light first person, but he
brings up his background right away in the piece just to
establish that what you're about to read in a reporter's
notebook or reporter's sense of the world comes from a
deeper history.
Here he looks back on when he was 19.

2. Most of us had never seen death so close, and many had
never seen death at all; we hadn't learned that when lifeless
flesh is pressed, it does not rebound, it does not press back.
This man seemed extraordinarily large, too heavy to lift, and
we learned the meaning of quot;dead weight,quot; a weight that
doesn't help you at all. We could barely keep our feet as we
headed down over the headwall; we half-dropped our burden
several times and we did drop it several times. Some laughed,
saying we should just let him slide down the slope, he
wouldn't mind, and we'd catch up later. That, apparently, is
what you do when you're at the height of your powers and
carrying a dead man you can hardly lift.
Being tall, I was at the downhill end of the load. One of his
booted feet was flopping right beside my shoulder, just
flopping there with an absolute limpness I'd never seen. The
nurse who had stayed behind said she'd found a prescription
for heart medicine in the man's pocket, and I kept wondering
what he was thinking when he passed the sign telling how the
weather changes above timberline are sudden and severe. I
kept looking at the boot laces on the foot flopping on my
shoulder. They were tied with a double bow knot, and I kept
thinking the same thing over and over, that when he tied that
bow this morning, he was looking forward to the day.
My friend Chan Murdoch was level with the man's arm, and he
told me later that all the way down he could only think of how
the man's limp elbow kept nudging him as he struggled with
the carry, just that persistent mindless nudge. When Chan
said that, I realized that we'd both seen our first death in very
small parts.
That image has haunted me ever since I read it, the idea of
that foot just flopping. I've never been able to forget that.
Humor almost always surprises and delights. It cuts the
sweet. It lightens what otherwise might be overwrought and
also lightens what might be too dark.
Even ugly characters can be drawn with empathy. I
think that's especially important if you're a reporter and you
are entering a situation where you really dislike the people
you're writing about, or there's something truly either
inhumane or cruel or mean. It's so easy to just go right there
in your writing and tell people that the character is cruel or
mean. And it takes real discipline to stand back and just show
a setting evolve or have an exchange happen in which you let
the reader make their own judgment. As a writer, you know
that judgment will be made if you're being true to the facts of
the scene or the facts of this person's character. But in writing
it you have to step back and be sympathetic at the same
time.
Writers can bring eloquence to plainspoken people and
articulate meaning in ordinary lives. One of the things I
like most about the potential of narrative journalism is not to

3. write about the big event, the big spectacular news event that
everyone is hearing about and talking about. Not to write
about celebrity. Not to write about the rich and famous. Those
people seem to articulate their own lives, or they're in the
public spotlight enough, or those events are in the public
spotlight enough that people get them either subconsciously
or through the writing or TV that surrounds those, no matter
what.
I love the potential of narrative journalism to go into the
corners and the subcultures and the neighborhoods and
actually make some kind of meaning or articulate something
about those lives that probably very few of those people could
ever put into words themselves. And I've learned that over
and over again through some of the good writing I've seen.
Writing about place can be especially hard. Writers
succeed through the vividness of their descriptions and their
crafty layering of meaning. Talking about physical place,
landscape, light, temperature, the feel of the air, the way
things smell. There's a phrase that I've never forgotten from a
piece written by a poet, Susan Mitchell, who did a piece for
another magazine I was working on. She wrote about the
Loxahatchee National Wildlife Preserve down near the
Everglades in Florida, and she had some wonderful
descriptions about the sultry, kind of moist air. But the phrase
I'll never forget is quot;The air was so soft and moist. It felt like
your breath coming back at you.quot; That's a wonderful image.
It's very vivid, and it works.
The confidence in a piece is directly related to the depth
of the reporting behind it. Susan Orlean last year at the
conference said that she doesn't believe there's such a thing
as writer's block. When you're having writer's block it's
because you haven't done enough work or reporting to have
the thinking that you need to do the writing. So she goes back
to the reporting as the cornerstone. And I think that the
pieces that just feel confident are full of what Mark Kramer
calls quot;muscular movement,quot; as if the writer is in total
command of the material. That comes in having reported the
piece so well that you know the material, and you know how
to work with it. And that comes through in even a single
sentence. The reporting is so solid in a piece when you start
not mistrusting the author. You start forgetting that it's even
being written, and you're just lost in the story. I think that
has a lot to do with the reporting and the confidence.
The best writers can break the rules of grammar and
sentence structure, but somehow they convey that they
know what the rules are to begin with.
Writing for a knowing audience allows a piece to carry
meaning that doesn't literally appear in the text. The
audience can fill in the back-story, can make connections that
aren't explicit, and can understand the inside jokes.
Topic selection for a writer is crucial and not crucial at
all. The not-crucial part is that in the end it is in the hands of

4. the writer to make something come to life and make
something feel relevant or moving or memorable. Some of the
most interesting and surprising pieces have come from off-to-
the-side topics or topics that on the surface don't sound like
they may be very good. So it really has to do a lot with the
writer's passion and what they bring to it and their
knowledge, and just their sense of playfulness they see in
something.
And this is the one single piece of advice I give young writers
and beginning writers: If you're trying to break into a place
that is a reach for you, or you're trying to go to the next level,
think of a story that nobody else can write with your
perspective. And that way, if the editors like the subject or
they like the idea, they've got to take you with it. And it can
be frustrating as an editor sometimes, but it's almost like the
subject is too good and we have to take the writer, even
though we're a little bit concerned that the writer might not
be able to pull it off. So if you have any story ideas that you
have been thinking in the back of your head that you're
uniquely suited to write, sell it as a package with the subject.
I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind.
In terms of narrative writing, very few writers understand that
a story has an arc, not just a beginning, a middle, and an
end, but a sequence of events that will keep a reader moving
along. I read a lot of pieces that seem flat. So one thing
happens, and then another happens, and another happens,
and there's no sense of movement in a piece. The movement
can be in any direction, it can circle back on itself, it can stop
and start again, and it can then flash back. But I think a lot of
writers have trouble with structure. And voice is the hardest
thing to teach as an editor or to get from a writer, but
structure is one of the mechanical things that I see as a
problem in a lot of the writers.
One of the important things to do is to read your writing out
loud and hear if it sounds conversational to you. People have
a speaking voice without even thinking about it. Every one of
us here has a distinctive speaking voice that we don't even
give a second thought to. With writing it takes a lot more
discipline to arrive at that kind of comfort and individuality in
our voice and writing, but we all have that if we can hear it.
So one of the ways of getting at it is to read out loud what
you've written, and if it sounds a little bit forced or you're
putting on airs, you're being someone you're not, then that
voice may not be very strong in that piece. I do believe that
people have distinctive voices in writing that are as inborn as
their storytelling voices or conversational voices. I could listen
to Ira Glass tell stories about anything. I just love the guy's
excitement and humor and his take on the world, and that
comes through in his voice. Rick Bragg, same way. They are
people who just seem to be born storytellers to me. And then
you hear Ira Glass say that he was not a good storyteller
growing up. It was something he had to learn and come to.
So maybe there is something in paying very close attention to

5. how good storytellers approach their craft and learn about
pacing and holding back from the punch line and waiting until
people aren't expecting and coming in. But I get the sense
that a lot of storytelling is inborn, certainly in speaking. And it
follows to me that it would appear in writing that way, too,
but it just takes more discipline to recognize or to make it
work.