Why long-form?
“If it’s done well, it’s about an immersive storytelling experience; the feeling of lifting words off the page,” says Serena Kutchinsky, writer and Digital Editor of Prospect Magazine.
“It's a format that worked well in the prime of the print era, fared poorly in the days of the desktop web, and works brilliantly on mobile devices,” says co-founder of longform.org, Aaron Lammer. “Longer articles are easily digestible on a commute or flight. People who wouldn't tackle Infinite Jest on their iPhone are very willing to read a magazine feature.
You need a good yarn
Serena says that people who want to write long-form should look for “A good yarn, an interesting subject matter, and human stories to bring a hardcore subject matter to life.”
For instance, award-winning long-form and Esquire US, Luke Dittrich, ended up writing about a group of people who sheltered in a beer cooler during a brutal tornado in Joplin, after a call from him mother:
“I was getting bombarded with all these news reports and all this awful imagery coming out of Joplin, I’d never seen anything like it. Initially it didn’t seem like something I would do anything on; I don’t do spot news. But then my mother gave me a call. She’d just been listening to NPR (which is the American Equivalent of BBC Radio) and they’d played this tape that had started to go viral. Some people stuck in a beer cooler had recorded it on their iphone.
So I found the video on YouTube, watched it and instantly felt two things. First, I thought it was just this insanely moving document, because it was so visceral and terrifying. But there was also this amazing sequence, where these people began saying I love you to each other. That was just so moving because they thought they were going to die, and they started shouting that out. Suddenly I wanted to know who these people were.”
Include narrative details that make the story come alive
“When I’m writing, it’s a case of figuring out how to pare down the words, but keep a fully fleshed out person on the page. And that’s difficult,” says long form journalist Luke Dittrich. “You’re always on the look out for that small detail that says a great deal. I think that’s probably the same with any sort of writer; with fiction or non-fiction. They call them telling details for a reason.”
In his piece To Catch a Predator: Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, Luke writes about how Bill Conradt - who shot himself on national television as part of a TV sting operation gone horribly wrong - was given a football ticket as a child, wrapped up in a small box and then progressively larger boxes. Luke says that as soon as he heard this detail he knew he would write it into the piece because “It’s something we can all relate to.”
Don’t discard social media...
Twitter and long-form may seem like polar opposites but, as Aaron Lammer points out, this isn’t the case at all - “Twitter has been very valuable to us in building an audience,” he says. “Uur traffic has grown beyond our wildest expectations.”
Serena, likewise, advises young writers who want to create long-form to “Put your work out there, blog, share content, and read magazines such as Prospect, The Spectator and Sunday Supplements.”
More on long-form...
... Write Now: The long and the short of it
... Print publishing vs the digital age
... Which route into journalism?
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