Reportage-Werkzeuge
15. October 2007
Roy Peter Clark hat vor einigen Jahren bei Poynter Online 50 grundlegende Schreibwerkzeuge vorgestellt und erklärt (online nur noch über Archive.org vollständig erreichbar - dafür gibt es sie neu auch als Buch). Als begeisterter Fan der Writing Tools bin ich die Liste nochmals durchgegangen mit der Frage: Welche sind speziell gute Reportagenwerkeuge? Hier sind sie - es sind ganze 8 (zusammen mit einigen Textausschnitten):
- Dig for the concrete and specific: the name of the dog. [...] In St. Petersburg, editors and writing coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without “the name of the dog.” [...] It reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened.
- Reveal character traits. [...] Watch people’s behavior, appearance, and speech. Write down the character adjectives that come to mind: obnoxious, affectionate, caring, confused. Now write down the specific details that led you to those conclusions.
- Narrative Opportunities. [...] Journalists [...] too often [...] write dull reports. [...] Reports convey information. Stories create experience. [...] The report points us there. The story puts us there.
- Quotes differ from dialogue. [...] The report points us there. The story puts us there. [...] Quotes are ‘about’ the action, not ‘in’ the action. [...] dialogue presents the reader with a form of action.
- Writing Cinematically. 1. Aerial view; 2. Establishing shot: The writer stands back to capture the setting; 3. Middle distance: The camera moves closer to the action, close enough to see the key players and their interaction. 4. Close-up: The camera gets in the face of the subject, close enough to detect [...] the full range of human emotions; 5. Extreme close-up: This writer focuses on an important detail that would be invisible from a distance.
- Report for scenes; place them in sequence. Tom Wolfe argues that realism, in fiction or non-fiction, is built upon “scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative.”
- Foreshadow climactic events. Plant important clues early in the story. [...] In dramatic literature, this technique is sometimes referred to as Chekov’s Gun. In a letter he penned in 1889, Russian playwright Anton Chekov wrote: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
- Good questions drive good stories. [...] This narrative strategy is so powerful it needs a name, and Tom French has given it one. He calls it “the engine” of the story. [...] Reports must anticipate the reader’s questions and answer them. [...] Storytellers take these questions to a narrative level, creating in the reader a curiosity that can only be quenched by reaching the end of the story.
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