–The straight-up feature story. I brought in a couple of examples of my own work from The Washington Post, but you’ll find these kinds of stories in just about every issue of most magazines and newspapers. Feature stories can provide a reader with many different satisfactions, but all feature stories begin, at least, with an impetus to teach, or explain, or illustrate, or inform, or [insert similar kind of word]. The topic doesn’t have to be particularly timely, famous, or momentous–your writing will make the case for its worth, whatever that worth may be.

–The historical feature story. I’ve focused in class on the work of Jill Lepore, historian at Harvard and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, but she’s certainly not the only person working in the genre. Historical features attempt to illuminate some current topic by moving back in time and demonstrating that the questions and issues surrounding said topic didn’t just appear, like, yesterday.

–The trend story. Dana Goodyear’s “I [heart] Novels,” from The New Yorker, and much of Bret Schulte’s work from The Washington Post provide terrific examples of this kind of work. Remember that a trend story (which is part of the general feature story phylum) must provide the proof as well as the pudding. If it’s a trend that means anything important, that case must be made; if it’s a trend that doesn’t mean anything, that case must be made; but in either case, readers must hear some kind of reasonable case that this is, indeed, a trend.

–Immersion journalism. I and others used to call this “participatory journalism,” before that term became a new way of saying “citizen journalism,” which immersion journalism is not. Follow? Immersion journalism is pretty easy to understand in outline: you partake of some less-than-universal activity and take your reader along for the ride. Immersion journalism is obviously the most voyeuristic of these types of writing under discussion here. We looked at Manny Howard’s “Empire of Dirt,” from New York magazine, and I also showed you two examples of Dallas Hudgens’ writing in The Washington Post. Nate sent along this very useful link to what he termed “extreme immersion journalism”; thanks, Nate, for the additional example.

–The profile. A profile provides an introduction–hopefully a rich, vivid, and suitably complex introduction–to some person we otherwise might never have met and known. A good profile, as is true of the the other forms listed here, provides the reader with multiple pleasures, but at heart the task is to put us in proximity to this person in a way that we’ve experienced their life as much as we’ve read about it. Think Susan Orlean’s “The American Man at Age Ten,” from Esquire, or Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Ghost,” from GQ, or Christina Ianzito’s work from The Washington Post, an example of which, “Full-Bodied With Unexpected Hints of Metal,” we read in class.

You now have your basic set of choices. Next class we’ll also consider Michael Paterniti’s “Driving Mr. Albert” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Horseman, Pass By,” both published as “folios” in Harper’s, as well as David Sedaris’s “Santaland Diaries,” in order to think not about how we draw lines between genres, but rather where genres bend and mix.

1) Blogs–at least the personal, topic-based blogs you’re all writing–exist in an editor-free zone and need to take as much advantage of that fact as possible. This doesn’t free you from the necessity to, you know, proofread, but it does free your blog from the requirement to adhere to any particular publication’s mission, tone, sense of audience, choice of topics, etc. As I said, if your blog seems too much an imitation of the kinds of writing you might find at one of your favorite magazines or newspapers (online or otherwise), consciously choose to break out of that mold.

2) Set yourself free! I talked about the persistent straightjacket feeling I got from reading some (though certainly not the majority) of your posts, as if you were being too careful to stick to the topic you’ve declared. Having a topic is important, very important, but only in the sense that it provides a home for you, the underpinning for whatever you decide to talk about each writing day. Don’t underestimate the attraction for the reader of a digressive post, one that uses the blog’s topic as only the flimsiest pretext on which to hang your writing.

3) Take full advantage of the flexibility of the form and, again, the absence of an editor looking over your shoulder. (Yes, I’m a form of editor, no denying it, but keep in mind that I’m trying my best to act the part of thoughtful reader.) That means that, say, impressionism or stream of consciousness or mock epic or idle musings or any other stylistic variations are all available to you all the time. Stories might work with a beginning, middle, and end, but they also might work without ends, or beginnings, or middles. Experiments of all kind are open to you.

4) Think about the fact that every blog post you create may bear several phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that might make wonderful entire posts by themselves. Blogs are a wonderful place to chew on a very small thought or moment at length — because “length,” for a blog, doesn’t have to be thousands of words.  The zoom lens is one of the most important tools a writer has.

5) Finally, remember that part of creating a voice, persona, point of view is to let us into your life and head a little (or a l0t). You all have multiple threads of thinking and activity in your lives; you’re complex people. Let us see that complexity. Think about yourself; remember that you have a past, and don’t be afraid to visit that past. You all know people that might make interesting recurrent characters, but above all understand that you yourself are the most important interesting recurrent character.

Please be in touch with me if you’d like to engage in some back-and-forth about my individual messages, and remember that revision of previous posts, while not required, is certainly allowed and welcomed.

You’re reading my blog dedicated to ENGL565, Forms of Nonfiction, a course designed for graduate students in George Mason University’s various MFA and MA programs in creative writing and English. I’m course blogging (or blogging, period) for the first time this semester; I guess the fact that you’re reading this indicates I must have done something right. Please bookmark this web address, as it includes the course description and schedule (see tabs above). I’ll be regularly posting course information, important links, course writing, etc., and I’ll also be linking to and sometimes commenting on the blogs you’ll create as one part of your work for the semester.

Notice that the course will meet on May 5, the university’s designated extra day in exchange for the inauguration; this means that we’ve really only missed one class period, not two. Still, let’s see what we can do to get ahead a little bit, or at least to keep us from falling behind. Here’s what I suggest you do before next Tuesday. If you don’t complete all of these tasks by Tuesday, it won’t hinder the class; but completing some or all of them might help things to run more smoothly.

– Read the course description and look over the schedule using the tabs above.

– Get to the bookstore and buy the two course texts on sale there: The Fun of It, edited by Lillian Ross, and 3 Minutes or Less, edited by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation.

– Find or buy or order or borrow a copy of David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice OR his book Barrel Fever. Holidays on Ice is pretty self-explanatory, a collection of Sedaris’s holiday-themed writing over the years, while Barrel Fever is his first book, a fairly edgy collection of early fiction and nonfiction pieces. Again, find or buy one OR the other. Lots of copies are available online and in your local bookshop.

– Think about what kind of topic you’d like to make the focus of a twelve-week blog for our course. I’d like this to be a topic near and dear to your heart, NOT a topic chosen to impress anyone. Obvious choices might include fiction or poetry, but the field’s also open to other kinds of topics: music, video games, knitting, sports, drinking, politics, auto repair, fashion, real estate, hair plugs,  gardening, computer programming, media-watching, club-hopping, glass-blowing, snail raising, Dumpster diving, and so on. In other words, the field’s wide open and you should choose according to what you care about and pretty much no other criteria. Some of you, of course, may already be blogging, which is great — but unless your blog is topic-oriented, you will need to either create a new, separate blog OR temporarily alter the nature of your current blog.

If you have questions about any of this — and remember, we’re not starting the course until next Tuesday, weather permitting, so all of this is suggested work, not required — please send me an e-mail at sberg1@gmu.edu.

I’ll leave off now by saying that I hope to see all of you soon. Really, I do.

Scott