Better Reporting
Good writers tend to say that they spend hours poring through dictionaries and thesauruses searching for the perfect nouns and adverbs. Great writers do that, too, but they also typically admit to poring over their notebooks for even longer periods of time.
Strong reporting is almost always the keystone to building a better magazine article. Your notes from research and interviews should be accurate, detailed, and far more complete than you need to write your article to its specified word count. The best magazine writers often have countless pages of notes on hand that they can't fit into their actual stories.
Why should you report more than you actually need to fill your word count?
Because the more you know about your subject matter, the more authoritative your articles will be. Plus, interview subjects tend to reveal more toward the ends of interviews, not at the beginnings. If you quit asking questions too soon, you'll probably forgo taking home the best quote of the day.
The more notes you have, the more details and quotations from which you can choose for your article — and the more memorable those details and quotes are likely to be.
Strong Quotes
There's nothing like a well-turned phrase to keep a reader's attention. It's a good thing that people being interviewed tend to say the darndest things. If you can get their most colorful remarks into your notebook accurately, then your magazine article will practically write itself.
Over time, most magazine writers develop an ear for hearing memorable, usable quotes the minute they come out of a source's mouth. Most people speak in patterns to which you become accustomed after a few minutes; you can tell when a person is trying to gather her thoughts versus when she actually knows what she wants to say. These moments of clarity are usually your keeper quotes, the ones you want to be sure you have written down accurately in your notebook.
Even if a source is stammering with “uhs” and “hmmms,” write those words into your notebook. If you don't, you risk forgetting the person's state of mind when he spoke, and describing a person's state of mind to your readers can add volumes of context. “He said cautiously,” or “he revealed,” are much stronger descriptors than a simple “he said.”
The more direct quotes you have in your notebook, the better. You can always go back later and paraphrase something that a source told you, but you cannot go back in time and get the source to repeat the exact quote again. Learn shorthand or develop your own system for writing or recording as many quotes as possible, and save the best ones for the parts of your articles where they will make the most impact on readers (more on that later in this chapter).
Sweating the Small Stuff
Details are another key to excellent writing, and the reporting phase of the magazine-writing process is usually where you will collect the best ones. Unlike quotations, though, details usually don't get handed to you right out of the source's mouth. You will need to use your observation skills to record as much of the small stuff as you can.
Citing details when writing descriptive sentences and paragraphs can tell your readers a heck of a lot about your subjects without your having to offer editorialized opinions. This is one of the hallmarks of good journalism, and your reporter's notebook is the place to practice the skill of digging deeper and deeper into everything you see.
As with quotations, details are best collected the first time around. You should gather as many as you can, even if your notebook is so overflowing that you just know you will never get all of them into your actual magazine article. The idea, again, is that when it comes time to write, you can pare down your notes to the absolute best, most essential details that the reader needs to know. With your notebook full of them, you can bet they'll be incredibly memorable and meaningful.
If you find yourself writing that a source is wearing jeans, be sure to note their color. And whether they're torn. And what's showing through the torn patches. And what brand name is on the back pocket. And whether they are zip-ups or button-flies. And whether they have boot cut or narrow cuffs. And how low they ride on the hips and stomach … you get the idea.
