When you are writing a feature story, sometimes you have to scrape and scratch to cobble together a halfway decent opening (or lead, in journalism parlance) from the material you have. Other times, you have so much great content that your problem is deciding which of the multiple strong angles you should go with for your lead. A story I wrote in 2020 about the soundtrack of an African city was decidedly in the latter category.
In fall 2020, I got word that a recent alumna of the Duke Graduate School had turned the field recordings she made as part of her Ph.D. dissertation into an album of music about life in Gulu, a burgeoning city in northern Uganda. My “good potential story” alarm went off, and I reached out to the alumna. We had a terrific conversation, and from it came an interesting feature.
As so often happens when writing a feature story, the material I gathered coalesced into several distinct “chunks,” each focusing on one aspect of the story behind the album. These chunks included:
- The backstory of how the idea for the dissertation, and subsequently the album, arose
- The alumna’s approach to the album
- The music on the album
- What the city of Gulu is like
When I write feature stories, one of my frequent first steps is to organize my material into chunks like these. Once I know what the chunks are, it’s often a relatively simple matter of figuring out their order and how to transition between them. Within each chunk, the material often falls into place almost by itself just by following simple storytelling logic.
The trickiest part, though, can be figuring out which one should be the lead. This sets the tone for the rest of the story. It’s not uncommon for 60 to 70 percent of the time I spend on a story to be directed toward writing the first three to four paragraphs. Once you have a good lead, oftentimes the rest of the pieces come together easily.
(Of course, you don’t necessarily have to always write the lead first. I have had instances where I got stuck on the lead, so I just wrote out some of the rest of the story, a process that sometimes helps chip away at the writer’s block where the lead is concerned.)
In the case of this particular story, each of these chunks outlined above had some compelling angle and material that could have been molded into an interesting lead.
- The back story for the dissertation idea could be developed to highlight how the resources at Duke made the project possible, which is always something I try to point out in such stories.
- The chunk about the approach to the album had interesting tidbits, such as all the settings in which she made the field recordings.
- The section about the music on the album dives into the way she blended her recordings and the musicians’ creations, and the part about an owl’s hoot being included could make for an interesting opening hook.
- The part about life in Gulu offered some vivid imagery. There are also some interesting points from the history of Gulu.
After experimenting with each of these parts and thinking about how each would affect the subsequent flow of the story if it became the lead, I settled on using one scene that the alumna described from her field-recording experience:
Joella Bitter was following a couple surveyors around the lush, green western outskirts of Gulu, a growing city in northern Uganda. While the surveyors marked the path of a future road, she was trying to record the songs of some nearby birds for her dissertation. The skittish avians, however, weren’t cooperating, as they scattered whenever she approached.
After giving her a little good-natured teasing, one of the surveyors offered an idea. He took her recorder, placed it under a tree, and told her to walk away for 15 minutes.
For me, the scene brought together a couple major undercurrents that flowed through the story. First, the surveyors marking the path of a future road through a lush area outside the city served as a symbol of the city’s growth, which features prominently in the dissertation and on the album. Second, the interactions between the alumna and the surveyors illustrated the idea of human connections—a theme central both to the album and to the process by which the album was created.
Another reason I really liked this scene was the level of details I got about it from the alumna during our interview. For instance, it wasn’t just “the outskirts of Gulu,” but the “lush, green western outskirts.” And it wasn’t just surveyors working. It was surveyors marking the path of a future road. The imagery of “lush” and “green” nature contrasts with the urban imagery of a road in the making, creating a dynamic that brings into focus the city’s growth. Where source materials for a story are concerned, a small handful of strong, vivid descriptors can make the difference between so-so and outstanding.
With those factors in its favor, this angle felt like the best one to set the stage for the rest of the story. After that, the pieces fell into place fairly easily. The theme of human connections flowed through all the sections. The story ended with another vivid scene—the alumna and her collaborators sitting together to listen to their creations—which once again emphasized the centrality of human connections in this project, calling back to the lead and serving as a fitting bookend.