People are the story

Situations, events, a random conversation at the bus stop or in a coffee shop – they will all offer the germ of a story.

Boxing Day swim in freezing water off the Norfolk coast, UK. Who are they, why do they do it, where are they from? Each person will have a different story

But it will be people who are at the heart of the story.

Examples are all around us – as shown below.

Every year on December 26, thousands of hardy people – just like those in the picture below – plunge into the seas and lakes in and around Britain. It is a decades-old tradition said to ward off colds and the excesses of Christmas festivities.

Who are they, why do they do it, where are they from? Each person will have a different story.

That is what writers have to do. Find that angle, that particular look at a subject which will stop readers in their tracks.

A man wraps a tree in crocheted squares in a public park – why? What for? He has a story.

Much was written about the morning of September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, US, collapsed after two hijacked airliners crashed into the buildings in a co-ordinated suicide attack which killed 2,752. Probably more column inches were written about that day than has ever been written about a single event.

But the stories which are remembered of that event are the stories that tell us about individuals – about the people who survived the horror, and stories about those who died.

Pulitzer prize winner Jim Dwyer together with four other writers and editors from the New York Times put together a lengthy but immensely moving article describing the two Towers’ final 102 minutes: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died.

It was a powerful piece of reporting and writing. It was put together after eight months of detailed interviews with relatives of the deceased, survivors, police and fire brigade and transcriptions of emergency services’ recordings. The article’s strength comes in the way the narrative is put together using the voices of those trapped in upper floors of the Towers to relive those final terrifying moments.

Though 9/11 was an extreme event, it does highlight the dilemmas facing the journalist.

How does he or she find the angle, the different take on the same event that will stand out over the hundreds of other articles covering the same event?

Jim Dwyer found a way. His journalistic lesson was: The bigger, the smaller. He based a series of articles he wrote immediately after  9/11 on specific objects with the story woven around them.

For example: A family photograph found in the rubble;  the tale of six men, one a window cleaner, who escaped from a lift trapped between floors in the north tower by cutting through three layers of plasterboard with the metal edge of two squeegees.

In Fighting for Life 50 Floors Up, With One Tool and Ingenuity the article tells how the men ran out of the building five minutes before it collapsed. In fewer than 1,000 words, Jim Dwyer captured the drama, the horror, the heroics, and the survival of average New Yorkers acting in extraordinary ways.

Other articles in his ‘Objects’ series featured handcuffs used to dig people out, daffodils to be planted in a city park by a father who lost a son, and a yellow baby buggy in The Kindness of Strangers.

Dwyer’s was great reporting and evocative writing.  He found a ‘human’ way to reflect the extent and extreme emotions of the inhuman tragedy.

And that’s what reporting and writing is about. Humanising events so people can identify with them.

When you are looking for a story, try to get to the people who are closest to the action. Talk to those who are involved rather than just figures of authority.

As a writer, faced with reporting an incident, you will look about you, you will talk to….friends, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, the old lady in the bus queue.

People are the story – what they do, what they see, what they feel.

The BBC correspondent Justin Rowlatt revisited Nepal in April 2016, a year after some 9,000 people died and more than 20,000 were injured when an earthquake struck.

His story was not of the rebuilding of the town of Langtang in the high Himalayas but the stories of the remaining people and how they were rebuilding their lives after the quake struck triggering a landslide which  buried their homes and families under thousands of tonnes of rocks and boulders, snow and ice.

And then there’s the story of the refugee Waheed Arian who fled to the UK from war-torn Afghanistan. He was expected to become a taxi driver but overcame all odds to study medicine at Cambridge University and has now set up a scheme where British doctors advise medics in Kabul via Skype.

And that is what writers have to do. Find that angle, that particular look at a subject which will stop readers in their tracks.

And today’s journalist has an arsenal of weapons – video, audio, photography, graphics and the written word – to help tell that story.

But whatever medium or selection of media is used – the story is always about people.