Knowing Narratives
By Jose Franco

Features writer Lane DeGregory is always in search of that next great story. She's a people person who likes hanging out with the fat man at the fair -- the kind of guy who claimed he was 600 pounds when he was actually a slimmer 425 pounds.

Speaking of weight, one time, she stood by a public scale and asked people what they had in their grocery cart. This was after they had weighed themselves. On another occasion, she watched a couple at a Christmas tree farm search for the perfect tree and then surprised them by inviting herself over to watch them decorate it.

The award-winning features writer for The St. Petersburg Times and a speaker at the 2003 Neiman Program on Narrative Journalism spoke on Knowing Narratives at the 58th annual American Association of Sunday and Features Editors Conference in New Orleans.

DeGregory, who averages 100 feature stories per year, is a mom, a wife and a journalist. She's the kind of person who likes talking to strangers. "I see stories everywhere I go and I think everyone has a story," she told the group.

She writes about quirky people and makes readers like them.

"I am looking at what may be perceived as weird but finding how human they really are," she said. Her advice includes:

• Ride the bus and talk to people. Hear their stories.
• Give your reporter a day to go to a part of town the reporter hasn’t visited.
• Read the walls. One of her stories developed from reading the classified ads.
• Instead of covering a ribbon-cutting ceremony, why not find out what people are doing to get ready for the ceremony?
• Sometimes her stories change over the course of an interview. For example, a story about a teenage racecar driver became a father-daughter story. A feature about a singer became a story about loneliness. “What's the universal connection?" she asked the audience.
• Following the workshop, DeGregory discussed her writing style. "I write my leads in the shower or while I am doing the dishes," she said. "I do timelines so I can know chronologically what happened."

She gives herself at least two days for the reporting of a features story. The first day she gets her reporting done and the second day she soaks everything in.

DeGregory is currently working on a feature about a little girl whose face was scarred by a pit bull. How did she find the story? She was writing a story on leeches and one thing led to the other.

Jose Franco is an entertainment writer for the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, S.C. He is a 2004 AASFE Diversity Fellow.