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Learn for yourself the secret of a storytelling master.
In the next couple weeks I’ll wrap the reporting on a feature for The Atlantic I’ve been working on for months. It’s a story that spans generations and settings and with a central character, a lawyer, whose life influences everyone else’s around him. With all those storylines and perspectives, the thing could get unwieldy when I start to write it. My only guard against such sprawl is the Gary Smith Rule.
You probably know of Smith, but in case not: He wrote features at Sports Illustrated for 30 years, re-imagining and expanding what a magazine story could do, how it could read, the insights it could offer. He influenced generations of writers and well beyond sports. Buy his collection if you don’t have it, or read the story that made me want to write when I was 17, Smith’s profile of golfer David Duval.
Smith’s rule is basically how he tried to attack every story he wrote. Paraphrased, the rule goes like this:
Every person has a central conflict to their lives and a daily manifestation of that conflict. Find the central conflict, find its daily manifestation, and what you’ve actually found is that person’s soul.
Let’s take the David Duval story above. It’s about David’s sick brother Brent and the bone-marrow…
