![]() Gould, unslept and unbarbered, was in town for a couple of days from his home in Toronto. Miss King is a statuesque, super confident, cheery former news anchor with a perfect face and perfect teeth, auburn hair worn straight to the collar and the immediately chummy, quick-talking eager breathy rhythms of the Rosie Barbara Katie sisterhood.Ī gracious, jolly, pink-cheeked man wearing toroise-shell glasses and a tuxedo He carried a couple of small contax cameras and took photographs of his own photographs and of people looking at them Testino is 44, a good natured, fleshy, large faced loosely put together, six plus two inch footer who was handsomely attired in a Bergere dark green coat, a Charvet painterly green shirt open at the collar and black English broughans. His face was freshly sunburned, and he had on a navy blue worsted suit, a white shirt with a button down collar, and a blue and silver striped necktie held by a brass pin, in the shape of a pt boat that was inscribed “Kennedy 60. His gray suit was uncreased, a yellow print Hermes necktie neatly done under his chin. His own face cool and dry and cheerful, under a snowy thick man of hair. Class of 40), keeps a long cigar in his mouth (“I’m a chewer, not a smoker”), dresses conservatively (navy blue blazer, matching pants, too tight shirts, bright knit ties), and tears around the metropolian area in a telephone equipped car from one to another of his three offices (Forest Hills, West 5th St., Battery Park City) and to his buildings.Ī genial forty three year old six footer with a graying beard He wears silver framed aviator style bifocals, sports on his little finger a gold college ring with an almost dime sized ruby in the middle. I culled the following from profiles that Ross included in her most recent collection, Reporting Back: Like Talese, Lillian Ross of the New Yorker is another writer who’s adept at bringing her subjects to life with vividly detailed and carefully crafted descriptions. Bad News” by Gay Talese in Fame and Obscurity. The obituary writer, a short and rather shy man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipeįrom “Mr. I find that even copying them out (being sure to note the source) helps me see the way the writer revealed the person and how I might do it with another subject. I collect examples of physical descriptions that I admire and study them for content, tone, pacing, even sentence length. Rhea Borja described a female minister this way: “She’s a woman with a friendly and open air, more comfortable in Birkenstocks and summer dresses than the vestments of her trade.”Ī Prescription for Putting People on the Page Rebecca Catalanello could have simply written, “Jason Myron, 8.” Instead, she wrote, “Jason Myron, a freckle-faced 8-year-old,” and evoked an idelible image of a child’s face. If these prizewinning examples seem beyond your reach, let me demonstrate how beginning journalists (students in Poynter summer fellowship program–can inject humanity into their stories in small ways: He is kind of thin for a football player, with a gangly walk, dark hair that falls onto his forehead, a thick neck, crooked teeth, a few pimples. His beard needed trimming, and the T-shirt he wore was faded and too small, but there was something proud and impenetrable about him.Ī person can be sketched quickly and with powerful effect with a few brushstrokes, as Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press did with his portrait of a football player and convicted rapist from Best Newspaper Writing 1996: ![]() Petersburg Times series, “Metal to Bone”, Anne Hull shows how it can be done in this brief but evocative description of a father and son:Ĭarl’s skin was black-gold, and his eyelashes curled over his eyes, just like Eugene’s. In her essay, “Don’t forget the “Ordinary” People,” she wrote, “If novelists are faced with the artistic challenge of getting people who are not alive to seem alive, the journalist faces essentially the same problem: how do you make people who are alive in reality come alive on paper.” ![]() Madelaine Blais, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, captured the essence of this challenge in The Complete Book of Feature Writing. It takes a little more effort to zero in on the physical attributes that distinguish one person from another, but that’s one of the writer’s gifts that makes storytelling such a special experience. “Janice Richardson, 35, advertising account manager at Hathaway Communications” or “William Masterson, 22, of 568B Crowne Court Apartments.” In most newspaper stories, and even some magazine pieces, people are little more than a name, a title, age and address.
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