Feature Writing

Feature writing combines the literary craft of fiction with the fact-gathering skills of the journalist, historian, and documentary filmmaker.

The best feature stories are both timely and timeless, using a narrative as a vehicle to touch upon something expansive, some universal truth or subtle meaning.

Feature stories can take many forms.

In this course, we focus on two: a first-person personal narrative (2,000 words) and a third-person reconstructed narrative (3,000 words).

A sequence of weekly writing exercises build up to both.

Students learn the publishing process from pitch to publication, with emphasis on immersion reporting, interviewing, story structure, editing, and fact-checking.

Students also learn organizational techniques essential for stories with many sources and tools that enable them to reconstruct scenes they are not able to witness as a writer.

The end goal of this course is to complete and polish two feature stories to submit to a target publication.