The Live-In Approach to Storytelling
The Live-In: Feature writers often deploy a technique called the "live-in." This is a moment that takes readers into the life of the subject, and it demands that the journalist witness an unguarded, telling moment in the subject's life. Here's a photo project that developed over the course of nine years.
It’s Tuesday night following a Sunday night road loss to the Oregon Ducks, and Connie Bone has prepared a dinner of barbecue pulled chicken, rice and broccoli. There’s no sports talk, just sharing stories and talking. A Pac-12 Networks game plays in the background.
Video feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu10QswH5f8
Here's another example of a live-in scene from this story on survivors of the Great Depression:
In the early hours before dawn, Thelma May Beets shuffled across the cold linoleum floor for a weekly inspection of the trunk next to her bed.
Her husband built the rust-colored tool chest when he came home from World War II. Now it is full of food: sugar, pasta, soup, oats, crackers, creamer.
Nearly blind, she reviewed her inventory by touch -- peanut butter jars with ridged lids, ground coffee rustling inside a can like dried oak leaves blown in the wind.
"If you like to eat, you better save some," said the 91-year-old widow, her fingers spotted with age and curled by arthritis.
With a feature, you need at least one long, face-to-face interview with your subject. You also want to observe this person outside the formal interview. Can you go with a farmer to their fields, an attorney to a court case, a homeowner as they empty the house during a foreclosure?
MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.
Here's another example of a live-in scene from this story on survivors of the Great Depression:
In the early hours before dawn, Thelma May Beets shuffled across the cold linoleum floor for a weekly inspection of the trunk next to her bed.
Her husband built the rust-colored tool chest when he came home from World War II. Now it is full of food: sugar, pasta, soup, oats, crackers, creamer.
Nearly blind, she reviewed her inventory by touch -- peanut butter jars with ridged lids, ground coffee rustling inside a can like dried oak leaves blown in the wind.
"If you like to eat, you better save some," said the 91-year-old widow, her fingers spotted with age and curled by arthritis.
With a feature, you need at least one long, face-to-face interview with your subject. You also want to observe this person outside the formal interview. Can you go with a farmer to their fields, an attorney to a court case, a homeowner as they empty the house during a foreclosure?
MEDFORD, Ore. — Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.
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