COMM 337: Journaling on Steve Lopez / IN CLASS / REQUIRED

Blog the following and be ready to discuss in class --

Did you ever wonder why news people always call the stuff they write a "story?" Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times has a gift for narrative, for story, and his stories are always based on good reporting. Always.

Let's see how it works. Lopez has been assigned to write color sidebars about the fires in Southern California. (What are color sidebars?) The assignment is a natural for him, since he writes the "Points West" column for The Times and is considered a newsman's newsman ... a guy who knows how to tell a story. In the paper's directory of Lopez' recent columns he has not only stuff about the fires but also a wide variety of stories about people. To one degree or another, they're all based on narrative. Let's find out how he does it.

On your blog, I want you to choose on of his stories and analyze it for narrative technique -- which is just a fancy word for story-telling, right? Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" (pages 152-55), choose one of Lopez' stories in the LA Times and analyze it for his mastery of the story-teller's art.

For example, if I were writing up the story we looked at Wednesday, the one where he interviewed former San Diego fire chief Jeff Bowman about the brush fires, I would focus on the dialog and description. I would notice his use of first person (no matter what they did to the capital "I" on the typewriters at Murray's old paper in Boston)! How many other narrative techniques do you see in this brief quote?

About 8 a.m., Bowman gets a call from his mother's nursing home.

They're evacuating the residents.

"I'll go get her," he tells Denise, and we pile into his truck for a short ride to a nearby neighborhood called Hidden Meadows.

This, I think is pure storytelling, pure narrative. The first person puts us on the scene. There's dialog. The present tense lends immediacy. So do the very short paragraphs. There are bits like that all the way through the story. What other narrative techniques does Lopez rely on? There's a list in Murray.

Your assignment: Pick another story. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find in the story. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze.