How to write a 2600 word feature on something you don’t really know about
Okay -- you have one month to write a 2600 word feature article on drilling rigs. How do you do it?
That was the problem I was confronted with over the summer break, and it was something I relished instead of cowering from -- despite knowing next to nothing about drilling rigs.
Writing about specialised information for an audience who knows way more about the industry than I do is something I’ve made a career out of.
From resources, small business, to advertising, I’ve managed to develop the ability to provide audiences who know a lot fresh ideas -- but I’m hardly unique.
The work of any journalist is to identify what their audience wants to know, and find that information however they can, and I’m lucky enough to have had training in that.
Combined with a decade of experience talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of things, I’ve managed to make the task of producing in-depth thoughts about subjects I know nothing about less daunting than it seems.
This is how.
The bottom of the mountain
The pitch from the editor came via email while I was in Japan recently, and was precisely three lines long.
It was broad, meaning that I had the freedom to take the piece in whichever direction I chose, but freedom can be a hindrance.
When you’re about to scale a mountain, a path up is always appreciated -- but I didn’t get that.
So how do you start structuring something when you have no idea what you’re going to get from interviews or research?
You do a placeholder sketch.
For me, it looked like this:
Intro [300 words]
Overarching issues
#1 300 words
#2 300 words
#3 300 words
In-depth issue #1 [600 words]
In-depth issue #2 [600 words]
Conclusion [300 words]
Breaking a task into smaller segments helps alleviate the absolute dread-terror of confronting a 2600 word piece.
My idea was to essentially take the temperature of the industry, to write about the issues its facing and about some of the potential solutions.
I also kept it nice and vague, because without knowing what issues they’re facing it’s a bit tough to do too much more.
That’s what the next phase is for.
The lesson: break down huge challenges into small chunks
A wild Friday night reading about 457 visa restrictions
Doing research before you reach out to people for interviews is vital.
It gives you a few leads on who’s spoken to the media before and who might be good for a quote or two, and it gives you insight into what’s been written before.
As a writer, you want to be writing something fresh and unique, and something which isn’t just a rehash of other stuff floating around.
Writing something unique is harder, but more rewarding creatively.
For this article, it was fairly difficult though.
Being a fairly niche topic, most of the writing about the industry was locked away behind various paywalls (because a specialised audience will actually pay for news about their industry!) -- meaning I didn’t have a whole lot to go on.
But, my experience writing about resources and businesses in general led me to a few topics.
I knew, for instance, that there’s always a mad scramble for rigs every year. I knew that talent is a perpetual issue for the industry. I knew that the drilling industry is essentially a service industry for mining companies.
So, enough to go on, but not really enough to get cracking.
The question was, how could I hope to flesh this out into something that isn’t just surface-level drivel?
The drilling peak body was a great place to start.
The lesson: research is key to making a unique contribution
Playing telephone
Virtually all industries have a peak body which takes dues from members to help advance their interests and advocate industry positions.
So if you’re looking for insight into what a particular industry is thinking about, they’re a good place to start.
I started by talking to the peak industry CEO, purposely asking open questions to draw broad insight.
An open question is essentially a question that can’t be answered with a binary statement.
For example, ‘do you dream at night?’ is a closed question because it can be answered with a yes or no, but ‘what do you dream about at night?’ is an open question because it prompts further discussion.
By asking broad questions to a person who is paid to present a broad range of opinions, I was able to give shape to some of the burning issues the industry is thinking about.
For example, we talked about the outlook for drilling, the quest for talent, and the relationship between miner and driller and how that’s shifted over the years.
It was a great starting point to help me out.
But while the interview offered a top-down view of the industry, for the piece to be truly reflective it needed bottom-up perspectives -- and that basically involved cold-calling a bunch of drillers during the festive season.
This is where the perseverance of a journalist comes in handy.
Of the 11 companies I reached out to for an interview, I secured two interviews with the head of a large drilling company and the head of a small drilling company.
I was able to touch on some of the issues I had fleshed out during my initial interview with the peak body, to see whether they were feeling the same pain points.
For example, what were they doing to help secure talent? How was their order book looking? What are the expectations placed on them by customers?
By starting out broad, I was able to get an idea of some of the issues at play -- and then by narrowing down into the individual experience of drillers I was able to demonstrate that these were issues affecting drillers on the ground.
One of the more famous pieces in journalism you invariably learn about in J-school is the interview the New York Herald Tribune did with the man who dug JFK’s grave for $3.01 an hour -- Clifton Pollard.
It offered a totally new perspective on a national tragedy, and something I try to keep in mind while writing a wide-ranging piece.
Always bring it back to a human perspective.
If you know very little about something you’re writing about, it also helps ground the topic in a human experience - something we can all empathise with.
Once I had three interviews in the bag, I was ready to start writing. Well, with one teensie step before writing...
The lesson: Go broad, and then go narrow
The transcribing. Oh God, the transcribing
The absolute worst part of any interview is the transcribing you have to do afterwards.
If I were on a daily newspaper I would tend towards scribbling down notes with key quotes so I could quickly and efficiently turn around an article.
But because I wanted to seek out broad perspectives rather than get particular information, I decided to record the call so the interview could be much more of a conversation than a Q&A.
A Q&A would be asking set questions, and not deviating from that. If you’re short on time, it’s the most effective approach.
But while I still write out questions, it’s not because I want to ask those particular questions: it’s more to get a handle on the shape of a conversation before I have it.
For example, a jazz quartet will know the general shape of a piece before they play it, but there is room specifically carved out for improvisation before returning to the theme.
Yes, I am Ryan Gosling and I just white-splained jazz to you.
But, this approach also means you’ll have to transcribe three separate half-hour interviews -- which is just about the worst thing on the planet.
AI transcribers, unfortunately, still aren’t word-perfect, and transcription services are charged in $USD -- meaning it costs an arm and a leg right now.
Transcribing is something which is very easy to get distracted from -- because it’s monotonous and boring work, and there’s literally the whole internet there while you do it.
Sadly, there’s no tip or trick to transcribing.
It sucks.
But what it does offer you is the opportunity to look at the details of the interview subject’s answers and give you an opportunity to find things you may have glossed over in the moment.
For example, an all-too real revelation you might have while transcribing is ‘why did I interrupt my subject here?’ or ‘why didn’t I follow-up on this here?’.
Quite often these moments prove revelatory and provide fodder for further exploration.
The lesson: The devil is always in the detail
The writing -- AKA, the fun part
Once I’ve transcribed the interviews, I’ve got all my research plus about 9000 words in interview text to go through.
So, how do I go about wrangling all of that into an article?
Remember when I started out and did a placeholder sketch?
I can now fill that out with particular topics, and I colour-code them.
I then go through my interviews and highlight particular bits of text with colours which correspond to the topics.
I then isolate that text and look for dynamic quotes, something with a bit of colour and is likely to leap off the page.
Once I’ve done a bit of copy-pasting and pasted the relevant bits into the rough template I created, I’m left with a piece which is 3200 words.
That means I have to reduce my piece by just under 20 percent.
Now it comes time to kill your darlings -- deleting anything which doesn’t help drive the story forward. You may be in love with a particular quote or clever line you’ve come up with, but if it doesn’t help the reader understand the topic then it’s essentially useless.
For example, one of my shortcomings as a writer is that I tend to duplicate points.
As in, write a paragraph and make essentially the same point in a different way in the next paragraph...
The editing process helps me with this, and I’m slightly better now (after a decade) than I was.
With the first draft out of the way, it’s time for tweaking.
The lesson: kill anything that doesn’t help your reader understand a topic
Knowing when to put the pen down
This is a question I managed to explore a bit on an myob podcast, but how do you know when something is done?
When you’re given the opportunity to tweak, and re-tweak, it’s easy to think that the piece is never truly done.
After all, TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) lost the 250,000 word manuscript for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, wrote a fresh 400,000 version from scratch; and then an improved 350,000 word version; an abridged 250,000 version; and then several other editions before settling on the 130,000 word edition made specifically so it could be circulated to the public.
But, I had a deadline to hit -- which meant the rounds of revisions were kept to a minimum.
It’s easy to think the more polish you’re able to apply to a piece the better -- but this isn’t always the case.
Sometimes imperfection is the spice of the piece. Hunter Thompson isn’t the best writer in the world, but his writing remains fresh and urgent in our collective consciousness because it’s rough.
Can you imagine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with polish?
Having too much time to edit can also result in a tyranny of choice, where you end up changing things just for the sake of changing things.
I’ve always found a great approach is to do two editing sessions -- one a day after I’ve written the first draft so the intent and process is fresh in my mind.
Then, I walk away for a week (if possible) and look at it with fresh eyes. I often find this second round the most productive, as I’m able to generate intellectual distance from the piece.
I find myself in a much better space to kill my darlings.
But if I undertook further revisions, I’d start to double-guess myself.
So, I leave it at two revisions: one close to the first draft and one after I’ve gotten some distance from it.
The lesson: Too much editing is a bad thing
How to go deep on something you don’t know about
I now know a hell of a lot more about drilling rigs and the business of drilling than I ever thought possible -- but I’m not some unique creature.
You can learn about drilling rigs, or anything else, as well.
I’ve taken a decade to hone the following process:
Break down a big problem into individual components
Research existing resources on the topic
Identify who can give you a top-down perspective on it
Identify who can give you a bottom-up perspective on it
Interview and transcribe
Write a first draft
Tweak once, and then tweak again a week later
This may not be immediately applicable to your work, but there may be a time that you’re called upon to investigate something you’re not strictly au fait with.
Taking a structured approach to illustrating any problem that seems a gargantuan unknown really helps.
What that structure looks like to you is on you, but I hope at least I’ve got your brainbox mulling over your approach should you be called upon to do something similar.
But, this is just one man’s very long-winded rambling -- have you ever had to write about something you have no idea about? How did you do it?