Dime Transport Story

Jason Kottke pointed to this article about transporting a valuable dime across the country. It's a news item draped in narrative style, but it falters.

I'm rereading William Blundell's The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, a book that I appreciate much more now that I've authored a reasonable number of features. This dime piece isn't really a feature, a sprawling spelunking on a topic, but the lessons from Blundell's book apply to it as well.

Blundell talks about different story structures, and one is a time line, where the action in the story follows a specific chronology. He uses a cattle drive as the framework for a story on true cowboys; Rubenstein uses a red-eye flight to drive the dime piece. But Blundell keeps digressing, using the physical events to lead the reader into more conceptual writing about cowboy life and culture. He does so quickly, but the effect is noticeable. The action doesn't get boring as it does in the dime piece, which just serves it all up to the reader. That would be a good choice for a fast-paced chase sequence, but Rubenstein's piece describes an airplane ride. Blundell's cattle drive is boring, too, but he draws in the reader by doling out the movement. Rubenstein should have mixed the larger issues into the body, skittering away from the flight to look at the valuable dime and its buyer and seller. Or as Blundell says in one of his maxims: Digress often, but never for long

(By the way, Rubenstein may not have had the luxury of column inches to do the story that way.)

Blundell also mentions "tout grafs" such as this one:

But the dime's cross-country trip was the stuff of intrigue, of that there is no mistake. The logistics of moving a $1.9 million dime across the country turn out to be at least as staggering as the notion of paying $1.9 million for a dime.

His view of these in-piece ads? If you have to tell people how intriguing your story is, maybe it's not as obvious as you think. This, of course, is simply "Show; don't tell" in a different guise.