Rolling Stone magazine and the power of ONE

Rolling Stone made the comeback of the year among U.S. magazines.

The legendary music and entertainment publication was slumping toward irrelevancy until reporter Michael Hastings wrote his landmark article The Runaway General. That brought a rapid end to the storied career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

That’s what happens when military men talk smack about their commanding officers – especially the commander-in-chief.

More the point for the purpose of this blog post, Hastings’ story was also a lesson in one of the most important rules of storytelling. As the late newspaper writing coach and Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Murray preached: “Don’t write about the army, write about one soldier.”

Or, in this case, one general.

Of course, Murray wasn’t just talking about military stories. The storytelling principle of writing about a person rather than an organization transcends industries and categories.

Another Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Tom French of the St. Petersburg Times, meant basically the same thing when he said, “The more macroscopic you want your story to be, the more microscopic the focus must be.”

There’s no better way to tell a story than through the eyes and experiences of a single individual. Here’s why. When you write about an organization – an army, a business, an industry, a city – you report and write at a level so remote the story lacks intimacy. Readers often have difficulty relating to that kind of high-altitude reporting because sentient flesh-and-blood beings don’t readily connect to bundles of statistics, policies, bureaucratic concepts and so on.

Meaningful connection comes from relating to the experiences of fellow human beings.

Let’s take Michael Hasting’s story as an example. It begins like so:

“How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies.

Being a former newspaper writing coach myself, I highly recommend against starting a story with a quotation. Still, my point is this: Right off the bat Hastings is focused on McChrystal, his situation, his emotions.

Though McChrystal is the focus, it doesn’t prevent Hastings from snapping on the wide-angle lens and showing a broader picture of the general’s situation. That’s illustrated by the story’s next few sentences.

Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

Nor does it prevent him from enriching the story by introducing the people around the general in paragraphs two through five.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

“Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?”

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

Along the way, the introduction of new characters and their relationships and interactions with McChrystal contributes to the general’s character development – however unseemly it might be in this circumstance.

Let’s also acknowledge that McChrystal was the obvious focus for Hastings’ reportage. You don’t get a month riding shotgun with the general in charge of the Afghanistan war efforts and focus on ancillary people and situations. That would obviously be a dumb move.

But using person-focused reporting isn’t so obvious in most cases – especially in business writing where the tendency is to write about companies, products, services, finances, trends, competitors, etc.

This is not necessary.

The next time your boss asks you to write a report about the division you manage, focus your report on the individual employee or customer that embodies the theme of your report. Your boss will more readily connect with the subject matter and will probably appreciate that you’ve shined a light on one of the company’s people or customers.

When you’re asked to give a speech about the company’s new breakthrough product, build your speech around a story focused on the team leader that invented the new product. That doesn’t mean you don’t also include other team members, but introduce them based on their relationship to the team’s leader. That way your story maintains its focus and continuity. The audience will find more rapture in a story about human brilliance and ingenuity than a bunch of product specifications or marketing brochure pap.

Think singular focus while always remembering that the trunk of the tree provides an opportunity to sprout many branches.

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