Читать книгу Field Guide to Covering Sports - Joe Gisondi - Страница 47

Conflict is the key to storytelling. In games, a player or team wants to beat another. Off the field, a player may be working to improve despite some physical ailments, or a coach could be trying unusual approaches to help the team win. Perhaps a young girl wants to be a professional boxer, even though females usually don’t get that opportunity. Or the story could be about a man who got a lung transplant after a young athlete committed suicide—and how both the girls’ father and recipient of the lung received their “second wind” as they learned how to run and breathe again in their own ways. If you cannot find the conflict, you probably don’t have a story.

Pamela Colloff, who wrote the story about the fired high school basketball coach and whose work has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing series, says the main conflict should be revealed early in any feature. “It’s important to establish what the stakes are in the story pretty early on,” Colloff says. “I’m not talking about a nut graf. I’m talking about giving the reader a reason to read the story. Who cares about a girls’ basketball coach in some small town in Texas? The writer must establish early on why the story’s main character is worthy of the reader’s time.”