There are some stories I haven’t shared. They might carry an emotional sting, but they are educational. I want to learn from the hard parts, and, in most cases, I find it most challenging to tell a person’s story.
I just don’t want to mess up their reputation or their relationships. Plus, their personal lives can be so delicate. I don’t want to hurt them.
When I first started in journalism, I was focused on telling a powerful story, one that would win a Pulitzer Prize and other awards. My study of other journalists’ works led me to believe that the greatest stories were loaded with pain, struggle, hardships and more.
So that’s what I went after, and I went after it hard.
In college, I took a journalism course taught by a Pulitzer-Prize winner, and the goal was to interview one person eight times. We essentially did a deep dive into every aspect of this person’s life (in school, in relation to religion, in the family, outside the family), and we packaged that together into one feature-length article. It seemed like a great idea, and the person I chose to interview was already an acquaintance. So our chemistry made me feel pretty confident about the final outcome of the project.
From my earlier conversations with this person, I knew there was a history of a not-so-great relationship in high school. The focus of the story was her experience with melanoma cancer, but the rough relationship seemed like such a defining moment of her childhood.
I kept asking for more and more details about that relationship, and I was trying to piece all the details — the who, what, when, where and why — together. I wanted to FEEL her pain, so I could help her. The individual was clearly having a hard time in our interviews, and it was getting harder for me.
I persisted … until she backed out of the project. It was too much.
After I unraveled everything that happened, I finally found the lesson I was supposed to learn: I was focusing too much on the trauma and not the person.
Many videos focus on the pain a person experiences. That’s fine and important. I do believe a person’s pain is only part of who they are. I am not my broken bones, nor am I defined by this one bad interview.
That’s why we need to look at how that pain, per se, transformed their life. AND, how was your organization involved in that transformation? How did they get better because of you? There’s your story.
As Steven Spielberg said, “People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.”
When you look at how the person grew as a result of pain, you have a story with a middle and an end!
Would you like to make your next video project easier? Hop on my calendar, and we’ll get you taken care of.
