Animate the Trend

This week’s magazine features one of the more challenging types of features to write: the trend story. This genre doesn’t fit neatly into our typical mental categories for features. Everyone is familiar with the profile, the breaking news report, the travel piece. A trend story isn’t any of those.

Trend writers isolate streams or channels of thought, movement, or action and try to figure out how individual details swim within those streams. They can talk about leadership styles, school acceptance policies, changing attitudes toward alternative medicine, intergenerational conflict. Usually these writers are big-picture thinkers who see larger implications in smaller stories and place those events in a more global, societal type of frame. This type of writer can take those three different discussions you’ve been hearing in varying versions at shul, simchahs, and the office, and explain how the various arguments are really part of one comprehensive issue.

If you have that “big picture” brain and you’re writing this type of story, however, you shouldn’t forget about the other tools in the writer’s box. Your focus is the trend, but you still want the current factor of a news story and the facts and figures of an “explainer” type of piece. Your story is stronger and more compelling when it revolves around some current development, not just a discussion of ear infections in children (actually, that’s always current). And without the stats and numbers, there’s not much authority — it’s just coffee room talk.

But even when you have a mastery of the issues, a current hook, and your math adds up, there’s still another game-changing element, and that is using people — real live human beings — to animate the piece.