Al's Morning Meeting

courtesy of 'Today'

Every story begins with a "Hey," as in, "Hey, give me your attention."

"You" is the reason why you should care about this story wherever you are.

"See" is the two or three facts you have in your story that nobody else knows.

"So" is why the viewer should care. In other words, "What does this story really mean?"

"When I write stories," Dotson says, "I always write the middle first. Then, if I have to cut the story for time, I cut a couple of the 'sees' and trim the 'so.' "

If he gets stuck for an opening line, Dotson says he often finds the second-best soundbite that he has but cannot use in the story because of time. Then he paraphrases it to make the lead sentence in the piece.

"Robert Frost said a poem beings with a lump in the throat," Dotson says. "Stories should begin with the lump in the throat."

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Dotson says his stories have four main parts:

• Scene setting

• Foreshadowing

• Conflict

• Resolution

He is convinced that any story of any length can include these essential storytelling elements. "Even a 15-second commercial includes all four elements of scene, foreshadowing what is to come, establishing a conflict and resolving the conflict by selling you the product."

Let's see some of Dotson's storytelling. With each story that we will explore in this article, I won't tell you much about it until you have had a chance to watch the piece. Then I will zero in on some of the techniques Dotson uses to make the story shine.

Look at this story -- the tale of a farm boy, a college dropout, who loved to sing. See how Dotson attaches the farm boy to the everyday viewer before the big surprise surfaces:

Charles Taylor

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Dotson said he didn't know about the drug abuse and homelessness until he was well into interviewing Taylor. It was a big turn, a giant surprise in the story. Dotson learned that detail when he asked Taylor what Dotson calls "the non-question question." "I said something like I used to love to sing myself but I never got around to it," to which Taylor said, "I would have started earlier, but I was homeless."

Cha-ching.

The story contains so many "You" moments that connect Taylor with the everyday person. Anyone who sings in the shower can identify with the dreams of an everyday guy who makes it big on stage. I suspect everyone at some level can identify with Taylor's statement "I still fight the feeling of being a fraud." The backstage silliness is telling insight into the inner person, but Dotson does not point it out or fuss over it; he just lets the viewer observe those moments without leading the viewer by the nose.

The resolution moments include his teaching at a school he did not graduate and that great line "Talent got him here; hard work put him on center stage." Dotson hooks into that traditional American value that "hard work will pay off in the end."

Then, at the end of the story, Taylor says that when his stage career is over, he wants to go home to the farm. It is an insight that as magnificent as "Charles" is, "Chuck" will outlive him. You almost detect in the soundbite that Charles looks forward to becoming Chuck again.

auschwitz.dk/ sendler.htm

Let me treat you to a few other great, recent Dotson stories. Irena Sendler is a woman you may not have heard of, but by this fall, the whole world may know her. Dotson explains why:

Irena Sendler

Notice Dotson's "non-question question" -- "She was only 5 feet tall."

Notice too how few visuals Dotson had to work with in this piece. He did not go to Warsaw. He did not witness the meeting between the kids and Sendler. He had still photos and home movies that the kids recorded. He had snippets of a play, and he had interviews. He had some Holocaust file tape.

"Sometimes the challenge is the blessing," Dotson explains. "We did the story from Kansas not Warsaw. We told the story from Kansas, and that's us."

Sendler, by the way, has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. Dotson says the Uniontown, Kan., kids run the Irena Sendler Web site, which connects the children Sendler saved with their birth families.

Think about how Dotson uses his story structure to develop this piece:

Scene setting: Kansas

Foreshadowing: The kids want to know more, so they write to Sendler.

Conflict: How could it be that this woman saved so many lives and yet is unknown to the world? The conflict is one of injustice. The expectation is that a tiny woman could not possibly have stopped the Nazi machine, and yet, in her way, she did.

Dotson's story about Sendler zeros in on the journey across generations. There is a natural conflict between our expectations that kids don't care about history and the reality that they do care about this historic woman. There is a quaintness in the relationship between school children and aging legend.

In effect, the second conflict in the story is one of expectation versus reality.

Resolution: The kids carry the story forward. Remember the soundbite that said, "They are reaching over the walls of bias and prejudice."

Using the usual television story structure, Dotson would have had to tell the story this way:

A 97-year-old woman has been nominated for the Nobel Prize. She lives in Hungary, and she saved a lot of babies during World War II.

Dotson talks about "grace notes" in stories. They are the simple, little visual and audio tools that separate good stories from the best ones.

courtesy of 'Today'

Here is a story that is full of grace notes. Simple things set this story apart. The first grace note is the sound that follows the first sentence of the story:

The rope is the big visual in this story. Dotson shows Ziak walking the rope around the tree, and then Dotson helps the Boston executive walk the same rope around a car. He doesn't mention the car in the copy, but you can see it, and you know how big that tree is compared to something that you may be more familiar with -- a car. It is a brilliant visual, and the writing does not repeat what I can clearly see on tape. It explains the video rather than narrating it. Remember: "Don't say dog. See dog." If you show me a dog in the video, tell me about the dog. Tell me something I would not know about the dog, but don't tell me it is a dog. I can see that. Even though Dotson's stories are a couple of minutes longer than most TV news stories, he still writes sparse copy, not repeating what we already can see.

courtesy of 'Today'

As a treat, I will give you one more fairly recent Dotson story:

Ed Lucas

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This time, I want you to look at the story copy and read the piece line for line. After you have clicked away to read the piece, come back for a wrap-up.

Dotson says many other journalists covered the wedding, but they covered it as an event, not as a story. "Don't drain the drama from the story at the top," Dotson says. "The wedding is the end of the story, not the beginning."

The grace notes include the fact that Lucas took his vision-impaired wife to a movie for their first date. "I can hear what's going on," Lucas said. "When they're not talking, I know they're either walking or kissing. I can usually figure that out for myself."

Dotson's grace note question -- "Was it love at first, you know?" -- was a grace note moment.

The story ends with a grace note line that hangs in the viewer's ear: "the day a blind man stepped to the plate and won the game of life."

If you ask Dotson how journalists today can survive against cell phone photographers and YouTubers, he has a simple answer. "Tell stories. Make the stories include 'Hey,' 'You,' 'See,' 'So.'

"Be different from everything else out there. The viewer is sitting on your knee. Spin a yarn. Tell them a story."

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.