Feature Writing Dave Garlock [email protected]. Normally, The Barn is a place where motorists can drive in, buy cold beverages and lots of munchies,

Feature Writing

Dave [email protected]

• Normally, The Barn is a place where motorists can drive in, buy cold beverages and lots of munchies, and drive out.

• But on Tuesday morning it was Not business as usual. The store was robbed.

• As the owner was preparing to open the store, two suspects walked in and one allegedly hit him upside the head with a pistol … He fell over a potato chip rack.

• The Delta Democrat Times (Miss.)

With the sting of a needle in his right leg, Timothy J. McVeigh was sedated, injected with poison and executed by the government he so despised, a quiet end for the man who sent 168 people to their deaths in screams, flames and crushing concrete.

Mr. McVeigh, 33, died with his eyes wide open and staring, and only when his heart stopped did his eyes roll slightly back in his head, breaking the stare that had held the witnesses both here and hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma City.

With the sting of a needle in his right leg, Timothy J. McVeigh was sedated, injected with poison and executed by the government he so despised, a quiet end for the man who sent 168 people to their deaths in screams, flames and crushing concrete. Mr. McVeigh, 33, died with his eyes wide open and staring, and only when his heart stopped did his eyes roll slightly back in his head, breaking the stare that had held the witnesses both here and hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma City.

Get off Interstate 90, off the state highway, off the black-topped county road, and finally go down the gravel track and into the farm land, listening to the power lines sing and the cotton woods moan in the everlasting wind, watching a red-orange pickup a mile away as it crawls like a ladybug

along a parallel road between freshly plowed fields, leaving behind a rising plume of gravel dust, crawling toward the silos and the rooftops that mark the Iowa line.

USE ALL THE SENSES

The drying alfalfa smells like ginger and something else, a sweet, fat odor riding the silky summer breezes with gravel dust and gasoline fumes, riding into the elbow-out side windows of dusty old automobiles.

First the eyes: They are large and blue, the color of a robin’s egg. And if, on a sunny spring day, you look straight into these eyes --- eyes that cannot look back at you --- the sharp April light turns them pale, like the thin blue of a high cloudless sky.

• Much of what he remembers has to be imagined visually first. Like the size and color of his room. “I think it’s kind of big” he says of the small room. “And it’s green,” he says of the deep rose-colored walls.”

• The side of the boy’s face oozes blood. Drops splatter the floor. A red stain spreads through the surgical drape as if someone had spilled a glass of wine on a white tablecloth.

• The sun is eye-level now, making each field a vivid shade of copper, red and orange, a quilt of different colors, but each a distant cousin to river’s syrupy brown.

DO STORIES COME FROM HEAVEN, OR WHAT?

I’ve been sued, and screwed and tattooed.

Jerry Jeff Walker

Sensational lead.Top-notch anecdote.

Profiles start with

GRADE ON THEIR REPORTING MORE THAN WRITING

It takes time to master writing

Boris Yeltsin strips!

• The crowd was sullen until Boris Yeltsin took off his clothes.

• Off came the jacket of his conservative dark suit; off came the tie. The white shirt.

• Then shoes, then socks.• Finally, as thousands watched, the president

of Russia took off his pants.

The perfect man!

• If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition.

• He almost never drools.

A perfect description

• John Kerry’s long angular face has something of the abstraction of a tribal mask. The features are at once stark and exaggerated, and, with the exception of his mouth, none of the parts appear to move.

Choose your favorite verb

• The soldier sporting a buzz cut and a beret is not impressed. His eyes are bulging and his lips are clamped so tight they could be kissing a layer of super glue.

• Blinking is not an option … the assault rifle is in hands the size of trash can lids.

Irony, whimsy, comparisons

Rick Bragg

She bound her ragged bible with scotch tape to keep Corinthians from falling

out.

Rick Bragg

He was a kidnapper, but now he has trouble holding a spoon.

His crimes flit in and out of his memory like flies through a hole in a

screen door.

Back then, before he needed help going to the bathroom, Mr. Cooper was a

dangerous man.

USE MORE COMMAS!

Eliminate periods.

Sand the color of icing sugar

• There’s this sliver of paradise, seven miles long, maybe a half a mile wide, lapped by the Jacuzzi-warm waters of the Gulf Coast. The sand is the color of icing sugar and the water has the clarity of Gordon’s gin.  

bleeding into the rich cobalt blue

• I am surrounded by coconut, mango, jackfruit and cinnamon trees … I can see the soft, white sand … and the turquoise water of the bay bleeding into the rich cobalt blue of the Indian Ocean.

Feeding trout and baby oil water

• Paul Roos kneels on the grassy banks of a creek in the Blackfoot Valley of Montana. It’s fall, and the slanted sunlight bathes the meadow in gold. Feeding trout dimple the creek’s surface, which is smooth and clear and appears as thick as baby oil.

•  

Verbs from the San Diego Zoo

• Please do not annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, nettle, tantalize or ruffle the animals.

THANK YOU!