The original Thanksgiving narrative is a semi-true tale about a harvest festival between American colonists and native Americans in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Reportedly, there was no pumpkin pie, only boiled pumpkin. Meh. The narrative usually stops there, leaving out subsequent massacres and wars.

Anyway, the key storyline was about different people and cultures coming together to celebrate a successful harvest. So that’s the original mythological narrative, the basis for the national holiday.

The second narrative is the modern notion of Thanksgiving, what I’d call the “Rockwell Narrative”: the idealized version of the modern American Thanksgiving dinner: a big happy family, together around a perfectly-set table, smiling as they prepare to devour a massive roast turkey. Gone is the original idea of different cultures and groups coming together; Rockwell’s Thanksgiving is private.

This iconic 1943 image provides the idea of Thanksgiving that advertisers, greeting card companies, and supermarkets want us to try and recreate (with their help). The narrative of the modern Thanksgiving is the celebration of family and abundance.

Growing up, this tidy, white-tablecloth vision of Thanksgiving drove a lot of frenzied preparations in our house: carefully aligning placesettings, using silver utensils, dusting off the China gravy boat, rushing out to various supermarkets, hunting for the “right” rolls to serve in a big, napkin-lined basket. When I’d elbow my way through the crowds at on Thanksgiving morning at Ralphs and Vons, I was one of countless Americans caught up in the annual, frenzied push to recreate Rockwell’s idea of the perfect family meal.

Today, Thanksgiving seems to have evolved to a more indivialized storyline. For many, it’s about “homecoming,” braving the airports, the Interstates, or turnpikes to make it back home for a holiday. For some, the Thanksgiving story is about eating, watching football, and drifting into comatose state. For others, it’s about a less glamorized idea of family: hoping to simply get along and avoid conflict (countless movies and sit-coms dramatize this side of the holiday).

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Passover narrative, and how my take on it has shifted over the years. Thanksgiving shares a lot with Passover: appreciation for one’s history, gratitude for collective good fortune, and a very big meal.

Compared to the mega-commercialization of Christmas, Thanksgiving still seems relatively unspoiled. The basic narrative remains intact: once a year, we try to slow down and celebrate our good fortune with others.

Considering all the other messages we get in our culture, that’s not a bad story to tell.

My story on paternity leave, “Odd Man Out” was published on Babble today. I’m pretty happy with it. The editors at Babble left it pretty much intact.

The story talks about why so few men take paternity leave, even those who work for companies that will give them paid time off. It also touches on my own experience taking six weeks off from work last year with my (then) five-month-old daughter Isabella. Check it out.

One of the writers I most admire is Malcolm Gladwell, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the author of the Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. His insightful writing explores big ideas through deep research and reporting, linking together seemingly disconnected events and ideas. In one piece, he ties together the biblical story of David and Goliath, Lawrence of Arabia, and a girls basketball team in northern California… and it makes sense.

His most recent New Yorker article, “Offensive Play” asks the question “how different are dogfighting and football.” The piece is alarming, fascinating, and effective. It doesn’t just try to provoke the reader with a provocative comparison for the take of being sensationalistic: Gladwell reveals that football, at almost every level, is much more brutal and damaging than most of us fans would like to realize. He doesn’t just make an argument: he tells stories, and builds a case, piece by piece.  Gladwell would have made a fine prosecutor.

Tim Wendel,  one of my mentors at Johns Hopkins, once advised us that when we see an article that blows us away, we should go back and rip the story apart, dissecting it to see how the author put it together and why it works so well.  Wendel described how earlier in his career, he literally cut up good nonfiction magazine stories into chunks of paper and spread those snippets out on a table to study how it all fit together.

So let me briefly do my dissection of “Offensive Play” here.  First here’s a brief outline of the piece:

• Scene: former NFL player Kyle Turley melts down at a bar
• Description and background on Turley
• Turley’s experience isn’t an anomaly: background and description of other NFL players who suffered from similar mental and physical problems after their careers
• Quotes and more first-hand stories from Turley
• Shift to background and summary of Michael Vick dogfighting trial and sentencing, followed by his recent reinstatement into the league
• Background on dogfighting
• Detailed, graphic description of a dog fight
• Transition: back from dogfighting to football: what is a “morally acceptable” sport?
• Shifts to medical research on dementia & Alzheimer’s; physical indications of neurological problems caused by head trauma
• Introduces researcher who found connections between ex-boxers and ex-football players and brain injuries
• Introduces second researcher who further found links between football players and high frequencies of neurological disorders; symptoms described echo those of Turley in the opening scene
• Description of how findings of symptoms match Turley’s breakdown
• Description of second researcher & her office.  Would she advise her own son to play in the NFL?  She’d tell him no, “Not if you want to have a life after football.”
• Transition: moving from research of sports injury risks and how other sports handle them. Is the injury risk inherent to the sport, like dogfighting, or can it be reduced?
• Example of how NASCAR improve safety after death of Dale Earnhardt
• Background, history on football and long-standing concerns about injury risks
• Examination of football injury research at UNC; how researchers determine that a routine tackle or a block can be the physical equivalent of being in a car accident
• Key take-away from UNC research: it’s not just one or two big hits that damage players; it’s the cumulative effect of countless “little” hits as well
• Also: Helmets can only help so much:  players today are too big, too fast
• Transition:  back to Vick’s surviving dogs; how the most prized dogs were bred & trained for “gameness” and willingness to fight
• Transition: linking the “gameness” of dogs to the “gameness” of NFL players;  back to Turley and the pressure to play “all out” despite injuries; anecdotes from final, painful days of his career
• Transition: Ira Casson, chair of an NFL committee on brain injuries, and the limits of what can be done
• Closing thought that the sport won’t be changed or eliminated any time soon, as so many fans love the sport, in spite of what it does to the players
• Echoes his closing thought with a quote from a book on dogfighting that describes the passion of the spectators

The story is just short of 8000 words, but it’s a fast, gripping read.  Why does it work?

First, reporting matters. Gladwell doesn’t just sit at his laptop and argue against the brutality of football and warn that it does lasting damage to players.  Above all else, the story is reported well.  He talks to three medical and science experts, two former football players, a trainer who is trying to rehabilitate Vick’s former dogs, and an expert on the business of NFL football.  He also digs into the history of football, the nature of dog fighting, NASCAR safety issues, and the Michael Vick case.  He can quote both what the NFL commissioner said about Vick and what Teddy Roosevelt said about the sport in 1905.  In short, Gladwell dug through old documents, talked to people, and asked a lot of questions to collect the raw materials for his story.

Second, scenes move the story.  The piece is loaded with science, research data, and historical information, but scenes drive the narrative.  By my count, there are at least twelve scenes in the story, moments that he vividly recreates for the reader.

Third, characters count.  Gladwell doesn’t merely quote the people he interviews; he shows them. The reader gets a vivid idea of what Turley looks and sounds like.  We see researcher McKee’s office, which includes a statuette of Brett Favre on a shelf.  We don’t just hear about Vick’s dogs; Gladwell shows them playing with a trainer in Utah.  All of this humanizes and deepens the story.  The human characters put a face on the scientific, medical side of the story: he uses Turley’s experience as bookends to the piece.

Finally, he shows more than he tells.  Gladwell doesn’t rail against football or dogfighting; rather, he lays out the evidence and the connections and largely lets them speak for themselves.  He closes with the disturbing idea that we hate dogfighting because of the suffering and harm it does to the dogs, but love football, despite the apparent long-term suffering it inflicts on many of its players.  He paints the connections that he discovers, but doesn’t overstep his role and hammer those findings into his audience.

Gladwell leaves the readers in a troubling spot: he doesn’t provide any real solution to the problem, but nonetheless makes the compelling case that the sport is possibly every bit as cruel and harmful as dog fighting.  He shows that the reader complicit in the problem, then leaves them on their own to decide what should happen next.

There’s a lot to learn and know about the craft of writing well. There are the literary building blocks, or as Roy Peter Clark puts it, writing tools: things like word choice, structure, description, rhythm, transitions, details.

But then there are the more technical, marketing-minded elements of the business, the stuff that separates unknown bloggers from people who can quit their day jobs and live off the income from full-time blogging: search-engine optimization, social network marketing, and, finally, the art and science of writing good headlines.

The latter raises some interesting questions for the writer. Brian Clark at CopyBlogger advocates writing headlines first, then drafting a story to fit it. In short: start with a catchy, marketable, DIGG-able headline, then invent story to go underneath it:

Start with the headline first.

You’ll of course have a basic idea for the subject matter of your blog post, article, free report or sales letter. Then, simply take that basic idea and craft a killer headline before you write one single word of the body content.

Why?

Your headline is a promise to prospective readers. Its job is to clearly communicate the benefit that you will deliver to the reader in exchange for their valuable time.

His series of posts on effective headline writing includes tutorials like “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work” and “7 Reasons Why List Posts Will Always Work.” He also advocates the “The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration“.

His suggestions make sense, especially if your goal is to maximize clicks and boost your profile. It also feels somewhat mercenary and transactional. Perhaps its the genre of blogging he promotes, but it seems to reduce all writing to a “what’s in it for me?” exchange.

Maybe he’s right. I’ve tried his method on some of my posts at Examiner.com with mixed results. I’ve used some of his “headline formulas”: some worked, some failed miserably.

Overall, I think the approach is dangerous. Yes, your headline should tease readers to check out your piece. And yes, it should provide a “promise” to the readers that if they read your work, it will be worthwhile. But if writers make it their routine to start with a search-engine-optimized, formula-driven headline, won’t it often lead to equally unoriginal and formulaic writing?

There’s nothing wrong with maximizing your chances at attracting a big readership through smart use of the web, but if you start with those goals in mind, then think about your actual ideas and writing second, aren’t you giving up a lot? As the old expression goes: is the tail wagging the dog?

One of my guilty pleasures is the site texts from last night, a site that posts random mobile text messages sent to and from anonymous people, mostly college-aged kids, usually drunk, high, or hungover.

A few recent examples:

(407): i went to disney world today with my friends, met snow white, then saw her later at a bar. she is naked next to me in her bed, passwed out. when you wish upon a star…

(914): last night you decided it was time to “get organized” and “straighten out your life.” You pulled out a bag of troll dolls, sorted through them and got nostalgic. You demanded both andy and i take one and keep it forever.

(301): We’re so high we’re finding things in the room to build a submarine with. So far we have two cardboard boxes, a piece of wood, puffy paint, and an empty bottle to use as a periscope.

(828): finding my wedding ring encrusted in vomit this morning really just topped off last night…

(212): i want you now
(916): you need to stop dating girls with the same name as your mother…or stop drinking so much…I don’t want to see this

Aside from the basic humor payoff, what I love about all of these is that the texts tell a story. Or at least, they deliver just enough to hint at the story behind the text. You don’t know what happened, or who was involved, or what happens next. You get just enough to spark a reaction, and your imagination fills in the gaps and the missing pieces. If nothing else, texts from last night shows that you don’t need many words to tell a good story.

The drunken students and twenty-somethings who tap these messages into their phones aren’t probably thinking of themselves as crafting narrative or engaging in storytelling, but that’s what they’re doing.

In the Washington Post last week, Joel Achenbach wrote an interesting feature on the diminishing opportunities for long-form narrative nonfiction in the newspaper-death-spiral/Twitter/iPhone era.

As seems to be the case anytime that I read about trends in the magazine and news business world these days, the outlook isn’t promising.

There seem to be two lines of thought: one is that modern audiences don’t have the patience or the attention span for longer narratives, which is why they watch reality TV shows and love Twitter. The other line says that people still want good journalism and storytelling: the problem has to do with the business model of publishing, not with the demand for good narrative. Achenbach gets to the heart of the problem:

Good stories take time to craft. Good writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, etc., all expect a living wage. The real question in the months and years ahead is whether there’s a business model that can support good stories. Norman Sims, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: “The great stories will survive. But the question is who’s going to pay for them. . . . This is not fast food. This is slow food. And it’s expensive.”

And that’s part of the challenge as a writer. There are lots of opportunities to deliver “fast food” writing: short, punchy pieces. Sidebars. Lists. Examiner.com would rather I write five short posts a week than one long, thoughtful one. Getting the chance to write good, long-form narrative is a big challenge.

For what its worth, call me a optimist. There’s no question that there are a lot of ADD Americans out there who lose interest after 140 characters. But most people still crave good stories, true ones or fiction. It’s in our DNA. I see it with co-workers who are counting down the days until return of Lost, gripped with “what’s going to happen next.” I see it on the Metro, with commuters nose down in Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer books. I see in in my 18-month old daughter when she begs me to keep reading to her at night.