We’ve got a few new additions to our Tip Sheets board (“Telling Big Stories,” inside the narrative machine with Matter) and Narrative News (“A Founder of Twitter Goes Long,” plus an argument for refocusing page design for narrative … Read more
If something funny comes my way — an article about dog whisperers, let’s say — I am sometimes reduced to responding with the shorthand “LOL,” though the truth is few stories make me Laugh Out Loud. The exception: a piece by … Read more
Pinned for your storytelling pleasure, a roundup of recent great reads, vids, tips, etc.: In case you missed it, Part 1: Gay Talese and Elon Green annihilated Storyboard traffic records this week with their critically acclaimed annotation of “Frank … Read more
If you’ve been following 40 Towns, the new literary journalism magazine produced by Jeff Sharlet’s creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth, you’ve seen longform stories about ex-cons, a roadside motel, a bead shop, a diner, a homeless … Read more
Pinned and pulled for your weekend reading pleasure, Storyboard’s three favorite reads this week, plus 10 tips on artful interviewing from Pulitzer winner Isabel Wilkerson and others: 1) “Lost in the Long White … Read more
Welcome, new readers! Our audience has grown considerably lately, so we thought this might be a good time to recap Storyboard’s goods and services, and to invite you to follow us on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. We’re a Nieman … Read more
In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. Since the former is the ideal relationship with the reader, the more you can bring that non-point of view to nonfiction narrative, the better. In other words, as a writer, no matter what the hell you’re writing, do your best to kill your ego, even if those are mutually exclusive ideals. (i.e.: He could have told the story of the effect of that atomic bomb on an innocent city by telling us what he found when he went over there, and it would have been a good piece. Instead he gave the story over to the six survivors, and it earned a place in immortality.) Read more
When Amy Wallace profiled then-Variety editor Peter Bart for Los Angeles magazine, she took on issues of access, personality, misdirection, industry politics, journalism and retaliation. To write about a guy who’s been called “the most hated … Read more
Storytelling prize season wound down last night with the presentation of the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the American magazine world. Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff took the “Ellie” for her two-part narrative series on a man wrongly imprisoned for 25 years … Read more
