What does a journalist do once they have all the reporting in front of them? They followed a subject for weeks or months (or years), talked to dozens (or hundreds) of people, researched studies and books, analyzed data — and then they must put it all together in a cohesive and compelling way.
From sentence structure to story arcs, five journalists told Nieman Storyboard how they combined all the elements to craft stories that keep readers engaged.
1. Putting the pieces together: Jeff Sharlet and the iron closet (2014)
Jeff Sharlet — a journalist, author, and professor — felt “poisoned” after extensively writing about LGBTQ+ rights and anti-gay rhetoric in Uganda, Kenya, and the U.S. As important as those stories are to tell, Sharlet thought he wouldn’t write one like it for a while.
But just before the Winter Olympics came to Sochi, Russia, in 2014, Sharlet was approached by GQ to see if he was interested in covering the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that was hitting the country. Sharlet, after hearing this pitch, thought that instead of taking the lens of someone who was “consumed by hate,” he would instead focus on people targeted by these laws.
The end result is a narrative that chronicles the lived experiences of dozens of closeted Russian citizens — from emigrating out of the country, to being targeted by violent hate crimes — that weaves in Russia’s history of anti-gay legislation.
Sharlet said that structure was an “interesting challenge” for the story, which he knew was not going to have a resolution and did not want it to be policy-focused with illustrative anecdotes. He wanted it to focus on moods, which he said is unique to literary journalism.
Here’s what the process looked like:
Once I have a big mess, I look at it all and settle on the major pieces I want. Then I start shuffling them like cards. There’s usually a sort of instinctive structure, that’s half formula — here we have the action lede followed by the second act of context — and half impression. I mean that in the same sense a comedian does impressions. The structure approximates some gestures I found essential to the character of the story as I found it. It’s more concerned with mood than with argument. At some point, I lay out the major pieces on the floor and just stare at them for awhile, trying them out in different arrangements to make sure that the one I’ve settled on is what I think is best.
2. Finding suspense in specific moments: Reporting through privacy and pain to expose the scandal of Black amputations (2021)
Lizzie Presser, a health policy reporter for ProPublica, ventured to write about the racial health disparities that Black diabetes patients face, especially when it comes to amputations. This is how her story opened:
It was a Friday evening in the hospital after a particularly grueling week when Dr. Foluso Fakorede, the only cardiologist in Bolivar County, Mississippi, walked into Room 336. Henry Dotstry lay on a cot, his gray curls puffed on a pillow. Fakorede smelled the circumstances — a rancid whiff, like dead mice. He asked a nurse to undress the wound on Dotstry’s left foot, then slipped on nitrile gloves to examine the damage. Dotstry’s calf had swelled to nearly the size of his thigh. The tops of his toes were dark; his sole was yellow, oozing. Fakorede’s gut clenched. Fuck, he thought. It’s rotten.
Presser told Nieman Storyboard she didn’t know how she would structure the story for a while. She met several patients of Dr. Fakorede, who heavily advocated for reducing amputations among Black patients, but it wasn’t until she met Dotstry on her last weekend in Mississippi that she knew she had her main character.
She was able to track Dotstry’s care from the beginning, and it was the first instance when she could truly see Fakorede’s frustration and hear about the obstacles he faces in his work.
In a story that tracks a man’s health care journey with a doctor trying to save his one remaining leg, it also includes medical studies and a history of the region to tell a story that is well-rounded and empathetic. “I’m trying to craft a narrative with suspense at the same time as I’m trying to construct a logical argument,” she said.
This is what Presser said about how she made her piece flow:
I’m structuring this story around small moments of suspense. At the same time, I’m attempting to show what details consumed and enraged Fakorede. If I can get you to see, perhaps even feel, Fakorede’s anger as he tries to save Dotstry’s leg, I’m more likely to keep you reading. I’ve set up the story with a “will he or won’t he” frame, which becomes one driving force of suspense.
3. Including the reporter in the dialogue: Sebastian Junger and the perfect storm (2013)
Sebastian Junger lived in Gloucester, Mass., as a climber for tree companies and accidentally cut his leg open with a chainsaw one day. He thought about the dangerous work people go through regularly, and heard a local story about a boat, the Andrea Gail, that had been caught in a storm in 1991 that killed everyone on board.
He covered the story with the goal of publishing it as a book (which he did in 1997), but first he wrote a 4,765-word story for Outside in 1994. He covered events entirely through second-hand accounts and materials.
In his annotations with Storyboard, Junger explains several literary choices he made throughout the piece. He includes technical fishing and boat terms with no definitions, because he believes it makes the piece flow but doesn’t feel it integral to explain to make the story work. His story follows a largely chronological timeline, but he found additional inspiration from another literary journalism great:
Whatever you’re reading, it’s probably the result of me making conscious or unconscious decisions. There’s undoubtedly some rhythm and structure in here that’s me trying to emulate John McPhee. He does that kind of thing a lot — those last sentences that drive home a point and leave you thinking … I think I incorporated his rhythms and sensibility very deeply in the way I write. I’m sure there was a writer of some previous generation that he did that with. That kind of stuff just gets passed on.
4. Using internal thoughts and external feelings: Sarah Scoles and ‘How to save people from snakebites’ (2016)
Sarah Scoles didn’t write about health very often — the freelance science writer’s background was in astronomy — but when she heard about a man who was developing a universal antidote to snake venom, she became intrigued. She was sold when she heard that the volunteer to try the antidote was the man himself.
In her piece for Slate, titled “How to Save People from Snakebites,” she started out with wilderness physician Matt Lewin surrounded by anesthesiologists and an emergency-room doctor while venom took over his body. It details the side effects Lewin was feeling as the venom creeped in, and the relief he felt when his antidote shot through his nose and instantaneously brought him off death’s doorstep.
After that harrowing lede, Scoles wrote about Lewin’s motivation to create this antidote and the journey he took to develop it. “I wanted to tell it straight chronologically,” she told Storyboard. “I know it’s fun narrative structure to go out of order, but it’s good for the reader, if you’re writing about complicated things, to go with a chronological structure.”
Scoles leaned into what Lewin was thinking in the moment:
He felt impatient and dependent, like a child whose well-being depends on others. “Even though I knew I was being monitored intensely, they appeared to me very casual,” he says, “because they couldn’t experience what I was experiencing.”
Then she quickly zooms out to observe Lewin’s external reaction:
The effects were almost instantaneous. The muscles under his face jerked awake and reordered themselves. It felt cartoony, like CGI of a human morphing into an animal. Minutes later, the rest of his body worked. He rose from the bed like Lazarus.
“It worked!” he said.
Scoles shared how she usually decides on the structure for her stories:
Before I sit down to write, I think, ‘I have so much material, how am I going to organize it? What am I going to do?’ Then I go for a run, and I don’t actively think about it. Then I sit down to write the lede, and it kind of feels like black magic, but really my brain has been working on the problem in the background the whole time. I knew I wanted to start with the paralysis scene, because it was the most gripping event and provided a way into the more detailed explanation of how he got to that point. And after I finished that, I went into the next part with the thought that I wanted to tell the narrative of how he came to be interested in this.
5. Using dialogue as a literary tool: ‘Good versus good’ stories that unravel complex societal problems (2023)
Nathan Heller, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2013, often writes about the Bay Area, where he grew up. In 2022, he got to write about Lowell High School, one of the oldest U.S. public high schools and a school he applied to attend as a teenager.
In the 2021-2022 school year, Lowell generated controversy when it switched its admission process to a lottery-style system that considered socioeconomic factors. Heller’s 2022 piece, “What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?” documented the school year with this new system in place — which also coincided with the first time classes were in-person since the COVID-19 pandemic.
He talked to students, teachers, staff, and alumni throughout the year to take the reader through what class at Lowell looked like, but also the behind-the-scenes work of helping the new class of students adjust.
Heller said talking to up to 100 people helps draw out the large pieces needed to tackle the story, but only a fraction of those voices will end up in the final draft:
Part of the structuring work is figuring out who actually gets to articulate Point X and when. You don’t want this huge cast of talking heads fluttering everyplace all the time, people constantly popping up in the reader’s ear, saying something interesting and then vanishing for 4,000 words before showing up in another time and place with another one-liner. That can feel like being attacked by crows. You also don’t want to seem to be working too hard to make connections. Part of the New Yorker style is to tell the story like a camera on a track: You move into the scene; you move out of the scene; there’s an illusion of narrative passivity. The trick is to do it so, along the way, you’re also gently tracing out a line of argument, building character arcs, meting out information in a cumulative fashion, offering nuggets of entertainment and so forth. Making all that work as a whole is the jigsaw-puzzle work of structure.
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Emilia Wisniewski is a general assignment reporter and engagement editor at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. She previously worked at Boston.com and The Boston Globe as a correspondent where she covered local politics, business, health, and environment.
