Articles

The Bread Loaf files: Ted Conover, Cheryl Strayed, Richard Bausch and Robert Frost on craft, dedication, discipline, poetry and what to ban from your bookshelf

The Bread Loaf files: Ted Conover, Cheryl Strayed, Richard Bausch and Robert Frost on craft, dedication, discipline, poetry and what to ban from your bookshelf

This week’s theme: semi-obscure archives that might prove valuable to your narrative storytelling. On Tuesday, we highlighted Mark Berkey-Gerard‘s posts on multimedia narrative, which he warehouses at his classroom-based website, Campfire Journalism. Today,…
How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

How to interview, structure, choose your medium, edit for sound, identify the story arc and more

The new student of multimedia narrative may want to bookmark an archive on digital storytelling by Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches online journalism at Rowan University, in New Jersey. A Columbia…
20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd

In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his…

10 things you can learn from Roger Angell’s “This Old Man”

The story of the week has been Roger Angell’s “This Old Man” (The New Yorker). Angell is widely revered for his body of work on baseball, but in this piece he…

“Why’s this so good?” – The badass women edition

From the “Why’s this so good?” archives, a handful of great reads about, or by, brilliant, brave, inspiring women, featuring Joan Didion, Rita Dove, Calvin Trillin, Julia Barton, Edna Buchanan,…
Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

Robert Caro, Part 2: On work habits, enthusiasm and minimizing distraction

On Thursday, we ran Part 1 of Robert Caro’s conversation with the Washington Post’s Anne Hull, on reporting, sacrifice, sources and finding book projects. Today, in the second and final part,…
Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Robert Caro, Part 1: On finding book projects, reporting, sacrifice and sources

Hearing Robert Caro talk about his work is like getting a master class in longform journalism. A Nieman Fellow, Class of 1966, Caro is the bestselling biographer of Robert Moses…
Annotation Tuesday! Jeff Sharlet and the iron closet

Annotation Tuesday! Jeff Sharlet and the iron closet

Last week, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics, GQ published "Inside the Iron Closet," a Jeff Sharlet story that revealed disturbing details about what it's like to be gay in…
The big idea: How to find enterprising stories

The big idea: How to find enterprising stories

Editor’s note: A great many Storyboard readers are journalism students, nonfiction writers in MFA programs, and beginning reporters and editors. The pieces in our Essays on Craft department cater to…
A champion of nonlinear narratives: An interview with documentary filmmaker Florian Thalhofer

A champion of nonlinear narratives: An interview with documentary filmmaker Florian Thalhofer

When Florian Thalhofer shows one of his interactive documentaries in theaters, he arms the audience with laser pointers. Whenever there is a choice of which clip to watch next, the…