Story Craft

Can a soundtrack ease you through a story?

A veteran journalist tuned into music to turn on her writing

By Jessica Wapner • February 21, 2019

“I’m thinking longer term, in geologic time, doing just what I can each day and not putting it off because it won’t be brilliant.”

From Amy Liptrot, in her memoir "The Outrun"

By Jill U. Adams • February 20, 2019

Why's This So Good?

What the “Insect Apocalypse” reveals about faulty human memory

Brooke Jarvis takes windshield wipers to environmental blindness

By Ben Goldfarb • February 19, 2019

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Steve Oney

Katia Savchuk

Julia Shipley

Jasmine Bager

Julie Schwietert Collazo

Tom Warhover

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Notable Narratives

A prescient voice speaks for the Earth

By Erik Ness

February 5, 2019

Seventy years after "A Sand County Almanac," Aldo Leopold's message grows in relevance

Notable Narratives

Finding a narrative in “our most urgent national conversation:” the one about guns

By Julia Shipley

October 23, 2018

How three reporters, a national news chain and 21 strangers who met to talk became a 5,000-word tale with character, intimacy, structure and drama

Notable Narratives

A conversation with Nathaniel Rich on “Losing Earth,” human inertia and storytelling as “a moral act”

By Rebecca Boyle

September 21, 2018

In the longest single piece ever published by The New York Times Magazine, the author takes on a crucible decade in the battle against climate change

Notable Narratives

Can you say … Thanks, and we miss you?

By Matt Tullis

July 13, 2018

On Mister Rogers, Tom Junod and the art of reverence

Notable Narratives

Writing through a whiteout: David Grann and “The White Darkness”

By Steve Oney

March 13, 2018

In his New Yorker piece on an explorer following Shackleton's footsteps in Antarctica, the reporter struggled through his own writing blizzard

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Jack Hitt and the birth of live-action TV news in “What Goes Up”

By Katia Savchuk

December 12, 2017

For Epic magazine, he writes about a daredevil helicopter pilot for a Phoenix station who "kept breaking the fourth wall of journalism by beating the cops"

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: The Cincinnati Enquirer’s stunning “Seven Days of Heroin”

By Katia Savchuk

September 25, 2017

A writer and editor talk about wrangling 60 staffers and a deluge of copy -- and creating a riveting portrait of the human face of the opioid epidemic

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah and “The Accusation”

By Katia Savchuk

September 12, 2017

The reporter talks about his piece, published jointly with Esquire, on a recanted allegation of child sex abuse that had sent a father to prison

Notable Narratives

The late Alex Tizon and “My Family’s Slave”: his first memory, and his last byline

By Jacqui Banaszynski

September 5, 2017

The Atlantic story, published just weeks after his death, drew a firestorm of criticism; a Pulitzer winner and friend examines the craft, and the loss

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Joe Kovac Jr. and a tale of murder, a manhunt and a midnight run

By Steve Oney

August 29, 2017

The reporter for Georgia's Macon Telegraph shows that even on regional newspapers with tiny staffs, writers can dream large with gripping narratives

Notable Narratives

Pat Beall and “Sexually abused as a child: A Post reporter’s journey to finding hope”

By Scott Gold

August 15, 2017

The Palm Beach Post investigative journalist talks about why she decided to write about her long-ago trauma -- and her struggles with first person

Notable Narratives

Notable Narrative: Nicole Lucas Haimes and “Who Killed Julian Pierce?”

By Katia Savchuk

August 3, 2017

The writer and documentary filmmaker talks about a story on a murdered Native American activist that was nearly 30 years in the making -- and became an obsession