Story Craft

“The most important element in a good story is conflict. It’s seeing two opposing forces collide with one another.” That’s from Beau Willimon, the showrunner for House of Cards, and he said it at…

In the fall of 2011, I began reporting stories about the aftereffects of globalization on small factory towns in southern Virginia, for the Roanoke Times. For the next three years,…

Several years ago, Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold’s Ghost and other nonfiction narratives, told a Vanderbilt University audience that academic writing doesn’t have to be boring. Scholars of history and science — theoretically…

It isn’t often that a narrative journalist’s retirement makes the news, but when Sports Illustrated announced this spring that longtime writer Gary Smith would be leaving the business, the public…

Whether you spell them “ledes” or “leads,” opening lines get a lot of attention. And why wouldn’t they? Sitting at the keyboard, with all the tedious and sometimes annoying reporting…

The sentence: The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.…

Recommended reading from the New York Times’ Opinionator series “Draft,” on writing: “Keep It Short,” by columnist and author Danny Heitman: To shorten my articles, I often worked through several versions, and…

Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples…

A few years ago an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading…

Editor’s note: This is the inaugural installment of our “Why’s this (sentence) so good?” series, in which a writer analyzes a favorite line from a piece of journalistic storytelling. As…