Story Craft

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. The…

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…

The first chapter of How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One), by Stanley Fish, begins with this paragraph:In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a…

My story might interest other small-timers with big ambitions. Believe it or not, a four-part series in a local newspaper launched my career as an author. My first book, Running…

Storyboard isn’t the only Nieman Foundation publication with a rich craft archive. Our venerable sister magazine Nieman Reports maintains a trove of material on narrative and storytelling, and we’ll be…