Story Craft

One night in January 2013, deep into the writing of Grandma Gatewood's Walk, I found myself alone at the keyboard, crying. Weeping, really.Thinking back, the storm of depression and anxiety…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Part 1 of our recap of the Tow Center’s recent Future of Digital Longform conference, at Columbia University, included Emily Bell talking with Joe Sexton about the impact of “Snow…

Because why not a list of lists? Ten* worth the storyteller's time:1) “130 years of must-read stories for digital journalists: five lessons from 1851-1981,” by Abraham Hyatt, editor of the…

I got the deal to write my first book, Horsemen of the Esophagus, in the spring of 2005. I’d been out of college for four years at that point, writing…

Editor’s note: The Oregonian’s Simina Mistreanu spoke to seven narrative journalists for her University of Missouri School of Journalism master’s project on longform. Last week, we ran her setup, a piece on the…