Story Craft

Fifty takeouts from some of the speakers at last weekend’s Boston University conference on narrative, culled from the Twitter feeds of Lauren Alexander, Alletta Cooper, Cat Cowan, Jessica DuLong, John…

I love inspirational quotes from august authors as much as the next writer. But the quote I thought about the most during the long years when I was writing my…

“That’s all fine,’’ the L.A. film executive said briskly, “but who’s the antagonist?’’Cut to: Me, author of a soon-to-be published biography of the 1940s/’50s wrestler and pop culture figure who…

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 such readers but also…

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…