Story Craft

Our latest Notable Narrative is an Eli Saslow story called “Life of a salesman,” about a swimming-pool salesman struggling in a terrible economy. Yesterday, we listed some of the story’s…

Why hasn’t anybody Hunter S. Thompsonized this election? Or have they, and we missed it? Esquire’s Charlie Pierce approacheth –In the interest of keeping you abreast of news that hasn't…

To hear the novelist Junot Díaz talk about writing is to have your mind augured open to new ways of processing the human experience and to feel swept up in…

One morning this summer, I got on the elevator with a colleague at WNYC, where I’m working as an interim producer for national programs. My elevator pal had just gotten…

From the Storyboard archives: tips on three of the fundamentals of narrative, from a trio of accomplished writers and editors. Click through to their full essays, and in the meantime…

Every narrative journalist can point to a story or a book, or two, that changed their lives, and that made them want to tell true stories. What story does it for…

We chose Erin Sullivan’s story about a 9/11 survivor as our latest Notable Narrative for the usual reasons − interesting characters; strong, memorable writing − but also because it contained the watermark of a takeaway…

In July 2011, Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) wrote a haunting story about the “disappearance” and death of a woman named Kathryn Norris. He did it…

The best stories – even the written ones – have audio. Maybe it’s a sensibility: voice or style, which Ben Yagoda explores in his craft book The Sound on the…

When students pitch their stories I first make them tell me the story out loud. They resist. They want to write it up, polish and perfect it, but I prefer…