Story Craft

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…

Isabel Wilkerson closed out the Mayborn by describing the 15 years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns. The book chronicles the migration of 6…

Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and of 23 other books, delivered one of the keynotes at this year’s Mayborn Conference for Literary Journalism.…