Story Craft

We're fine-tuning our Editors’ Roundtable, moving toward more frequent postings and smaller groups of editors looking at each story. As part of those changes, today we highlight our second June…

Strategies to plot and give shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time

Yesterday, our Editors’ Roundtable dissected “Ala. tornado twists two families together” by Stephanie McCrummen, which follows the development of an unlikely connection in the aftermath of a tornado. Late last…

For the first Roundtable of the month, our editors looked at “Ala. tornado twists two families together” by Stephanie McCrummen from The Washington Post. The story, published early in May,…

This month, the Editors’ Roundtable looks at “When a diver goes missing, a deep cave is scene of a deeper mystery” by Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times. The story, our…

[This last installment in a four-part series on writing historical narratives focuses on the importance of plot in nonfiction storytelling. The series is based on a lecture given by Adam Hochschild…

Stop shopping for your Easter bonnet, and put down those 1040s – it's time for a new Editors' Roundtable! This session, our editors are looking at Michael Paterniti's “The Boy from…

[This third installment in a four-part series on writing historical narratives focuses on the importance of characters. The series is based on a lecture given by Adam Hochschild at Vanderbilt University…

[This second installment in a four-part series on writing historical narratives focuses on the importance of setting and scenes in nonfiction storytelling. The series is based on a lecture given by…

[This four-part series on storytelling and historical narratives is based on a talk given at Vanderbilt University in February 2011.]Half a century ago, the novelist and physicist C.P. Snow wrote…