Story Craft

This essay is adapted from Rick Meyer’s notes for a talk at the 2005 Nieman Narrative Editors’ Seminar. Rick’s presentation was paired with Laurie Hertzel’s talk on scenes. We probably ought…

As you map out the story, there are a lot of things for you to consider

What is your advice on structuring a story while reporting?You report for structure the same way you report for anything else. When you’re reporting for dramatic narrative, you’re reporting for…

Newspaper folks talk a lot about getting people into stories. But all too often that means trotting out direct quotes from a variety of sources. True characterization taps an array of…

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression.…

Editor’s Note: This is an edited transcript of comments made by Gay Talese at the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Dec. 1, 2001. It…

Note: The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Jim Collins at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of…

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of Nieman Reports, the Nieman Foundation’s quarterly magazine.Narrative writing is returning to newspapers. No one has added up the…

The doctor at the Army base had a young corporal as his assistant to keep track of the paperwork. The young man was curious about the doctor’s affairs. He was…

We’ve heard it to the point of numbness: “Get people into your stories. Tell it in human terms.”Who’s to argue? Yup, human beings are more interesting than paper creeping through…