Writing about the writing process isn’t easy, for good reason. Turning words into sentences and sentences into scenes is at heart a craft, yet there’s still a certain amount of magic involved. Synapses fire. Muses play. That magic, which manifests … Read more
In Thursday’s post we excerpted nice lines from the five National Magazine Award finalists in feature writing. These included Luke Dittrich’s “Heavenly Father!…,” from Esquire, about survivors of the Joplin, Mo., tornado, which killed 160 people. Read more
I love teaching “The Pig” because students, especially narrative nonfiction students, always freak out. “Wait, we can do this?” they want to know. Yes, you can do this and I’d like to see you try. Nailing the reporting lets … Read more
I wish I had come to this assignment when Alice Steinbach was still alive. I could have thanked her one last time for writing “A Boy of Unusual Vision,” a stunning immersion into the life, mind and vision … Read more
You might notice editors switching seats in the days ahead. In the interest of keeping readers in the loop, we want to let you know that Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer is working on a narrative nonfiction project about Vladimir Nabokov … Read more
Malcolm Gladwell does so many things well as a feature writer that it’s embarrassing to mention them all. I’ll list a few of them anyway: Malcolm Gladwell is astonishingly quotable. He writes graceful, intelligent sentences. But he’s also something better … Read more
In this week’s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick’s story on a wrongful conviction used one person’s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration … Read more
America tends to get credit for adding narrative journalism to the literary canon. And there’s no doubt that the combination of timely reporting and timeless writing took on new and exciting forms in the U.S. in the second half of … Read more
It’s been 16 years since I first read Darcy Frey’s piece about the overwhelming, stressful job of being an air traffic controller – 16 years since I first swore never to fly into Newark. Frey’s powerful narrative scarred me for life. Read more
When I was little, my mama worked the early shift at the seafood plant. She’d drop me off at my Aunt Janice’s house before dawn and they’d lay me down on a pallet in the living room. Country music played … Read more
