Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end. But in the telling, stories don’t necessarily conform to that neat order. For Dave Cullen, freelance journalist and bestselling author, there is plenty of room for … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2o19 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University was a full immersion into the craft, challenges and characters of story work. We are scrambling to mine as many of those riches as we can, … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2o19 Power of Narrative conference at Boston University was a full immersion into the craft, challenges and characters of story work. We are scrambling to mine as many of those riches as we can … Read more
Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now. History is happening. We are changing the world. So sings Eliza Schuyler in “Hamilton,” a magical musical set in the late 1700s about the … Read more
This sentence contains everything that good narrative writing should. There’s the specific detail of the narrator, and there’s universality — the wonder we humans experience when faced with a child growing up. It seems remarkable to me that we … Read more
Why I like it: I imagine my high school grammar teacher, Ms. Weiner, trying to diagram this sentence. We all seek characters to drive our stories. Here, Kerouac lists requirements for the characters that attract him — … Read more
Storytellers in any medium can learn from those in others. Writers must know how to paint mental images through the hieroglyphics of text, apply (and break) rules of grammar to ensure clarity, and translate specialty jargon into widely understood … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the tenth and last in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The author, … Read more
Maria Streshinsky, executive editor of Wired, wouldn’t say the magazine has grown skeptical about the promise of technology. But compared to the optimism of past editorial regimes, she and editor-in-chief Nick Thompson, who took their posts in 2017, have … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth and penultimate in a series of Monday odes that chronicle the legacy newsroom. Each is written from a different first-person perspective. Together they create the mumbled narrative of a special and sadly contracting culture. The … Read more
