Pitching rises again and again as one of the main challenges facing writers who want to make the leap from idea to publication. Whether you’re a reporter hustling support for an enterprise piece in your newsroom, or a freelancer … Read more
“The Trials of Whiteboy Rick,” the Atavist Magazine story, by Evan Hughes, of a baby-faced young white man who rose to the top of Detroit’s mostly black cocaine world. “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” about journalist … Read more
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 creativity … 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
A key character in a story I was struggling with was a woman with a broken heart. She’d been cheated on by the man she had married, but continued to love him even after he went to prison for … Read more
I‘m not much on Valentine’s Day. I liked the grade school tradition of exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with classmates. (Is that just a U.S. thing?) Each of us was supposed to have enough cards for everyone so no one … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Storyboard recently revisited the long-standing debate over the ‘nut graf’ — variably called the summary nut, the billboard, the transition, the significance graf, the so-what passage, the foreshadow. Veteran writer and story coach Chip Scanlan weighed … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In earlier posts, veteran … Read more
Editor’s note: We’re looking at the never-ending debate over what is called, in journalese, the “nut graf” — that so-what paragraph or section that pulls out of the news or narrative to provide context and significance. In an earlier post, veteran … Read more
