This is the inaugural installment of Work the Problem, a storytelling advice column featuring everyday craft quandaries and a roving band of narrative sages. Today’s players: >Dave Tarrant, reporter, Dallas Morning News >Jack Hart, former Oregonian editor and author … Read more
Kelley Benham French’s “Never Let Go,” about the extremely premature birth of her daughter, Juniper, was included in Storyboard’s Best of Narrative list for 2012, and our final Notable Narrative of the year. The five-part series … Read more
CBS’ coverage When Richard Ben Cramer died Monday, at 62, of lung cancer, the outpouring of grief and gratitude began immediately. It’s hard to find a narrative journalist … Read more
The first of the Newtown narratives began appearing over the weekend. In the early wave, everyone was reading the Hartford Courant piece by Edmund H. Mahony and Dave Altimari, who began boldly with thunderous rounds” and shattered glass, and unfolded the story from there. The Washington Post’s Eli Saslow started … Read more
We love December for its inevitable bouquet of great year-end stories. Lots of good stuff out there right now, including these, four of our recent favorites: … Read more
In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked … Read more
This is the third in an occasional series of line-by-lines with narrative writers and their work, adapted from a project called Annotation Tuesday! on Tumblr. Earlier, we featured the Tampa Bay Times‘ Michael Kruse and his story about a woman who … Read more
The friend who first sent me “The Bravest Woman in Seattle” told me it was stunning but also so unsettling that I should not read it before going to bed. She was right on both counts. The story, by … Read more
We’re coming upon our 65th installment of “Why’s this so good?” – in which notable journalists dissect their favorite pieces of narrative journalism. Our contributors have included Adam Hochschild, Jennifer B. McDonald, Eli Sanders, Megan Garber, Wesley Morris, Ann … Read more
In Part 3 of our recap of Romania’s “Power of Storytelling” conference on narrative journalism, radio producer Starlee Kine talked about story forms and themes; Esquire‘s Mike Sager talked about listening, and about suspending disbelief; and Pulitzer winner Alex Tizon talked about writing … Read more