Welcome, new readers! Our audience has grown considerably lately, so we thought this might be a good time to recap Storyboard’s goods and services, and to invite you to follow us on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. We’re a Nieman … Read more
In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. Since the former is the ideal relationship with the reader, the more you can bring that non-point of view to nonfiction narrative, the better. In other words, as a writer, no matter what the hell you’re writing, do your best to kill your ego, even if those are mutually exclusive ideals. (i.e.: He could have told the story of the effect of that atomic bomb on an innocent city by telling us what he found when he went over there, and it would have been a good piece. Instead he gave the story over to the six survivors, and it earned a place in immortality.) Read more
Storytelling prize season wound down last night with the presentation of the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the American magazine world. Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff took the “Ellie” for her two-part narrative series on a man wrongly imprisoned for 25 years … Read more
A top reporter and storyteller, Eli Saslow was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing two weeks ago for his story about a struggling swimming pool salesman.Today, in the latest installment of our Annotation … Read more
At some point, we’ll round up some of the better deadline storytelling from the past two weeks’ historic news out of Boston and Texas and Washington, D.C., and Mississippi and Cambridge and Watertown, but let’s end the … Read more
“Snow Fall,” the widely celebrated New York Times multimedia narrative on a deadly avalanche in Washington State, won a Peabody this week (and would later win the Pulitzer) for being “a spectacular example of the potential of … Read more
Narrative isn’t synonymous with long-form work. A narrative journalist doesn’t need thousands of words or loads of reporting and writing time to tell a memorable story. For you hunter-gatherers of short-form models, consider: … Read more
Our storytelling advice column continues: A journalist asks a question and we find an accomplished narrative writer or editor to answer it. In our first installment, Dave Tarrant of the Dallas Morning News had a question about how to … Read more
My Pulitzer-winning pod-mate Lane DeGregory in the Tampa Bay Times, on the Florida pizza man who famously gave Barack Obama that bear hug: FORT PIERCE — After talking to MSNBC and Inside Edition, while waiting to be miked for Wolf Blitzer, Scott Van Duzer, … Read more
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
