-
Rebecca
Allen
Special to the Digest
A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader's mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question—something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens. Newspaper narratives are also entirely true and factual in every detail.
- Tags:
- Narrative Arc,
- Writing
-
Roy Peter
Clark
Creative Nonfiction
Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, film makers and painters. Artists, after all, build things that imitate the world. So do nonfiction writers.
- Tags:
- Ethics,
- Quoting Sources,
- Writing
-
Roy Peter
Clark
Special to the Digest
We call lots of things "stories" in American journalism, but very few of them are true narrative storytelling. Most journalistic accounts are reports, whose primary purpose is to pass along information to readers. Reports require certain writing strategies to help readers figure things out: the telling quote, the revealing statistic, the deep explanation, a piece of jargon translated for the general reader. Readers use the information in their roles as citizens, consumers, residents and parents.
- Tags:
- Finding the Narrator,
- Writing,
- Quoting Sources
-
Jim
Collins
Special to the Digest
These are things I have learned from my best writers, and now I pass them on to you in 10 lessons.
- Tags:
-
Bruce
DeSilva
Special to the Digest
The ending is something special. The ending is the last word. It's the writer's final chance to nail his or her point home to the memory of the reader. It's the moment when you give the reader something to take away from the story and think about or when you fail to achieve that.
- Tags:
- Finding the Story,
- Narrative Arc
-
Walt
Harrington
Intimate Journalism: Sage Publications
This essay is based on presentations given in advanced feature writing seminars the author taught at The Washington Post.
- Tags:
-
Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
We've heard it to the point of numbness: "Get people into your stories. Tell it in human terms."
Who's to argue? Yup, human beings are more interesting than paper creeping through a bureaucracy. Yup, real human experiences bring abstractions to life. Yup, readers are endlessly fascinated with the peccadilloes of their fellows.
So we all agree. So what? We still don't have many people in our stories.
- Tags:
- Capturing Character,
- Quoting Sources,
- Writing
-
Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
Consider this list the next time you tackle a story in which character matters.
- Tags:
-
Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
Think of the great characters from fiction. Gustave Flaubert's romantic and unfocused Emma Bovary. Mark Twain's spunky Huck Finn. Larry McMurtry's lusty Gus McCrae. Margaret Mitchell's willful Scarlet O'Hara. Each is memorable because each is a whole person, carefully crafted with a volume full of specific actions, revealing words and individual attributes. The cliche is that good characters come to life on the page. The truth is that they often seem more human than the living characters we actually encounter in our daily lives.
- Tags:
-
Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
It's important that we learn to tell actual stories—that is, stories in the literary sense—in short, quick-and-dirty versions. The point, after all, is that we use improved storytelling skills to make more appealing reads. A Sunday story that runs 3,000 words helps. But short daily stories that brighten the weekday paper may be even more important. Short stories reach more people. And they reach them more often.
- Tags:
- Finding the Story
-
Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
Bright or moving human-interest items, the "brites" that we're eager to get on our section fronts, usually work best when they assume a natural story form. They often fall flat when told as the abstract summary, which is the form characteristic of newswriting.
- Tags:
-
David
Hertz
Special to the Digest
I started a narrative group at the Akron Beacon Journal in January 2004. We meet roughly twice a month to discuss narrative techniques, how to apply them and improve the newspaper's storytelling. Our meetings have ranged from a handful of participants, discussing narratives we have written or seen in other publications, to more than two-thirds of the newsroom attending a two-day in-house seminar.
- Tags:
-
Laurie
Hertzel
Special to the Digest
Scenes are the backbone of narrative. They're where the action of your story takes place, where the plot unfolds.
- Tags:
-
Adam
Hochschild
Special to the Digest
Getting stuck next to a compulsive talker is one of the worst things that can happen at a dinner party or on a long bus ride. Even worse: the self-centered compulsive talker. What makes this experience so awful? The person's desire to tell his or her story, without thinking about which aspects might be interesting to the listener. This experience translates directly to the page. The worst books and articles are those that seem to have been written only to satisfy the writers' egos.
- Tags:
-
Mark
Kramer
Special to the Digest
When writers, readers, English teachers, librarians, bookstore people, editors, and reviewers discuss extended digressive narrative nonfiction these days, they're fairly likely to call it literary journalism. The previous term in circulation was Tom Wolfe's contentious "New Journalism." Coined in the rebellious mid-sixties, it was often uttered with a quizzical tone and has fallen out of use because the genre wasn't really alternative to some old journalism, and it wasn't really new.
- Tags:
-
Mark
Kramer
Nieman Reports
Narrative writing is returning to newspapers. No one has added up the reallocated column-inches to quantify this change, but there are many signs of the increasing interest.
- Tags:
-
Mark
Kramer
Special to the Digest
My writing seminars work on print pieces, and the radio folks are always among the quickest and most fluent at structure—at treating a piece not as a topical outline, but an assembly of sequential experience for audience-members, arranged so the listeners and readers dip in, as needed, to some ongoing story, to background info, to other relevant-to-glimpse side stories, and coming back, perhaps repeatedly, to the main tale.
- Tags:
-
Adrian Nicole
LeBlanc
Special to the Digest
There are stories everywhere. Any idea could probably be a story if you had enough time and stamina, but I try to expedite the process a bit.
- Tags:
- Finding the Story
-
Peter
Manseau
Special to the Digest
A chronicler of spiritual stories shares principles for writing well and fairly about matters of faith.
- Tags:
-
Douglas
McGill
Special to the Digest
Editors and reporters may suppose that uplifting stories of sacrifice on the battlefield "balance" the depressing and horrible facts of the war, or that their communities need tales of valor and happy endings as a counterweight to the endlessly lengthening roll calls of the dead and wounded. That's a tragic editorial miscalculation. The first thing J-school tells students, and it's true, is that a journalist's loyalty is not to sources, power, city, state or nation. It's to the facts. Truth.
- Tags:
-
Rick
Meyer
Special to the Digest
We probably ought to declare something right away, so no one can accuse us of cheating. In nonfiction, when we talk about building characters, we're not talking about creating them. That happens in fiction. In our world, God creates the characters. That's his or her job. It's our job to write about those characters.
- Tags:
-
Michael
Pollan
Special to the Digest
Book by book, project by project, it's usually hard to say who you are as a writer or what your long-term subject is. But with hindsight you start to see threads. By my third book I realized that I was always gravitating back to nature.
- Tags:
- Finding the Story,
- Writing,
- Research
-
Christopher
Scanlan
Special to the Digest
For an ambitious young reporter who loved writing stories, it sounded like the assignment of a lifetime. My editor, Joel Rawson, wanted daily narratives for the front page of The Providence Journal. The idea also seemed impossible. I'd written narratives before, but usually had at least a week and even more on some occasions. Never a day.
- Tags:
-
Barry
Siegel
Special to the Digest
Many—surprisingly, perhaps most—of the stories we read for this site are about, or involve, children we worry about: They're alone, ill, miseducated, lost in the system, abandoned or abused. Mark Kramer calls such pieces "endangered children" stories. They're attractive to newspaper writers because children are of universal concern to the community. Portray a child in a fix and everyone cares. But precisely because the dilemmas of children are emotionally fraught, writers run the risk of veering into mawkishness—a tack that's too easy and that often evades the social complications at the heart of any story. We asked Barry Siegel, director of the literary journalism program at UC Irvine, to offer some advice.
- Tags:
-
Ole
Soennichsen
Special to the Digest
Franklin talks with Soennichsen, a Danish journalist, about reporting, structuring and writing for story.
- Tags:
-
Gay
Talese
River Teeth
The fiction writer, playwright, and novelist deal with private life. They deal with ordinary people and elevate these people into our consciousness and give them names and give them a place in life because of the power of the writer, the power of the word. The world of the nonfiction writer, the writer of biography, primarily has dealt with people in public life, names that are known to us. But the private life that I wanted to delve into as a young writer for The New York Times was the life of the person who would not be worthy of news coverage. I thought that if we could bring these people into the larger consciousness, they could help us understand the trends in all the lives around us.
- Tags: