EDITOR’S NOTE: In coming weeks, narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler will identify and explore the key elements of nonfiction storytelling, including scene, character and dialog. By Lauren Kessler here was something of a Camelot — a brief and shining moment — for long- … | Continue reading
By Dale Keiger f you write for a living and stay with it long enough you will accumulate a bulging folder of journeyman’s work. You don’t renounce it and you don’t brag about it. It’s the work that working pros do. You will also write a few portfolio pieces — stories that win pra … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski he video screens on the back of airplane seats are small and often smudged. But for many years, when I flew twice a week for work, that’s where I saw most movies. The filmophiles in my life shudder at that thought, but I’m fine with it. The on-flight screen … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski ontext is a core to good reporting, especially when current events are informed by history, law, geopolitics, culture, economics or the many other things that complicate modern life. A singular moment is seldom that. Context can, and often should, be woven t … | Continue reading
By Katharine Gammon oy Peter Clark says he never meant to write another book about writing. Clark, a senior scholar at The Poynter Institute, had already written or edited 20 books about reading, writing and language. He is perhaps best known for his “Writing Tools: 55 Essential … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski onsider the tease of the writer’s muse. We wait and wait and wait for her to show up, and get more anxious about her absence as deadline nears. So we thrash through something as the clock ticks ever forward until, if we work in a world of true deadlines, we … | Continue reading
By Lauren Kessler an the past teach us anything? Is there a reason beyond “oh, that’s interesting/ quaint/awful/who knew?” to delve into the lives of journalists who did their work before we were born, perhaps many generations before we were born? In a word: Yes. Here’s an analog … | Continue reading
By Caren Chesler ssayist and poet Hillery Stone lost her 4-year-old dog not long ago. A door was opened. The dog ran out. Several people who tried to steer the dog run away from the road inadvertently pushed him toward it. Stone can still hear the screeching of the brakes. And sh … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski ou don’t need insider access, aka paid subscriber status, to the news to overindulge in speculation about the possible indictment coming down from a Manhattan grand jury against former President Donald J. Trump. You also probably don’t need me to recap the n … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski long ago abandoned the illusion that I could block spam from my inboxes, prevent hacks of my accounts or keep much of my private business private. Unless you live way off-the-grid — maybe in a yurt on the outer edge of Mongolia with yaks for company — a plug … | Continue reading
By Don Nelson hen we first meet Carl Bernstein (as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman) in the opening minutes of “All the President’s Men,” he’s a shambles. Shaggy hair, tieless, frayed shirt collar, unbelted jeans, tennis shoes, constant cigarette, one of hundreds of bodies in the vast … | Continue reading
By Don Nelson hen we first meet Carl Bernstein (as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman) in the opening minutes of “All the President’s Men,” he’s a shambles. Shaggy hair, tieless, frayed shirt collar, unbelted jeans, tennis shoes, constant cigarette, one of hundreds of bodies in the vast … | Continue reading
By Line Vaaben o tell this story of craft, I must share something which might ruin your first-time viewing of the short documentary film “Victoria,” by Eloisa Diez. So if you haven’t already watched it and don’t like spoilers, here is a piece of advice: Watch the film first, and … | Continue reading
By Don Nelson hen we first meet Carl Bernstein (as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman) in the opening minutes of “All the President’s Men,” he’s a shambles. Shaggy hair, tieless, frayed shirt collar, unbelted jeans, tennis shoes, constant cigarette, one of hundreds of bodies in the vast … | Continue reading
returned from a recent three-day watercolor workshop with three marginal values’ studies in gray (trying to see and control the range of light-to-dark without being distracted by color), and a scrap of paper scribbled with doodles and notes. Some of the notes were things I wanted … | Continue reading
By Carly Stern or Nathan Heller, Lowell High School had always represented the road not taken. Heller had applied to Lowell when he was a teenager growing up in San Francisco, but ended up attending a nearby private school that offered him financial aid. More than two decades lat … | Continue reading
By Trevor Pyle t would be easy for a writer to jumble himself into knots of frustration writing about Tom Sizemore, the incendiary “Saving Private Ryan” and “Strange Days” actor who died last week at 61. Faced with just that challenge in a piece for Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz fou … | Continue reading
By Chip Scanlan hen Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times decided to write about mental health care in California through the lens of one patient, he faced a daunting challenge: tracking the erratic chronology of a severely ill man’s life on the streets and in and out of institu … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski s I read Celeste Ng’s most recent novel, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.” Nor could I avoid echoes to discordant times in real life in recent years. “Our Missing Hearts” is dystopian tale set in th … | Continue reading
By Howard Sinker he news reporting class I teach probably isn’t what you’d expect. I don’t teach at a school that offers a journalism degree — and I’m good with that. My hope is that students learn a little about how to write a story and a lot about things they might be intereste … | Continue reading
By Andrea Pitzer s it possible to tell the story of Auschwitz, the abyss at the center of the twentieth century? When I wrote “One Long Night,” a history of concentration camps around the world, my central question was “How did humanity get to Auschwitz, and where did it go from … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski large property sprawls on the north side of the state highway that runs from mountain cabin in the Washington Cascades to the town where I buy groceries. At least I assume It’s a large property. No buildings are visible from the road, but two large timbers s … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski et’s, for a moment, consider squirrels. Stick with me. There’s a reason for this, and it has to do with things threatened and endangered. More specifically to that point, the subject is the western gray. I’m not sure if the subspecies name should be capitali … | Continue reading
By Monique Brouillette and Jacqui Banaszynski ongratulations to Cerise Castle and Carvell Wallace, this year’s recipients of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. The prize was launched in 2018 by the Heising-Simons Foundation as part of a mission to support journalism as “an ess … | Continue reading
By Ania Hull on Mooallem is a writer-at-large with The New York Times Magazine, and has published articles and feature stories with, among others, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones. He’s the author of two nonfiction books, “This Is Chance!” and “Wild … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski he details are what always hold me. The numbers matter, of course. Horrible numbers that matter horribly. I follow them as they rise. When the news of the shallow earthquake broke on Monday, devouring a vast patch of Turkey and Syria, the first number I hear … | Continue reading
sat down to watch the State of the Union address this week out of a sense of obligation and, to be honest, a somewhat dark curiosity. How scripted would it be? How predictable? How long? Mostly, how boring? President Biden isn’t known as a great orator. He practices, hard and lon … | Continue reading
By Korrina Duffy imer set. Pen poised. Go! Free writing is for when you just need to write the damn thing already. If you like many have a bad case of blank page syndrome, free writing helps clear the mental constipation with verbal diarrhea. To free write, all you need is a pen … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is shared with our friends at The Poynter Institute by request of the author. * * * By Roy Peter Clark arly last October I received a small package from England, which looked most interesting even before I opened it. The envelope celebrated “Her Majesty … | Continue reading
By Chuck Haga he students file in and suddenly some remember the day’s assignment: Bring in a favorite song lyric, something with magic in the way words work together. Out come the phones and they search, trying to remember that song that took them by surprise the other night, th … | Continue reading
t’s a common and happy reframe among my retired friends: They are busier than they’ve ever been. They can’t remember how they managed to do all the things they needed to do — make friends, keep a house, have children, run marathons, read books, care for aging parents and more — w … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski y fingers felt heavy on the keyboard last week as I edited two special posts that were long in the making. The posts themselves explore the kind of craft tools and inspiration — the partnership of mechanic and muse — that is the core of Storyboard’s mission. … | Continue reading
By Mallary Tenore Tarpley ashington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox has spent six years covering stories of gun violence and children, fashioning a beat out of one of America’s most heartbreaking realities. Yet when he first heard about the shooting last May at Robb Elementary Sch … | Continue reading
By Chip Scanlan hen Rick Rojas became a national correspondent for The New York Times, a colleague told him to focus on the second word of his new title. As correspondents, Rojas says, “We are, in a sense, writing a letter to our readers. Not just relaying basic facts, but striv … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski t’s a common theme when a Storyboard contributor interviews a journalist about a descriptive analogy or metaphor in a written piece: How did you come up with that analogy? The same question comes up again and again when we analyze stories in writing workshop … | Continue reading
By Trevor Pyle hen Jose A. Del Real was on the lookout for people navigating the snarled thicket of American masculinity, he found an unexpected one: a 23-year-old waitress and single mom in northeast Wyoming. He was in the nation’s least-populated state reporting for the Washing … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: Six mid-career freelance journalists who specialize in science and environmental stories offered takeaways from a weeklong workshop on nonfiction writing held at a guest ranch in Tucson, Arizona. ne thing we journalists tend to forget: There’s safety in numbers. Wi … | Continue reading
aven’t we all been tortured by those nights when, no matter how hard we try or how desperate we are for rest, we cannot fall asleep — often when we need it most? It is such a universal experience — such a non-novel event — that describing it risks cliché. So I was enchanted, on [ … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski t was a favorite diversion of mine, when I was teaching at the Missouri School of Journalism, to wander down the hall from my office to the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. I would plug into the low-level thrum of tension, and thrill as it ramped up towa … | Continue reading
By Lauren Kessler isten to the people who are talking about how to fix what’s wrong, not the ones who just work people into a snit over the problems. Listen to the people who have ideas about how to fix things, not the ones who just blame others.” That’s Molly Ivins writing in “Y … | Continue reading
By Dale Keiger n 2014, I interviewed a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University about the use of computer simulations to rehabilitate stroke patients. At one point our conversation veered to this idea he had about athletes: Talent in sports was misattributed. He didn’t dispute … | Continue reading
By Jacqui Banaszynski s we turned the last pages of 2022, I am pondering the years past and the year ahead and the concept of writing practice. I’ve spent my professional life trading in the written word, but never came to comfortable terms with that term. If anything, in the 30 … | Continue reading
s the year comes to a close, we bring you our version of the best-of lists. We started with the reader’s choice awards: the Storyboard posts that ranked in the top 10 according to pageview analytics. Today we dish up the editor’s picks. A couple of the pieces overlapped. (Who doe … | Continue reading
ds on radio and news sites here in Seattle are promoting “Potted Potter,” a romp of a stage play that retells all seven Harry Potter books — more than 4,000 pages worth — in 70 minutes. I’ve read every word of every book and seen every movie — most of them multiple times. I can [ … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven story approaches that can help understand and address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fiction writing on social problem … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers to address social problems. From his introduction: “The best narrative non-fic … | Continue reading
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a series on making “good trouble” through journalism, Paul A. Kramer of Vanderbilt University argues for seven approaches that can help create partnerships between writers and readers in ways that can better address social problems. From his introduction: “The b … | Continue reading