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 of Storycraft Tarrant is on the enterprise and projects team, where he started in 1984 as a [...]
Tag Archives: Jack Hart
Work the problem: “How do you prospect for narrative beyond the obvious?”
January 25, 2013 – 9:44 am
The best of Storyboard: essays on craft
May 18, 2012 – 8:46 am
If you’ve ever spent some time nosing around Storyboard you know we archive everything from interactive narratives to original essays on craft, in which masters such as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Rick Meyer and Walt Harrington offer tips on developing characters, finding stories, writing scenes and more. Some of the 26 pieces feel fresh even a decade later. Here’s [...]
Narrative journalism around the world: Argentina, Romania, Belgium and the Netherlands
March 8, 2012 – 2:18 pm
America tends to get credit for adding narrative journalism to the literary canon. And there’s no doubt that the combination of timely reporting and timeless writing took on new and exciting forms in the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century. But that movement grew out of more than a thousand years of narrative [...]
When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips
December 15, 2011 – 12:34 pm
There’s long-form narrative, and then there’s book-length narrative. Both are “long,” but a story that’s 300 pages long is a different proposition, for both writer and reader, from one that’s 3,000 words. Writers embarking on their first book-length project respond to the challenge in different ways. Some panic, staring blankly at their screen as fine [...]
Jack Hart on “Storycraft” and narrative nonfiction as an American literary form
October 20, 2011 – 4:41 pm
A soup-to-nuts look at narrative nonfiction, Jack Hart’s “Storycraft” breaks down different approaches to telling true stories and the components that make or break them. In writing the book, Hart brought to bear a doctorate, years of teaching in college classrooms, and a quarter-century of experience at The Oregonian, where he edited several stories selected as [...]
