What is it that we really want from memoir? The kerfuffle this week over “A Widow’s Story,” a narrative from Joyce Carol Oates about the loss of her husband and their many years together brings this question front and center again.
Oates was married to Raymond J. Smith for nearly five decades; in addition to their [...]
Tag Archives: Roy Peter Clark
Death, truth and memoir: the debate over Joyce Carol Oates’ “A Widow’s Story”
February 17, 2011 – 10:36 am
What we’re reading: the long arc of reporting on Scientology, a different kind of drug war, and a new narrative collaboration
February 15, 2011 – 11:46 am
The long-form buzz this last week has been all about Lawrence Wright’s piece on Scientology for the New Yorker, “The Apostate.” It’s ostensibly a profile, but it’s also investigative journalism and a compelling narrative. Wright’s deft storytelling was recently addressed on this site by Roy Peter Clark, who looked at a passage from “The Looming Tower,” [...]
Keeping it real: how round characters grow from the seeds of detail
January 24, 2011 – 2:50 pm
When I first read the New Journalism manifestos by Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, they changed forever my vision of narrative. In spite of my Ph.D. in English, I realized for the first time that a narrative had parts and that each part lent to a story a power of its own. I began [...]
Roy Peter Clark on “the power of the parts” for storytelling
November 9, 2010 – 4:36 pm
Roy Peter Clark holds the post of senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, and as such is one of narrative journalism’s hardest-working midwives. You may have already encountered him here on Storyboard or through his books on writing, including “Coaching Writers” and more recently, “The Glamour of Grammar.”
We had hoped to bring you highlights from his [...]
Tommy Tomlinson on Ze Frank, newspapers and what comes next
September 7, 2010 – 1:49 pm
Tommy Tomlinson has been a local columnist for The Charlotte Observer for the past 13 years but recently announced that he’s switching jobs to embark on a storytelling experiment for the paper. A former Nieman fellow and Storyboard contributor, Tomlinson was also a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2005. We’ve covered other innovative storytelling efforts [...]
The importance of words in multimedia storytelling
April 21, 2010 – 3:53 pm
Journalists are told to write short for the Web. The online audience wants information, not a lovely phrase or a rousing metaphor. “On the Web, people want to move quickly,” says Hoa Loranger, quoted on a video for a Web writing session at the 2009 Online News Association conference. “Our challenge is to adapt to that behavior.”
Journalism—even that of [...]
