At the recent City & Regional Magazine Association conference in Atlanta, Esquire’s Tom Junod and Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff interviewed each other for an audience of narrative lovers. Atlanta magazine’s Tony Rehagen kindly recorded the session exclusively for Storyboard. You can hear the conversation in its entirety (an hour and 22 minutes) below, with an introduction by Steve [...]
By Paige Williams
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Posted in audio narratives, tips
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Also tagged Atlanta Magazine, City & Regional Magazine Association, CRMA, David Grann, Esquire, John McPhee, Pamela Colloff, Steve Fennessy, Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, Tom Junod, Tony Rehagen
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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.)
By Peter Richmond
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Posted in #longreads, tips
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Also tagged Best American Sportswriting of the Twentieth Century, David Milch, GQ, James Agee, John Hersey, Pulitzer Prize, Ring Magazine, The New Yorker, The Writer's Craft, Thomas Wolfe, Time, Wallace Shawn, Yale Daily News
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November 8, 2012 – 9:55 am
Word nerds, you’ll want to stock up on yellow highlighters for Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Constance Hale’s newest book on writing and language. In her follow-up to Sin and Syntax, Hale, a journalist and writing teacher, autopsies and deifies verbs. Verbs, nerds! From whence they came; and why good writing can’t exist without them. After reading [...]
By Paige Williams
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Posted in narrative news
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Also tagged Alan Burdick, Bill Wasik, Bonnie Tsui, Constance Hale, East Meets West, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Thomas Curwen, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Vanessa Mobley, Wired
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October 2, 2012 – 8:29 am
The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee.
September 20, 2012 – 8:35 am
Every narrative journalist can point to a story or a book, or two, that changed their lives, and that made them want to tell true stories. What story does it for you? Where was your love born? When we asked about influential writing via Twitter, answers came in a flurry. Wright Thompson said North Toward Home, [...]
By Paige Williams
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Posted in #longreads
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Also tagged Aaron Latham, Adam Davidson, Alex Tizon, Alice Steinbach, Alison Smith, Andrew Pantazi, Anne Lamott, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara Myerhoff, Buzz Bissinger, Chris Jones, Clive Thompson, Cornelius Ryan Award, Darcy Frey, David Foster Wallace, David Von Drehle, Deborah Baker, Des Moines Register, Diane Shipley, Dinty Moore, Edwidge Danticat, ESPN, Gay Talese, Gene Weingarten, George Orwell, Harold Ross, Harper's, Ian Frazier, Jacqui Banaszynski, James Baldwin, Jane Kramer, Janet Malcolm, Jeanne Marie Laskas, Jeff Sharlet, Jimmy Breslin, Jo Ann Beard, Joan Didion, Joe Sacco, John Carey, John Hersey, John McPhee, Jordan Conn, Joseph Mitchell, Julia Sommerfeld, Karen K. Ho, Katherine Boo, Kelley Benham, Ken Fuson, KillingtheBuddha.com, Larry L. King, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, Lillian Ross, Louisa May Alcott, Luke Dittrich, Madeleine Blais, Mara Grunbaum, Mark Bowden, Mark Kramer, Mary McCarthy, Melissa Faye Green, Michael Herr, Michael Lesy, Mother Jones, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Nick Paumgarten, Nieman Fellow, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Nora Ephron, Norman Mailer, Overseas Press Club Award, Philip Weiss, Pulitzer Prize, Rachel Signer, Randy Shilts, Rebecca Skloot, Rob Boynton, Rolling Stone, Ron Rosenbaum, Rosemary Mahoney, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Sebastian Junger, Susan Orlean, Tampa Bay Times, Ted Conover, The Atlantic, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The New Yorker, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, Tim O'Brien, Timothy B. Tyson, Tobias Wolff, Tom Junod, Truman Capote, Vanity Fair, Walt Whitman, Wendy Call, Will Hobson, William Browning, Willie Morris, Wired, Wright Thompson, Zoe Heller
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We may as well begin the way Gary Smith begins – with a question, and near the end. Why is it that when you finish reading “Lying in Wait,” Smith’s 2002 profile of coach George O’Leary, you feel the impact so strongly? And by feel I mean physically feel. It will be different for everyone, [...]
Over the years Roy Blount Jr. has written a number of superb magazine articles, one of my favorites being “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” a profile of the great Southern raconteur Jerry (pronounced Jay-ree) Clower. The piece, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1973, possesses many virtues, among them its substantial length. Clower, a regular on the [...]
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 [...]
October 21, 2010 – 4:16 pm
Last week, veteran writer Tracy Kidder offered his reflections on narrative nonfiction a public conversation with current Nieman Fellow Darcy Frey. Part of the Harvard Writers at Work series, the talk took place in a packed campus auditorium and was co-sponsored by the university’s Shorenstein Center, where Kidder is a fellow this fall. Winner of [...]