Writers and Editors

Narrative nonfiction goes under many names, including creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and fact-based storytelling.

In short form, it's an alternative to the traditional newspaper pyramid structure (in which, if you lopped off the bottom part of the story, the reader would still have all the key information). With narrative nonfiction you don't present the main point in the first paragraph—compelling narrative keeps the reader reading to find out what happens, and the journey to the epiphany is half the point.

"Creative nonfiction" is misleading in that it implies the facts can be made up. You stick to the truth--the storytelling is fact-based--but you adapt some of the features of fiction (creating a narrative persona, setting scenes, presenting interesting characters, creating the look and feel of a setting, telling a story) to the purposes of journalism.

Basically, it's fact-based storytelling that makes people want to keep reading. Forms of creative nonfiction include literary journalism, the memoir, the lyric essay, the prose poem, and the nonfiction short.

The Nieman Narrative Digest (see links below) provides links to many excellent newspaper series that take advantage of the form. Among magazines, you can find excellent examples of narrative nonfiction in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Points of Entry, and
River Teeth. After a series of links here you will find a list of classic book-length narrative nonfiction, followed by links to a few exceptionally good short narratives or newspaper series readable online.
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Books on the craft of narrative nonfiction, including useful anthologies Clicking on a title/​link will take you to the Amazon.com page for the title, where you'll find information about the book. Any purchase you make after following such a link will bring a small commission to this site (which helps support the cost of providing it). • The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism , ed. Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda • The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing, by Francis Flaherty (excellent short takes on the architecture, bones, & tendrils of story and character development, especially for journalism) • Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction by James Stewart • Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, by Janet Burroway • Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, ed. Walt Harrington • Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction , by Lee Gutkind (less practically helpful than other books listed here) • Literary Journalism, ed. Norman Sims and Mark Kramer • Literary Nonfiction: Learning by Example, ed. Patsy Sims • The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing, ed. Alice LaPlante (how writers create -- for serious writing students and teachers) • The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton • Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, ed. John Biewen. See also: Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production by Jonathan Kern • The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrativeby Vivian Gornick (a slim book about writing essays and memoirs, with examples from other writers. Writes Gornick: "Memoir isn't what happened but what the writer makes of what happened.") • Story Building: Narrative Techniques for News and Feature Writers by Ndaeyo Uko ••• Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction by Jack Hart. An excellent book on the craft of short narrative nonfiction from the former managing editor of the Oregonian, who guided several Pulitzer Prize–winning narratives to publication. “Jack Hart was hands-down the best narrative editor ever to work in newspapers,” writes Jon Franklin • Telling the Story : How to Write and Sell Narrative Nonfiction by Peter Rubie (a solidly practical book to how to write a narrative nonfiction BOOK and the book proposal that will land an agent to sell it to a publisher, by a former literary agent) • Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, ed. Mark Kramer, Wendy Call (an excellent guide) • Tell It Slant:Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola • To Tell the Truth: Practice and Craft in Narrative Nonfiction by Connie D. Griffin (students like the personal essays that reveal the writers' internal processes) • Writing a Book That Makes a Difference by Philip Gerard (principles that apply to both fiction and nonfiction--books that are memorable and change people's lives) • Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by Jon Franklin. A classic guide to identifying the conflict-resolution outline (conflict, rising action, climax, denouement) that makes for a good story and helps you "write smarter." • Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, ed. Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard Some works aimed at fiction or screen writers may also be useful to writers of narrative nonfiction: • The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner • The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart's Truth into Literature, by Carol Bly (you'll have to buy used copies as it's out of print) • The Screenwriter's Workbook, by Syd Field • Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew,by Ursula K. Le Guin • Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee • The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters by Christopher Vogler • Tom Wolfe's mid-century anthology, The New Journalism, is out of print but available as used books. As one amazon.com reviewer observes: "The predictions in Wolfe's manifesto haven't panned out as pervasively as he expected - if anything, today's writerly writers, by and large, are more gimmicky, narcissistic and insulated than ever - but that's capital-L Literature's loss, and the night is young."

The Art of Listening (Henning Mankell, NY Times Sunday Book Review, 12-10-11, on what we can learn from the African storytelling tradition. One story ends: "“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”

The "Basic" Plots in Literature (IPL)

Breaking into Creative Nonfiction, Part 1: The Basics (Chip Scanlan, Poynter Online 4-17-03); Part 2, Getting that First Acceptance, Assignment

Bruce Dobler's Creative Nonfiction Compendium (with reading list and notes, thanks to the Wayback Machine!)

Byliner, stories about and reactions to:
• Byliner: The Pandora of Nonfiction Reading Adam Clark Estes (The Atlantic, 6-21-11). In this "pro" article, Estes calls Byliner "a discovery engine for the best long form nonfiction writing... Imagine an aggregator like Arts & Letters Daily meets Google News and has a beautifully designed baby."
• Byliner Sure Is Slick, But Is It Also Stealing? Adam Clark Estes (The Atlantic, 6-22-11)
• Byliner CEO excited about ‘opportunity to discover some great writers’ (Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter Online, 6-21-11) "When deciding whether to start another book or write magazine stories, [CEO and founder John Tayman] began exploring the space between magazines and books."
• From Wife-Swapping to Spelunking to Princess Di: Byliner Is What It Promised To Be--"the most viable marriage yet between widespread deep-reading and the Internet browser." (Michael Humphrey, Forbes 7-1-11).
• Byliner Rolls The Dice On Long-Form (Bill Barol, Forbes.com 6-23-11). "It isn’t limiting itself to curation and aggregation...there are Byliner Originals in ebook form..." "Read-later capability is limited at the moment to the ReadItLater service..."
• Byliner aims for the space between books and magazines (Steve Meyers, Poynter 4-20-11)

Building Character: A Checklist by Jack Hart (Nieman Storyboard, 10-15-04)

Can We Humanize the Web? New sites aim for story-telling that connects us. (Wall Street Journal, Marvels, 12-31-11)

CBC Dispatches, Part 1: Sounding out your story. Nieman Storyboard features best tips from the audio storytelling handbook of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Dispatches weekly radio show of documentaries, essays, interviews and reports from around the world. Followed by (Part 2: Composing with sound and Part 3: Writing for radio.

Center for Digital Storytelling, a California-based community arts organization rooted in the craft of personal storytelling, with an emphasis on first-person narrative, meaningful workshop processes, and participatory production methods. Newsletter focuses on five core area: Stories of Health, Silence Speaks (stories to fight gender-based violence), Witness Tree (stories of place and environmental change),Immigrant Voices, and Women, Girls, and Leadership.

Chris Jones on structuring a mystery, about two stories he wrote for Esquire: The End of Mystery (what happens when a helicopter goes down and the men on the ground try to unscramble the mystery of why) and The Things That Carried Him (the true story behind one soldier's last trip home)

Creating Nonfiction by Rachel Toor (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12-3-07) on what to call this "new" genre

Creative nonfiction (Wikipedia entry and reading list)

Creative Nonfiction Collective
Creative vs. narrative vs. literary nonfiction (Caroline Kettlewell, on her narrative nonfiction blog). Also, check out Kettlewell on What is the personal essay? and What is this thing called nonfiction (about the differences between fiction and nonfiction).

Digital storytelling, Hurricane Katrina, and using technology with a "narrative purpose", a Nieman Storyboard interview with USA Today interactives director Joshua Hatch on Stories from the Second Line and the making of Hurricane Katrina: 5 Years Later, a series that combines maps, interactive visuals, video and bare-bones text.

The end of the line for the Lone Ranger? (A how-to guide for narrative collaboration, Beth Macy, Nieman Storyboard 11-24-09)

Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences. Seventy lines that sparkle, invoke, provoke, or are just damn enjoyable to read. Both fiction and nonfiction, including: "Twenty-four years later, on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o'clock, in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.'s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at."
--Gore Vidal, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.," 1969

Essays on Craft (Nieman Storyboard, into which the former Nieman Narrative Digest merged -- both narrative sites of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard)

First Person Singular: It’s not just about you (Adam Hochschild, Nieman Storyboard, 6-28-06)

From research to story. On Nieman Storyboard, Andrea Pitzer presents excerpts from presentations at the BIO (biographers) conference 2011 by Anne Conover Heller (author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made), John Aloysius Farrell (author of Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned), and Jane Leavy (author of biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle). The final quote sent me (clearly square) to Wikipedia.

The future of long-form narrative by Gerry Marzorati, the NY Times Magazine editor's keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors' Forum

Ira Glass of This American Life, the popular show on WBEZ public radio, gives an interview on Storytelling, 8-18-09, in four parts. Click here for Part 1 (the anecdote and the moment of reflection as the two building blocks of a radio story); Part 2 (the amount of time it takes to find a good story and the importance of being tough and killing the boring parts; Part 3 (how much time you have to put in to get to the point where your skills match your good taste), and Part 4 (being yourself and being a good listener, because what's interesting is the way you interact with people, not your take on things). Listen to stories from the archive or on the radio (find your local stations).

Edward Humes on narrative nonfiction

Gary Smith on intimacy and connecting with subjects (“Any uneasiness you bring is going to cost you dearly," says the writer from Sports Illustrated). Andrea Pitzer, for Nieman Storyboard, reporting on the Mayborn Conference.

Helpful tips from a Harvard writers conference (Livia Blackburn's blog, A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing)

How to organize research on a heavily researched subject (Jean Strouse, in an interview for Bookreporter.com--scroll down for that Q&A)

The human heart of the matter. Novelist Geoff Dyer argues that recent reportage about military conflict trumps fiction in its characterisation, observation and narrative drive (The Guardian 6-12-10). He compares two new books, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers and Sebastian Junger's War to a shelf of other first-rate books on the subject: Steve Coll's Ghost Wars; Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower; George Packer's The Assassins' Gate; Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and Dexter Filkins's The Forever War.

The importance of words in multimedia storytelling (Jacquie Marino, Nieman storyboard)

Interactive Narratives (multimedia storytelling, sponsored by Online News Association)

Internet Classics Archive

Interview with Jack Hitt (Part 1) and Part 2, by Conor Firedersdorf (and if your writing has been a struggle, Part 2, on the writing process, will make you feel better, or smile). See also
Jack Hart on “Storycraft” and narrative nonfiction as an American literary form (Nieman Storyboard 10-20-11)


Interview with the ubiquitous Rebecca Skloot, about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Kindle Single e-books extend potential for long-form journalists . New Kindle Single e-books from The New York Times and ProPublica "highlight the potential for journalists to find new audiences, and possibly new revenue, for long-form reporting."Amazon officially unveils new Kindle Singles.

Learning to Listen (Gina Kolata interviews Rita Charon on narrative medicine program at Columbia, NY Times, 12-29-09)

Lee Gutkind, The Voice of Creative Nonfiction, blog

The Line Between Fact and Fiction (Roy Peter Clark, Nieman Storyboard, 9-7-04)

Lines in the Mud: Exploring Creative Non-Fiction (Aaron Pope)

Mary Karr on truth. Andrea Pitzer's Nieman Storyboard report from Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference: “the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right.”

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference (Grapevine, Texas, July)
• As experienced by Sam Eifling and described in I Heard It While in Grapevine (Columbia Journalism Review, 7-28-09)
• Mark Bowden on the value of beginner’s mind. Andrea Pitzer's Nieman Storyboard report from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
• Narrative tips for nonfiction writers: more from the 2010 Mayborn Conference (Tom Huang, 7-28-10)
• Colin Harrison and Sam Gwynne on the editor-writer partnership, going deep and the difference between a subject and a story

MediaStorm(exemplary online multimedia narrative)

The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction, Sue William Silverman's essay on the subgenres of (biography, autobiography, immersion essay, memoir, personal essay, meditative essay, lyric essay, and various mixtures of same) and her excellent and interestingly organized reading list of, contemporary creative nonfiction

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (Part 1) Adam Hochschild's four-part series on storytelling and historical narratives, based on a talk given at Vanderbilt University in February 2011 (Nieman Storyboard 3-24-11). Part 1 is a call to bridge the divide between academic writing and narratives intended for the general public. Part 2: Setting addresses the importance of setting and scene in storytelling. And Part 3: Character examines the role of characters in historical writing. Part 4 is about plot. How do you unfold a story, and how do you unfold it in a way that is going to hold the reader’s attention?

Menand, Louis. Excellent New Yorker essay, The Historical Romance: Edmund Wilson's Adventures with Communism ( 3-24-03), in which Menand writes: "Intuitive knowledge—the sense of what life was like when we were not there to experience it—is precisely the knowledge we seek. It is the true positive of historical work."

The Miami Herald: a case study in the rise of literary journalism at newspapers (Andrea Pitzer, Nieman Storyboard 5-27-10)

Mining the Literary Middle Ground (Hernán Iglesias Illa, Publishing Perspectives, 8-5-11).Online start-ups Byliner and The Atavist have established a market for stories too long for magazines and too short for books (between 5,000 word magazine articles and 100,000 words books. Much of their income is from apps, not content.

The Moth(live storytelling events in New York City)

Narrative (Richard Gilbert's blog)

Narrative and Healing (The Physician as Patient, LitSite, Alaska)

The Narrative in the Neurons (Wray Herbert, We're Only Human blog, 7-14-09)

National Book Award winner T.J. Stiles on telling good stories and asking big questions (Nieman Storyboard)

News Feature v. Narrative: What’s the Difference? (Rebecca Allen, Nieman Storyboard, 1-9-06). Excellent explanation and examples.

Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism

Nonfiction Page Turners (transcript of Authors Guild Foundation symposium, with panelists Melissa Fay Greene, Nick Taylor, Sebastian Junger, Dava Sobel, Hampton Sides)

Nonny de la Peña on “Gone Gitmo,” Stroome and the future of interactive storytelling Ernesto Pirego (Nieman Storyboard 1-30-11) interviews one of the co-founders of Stroome.com, a community that allows online collaborative remixing of visual journalism

Notable writers talk about their craft (Literary Nonfiction, University of Oregon). Interviews with authors of literary nonfiction, including Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Mary Roach, Ted Conover, Naka Nathaniel, Melissa Fay Greene, Mark Bowden, Susan Faludi, Anne Fadiman, Tracy Kidder, Gretel Ehrlich, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Humes, Charles R. Cross, Adam Hochschild.

Not Always Bingo. Ruth Franklin (The New Republic, 4-6-11) reviews Janet Malcolm's new book,Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial . "Malcolm eschews the pretense of certainty that most journalists adopt; instead, her process of probing the ambiguities, of investigating exactly how much she knows and does not know, becomes crucial to her narratives. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she wrote in Two Lives, her recent book about Gertrude Stein’s life and work. 'Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best.'"

Online venues for narrative nonfiction. Spot.Us, Byliner, Atavist Are Showing Freelance Writers the Money (David Cohn, Idea Lab, 6-8-11). "I think gigs or "gigging" will be the way freelancers turn their practice into a career in the future. Instead of pitching story to story, you'll be working project to project or gig to gig. And that means reporters who work on projects will need representation." Among places to be spotted:
• Spot.us (community-funded reporting)
• The Atavist. Read also Literary journalism finds new platforms by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times 5-15-11). "Byliner, the Atavist and Virginia Quarterly Review take the form into the future."
• Byliner. Read also Will Byliner Save Longform Journalism? (Elana Zak, New Media Bistro 5-12-11)
• Longreads. Aggregates (links to) the best long-form stories on the web. See its Community Picks section.
• eBuyline
• StoryMarket ("Freelancers: Discover Entrepreneurial Journalism. Showcase your work, bringing editors to you. Sell your original work to publishers a la carte."
("welcome to the future of content syndication")

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Program in Narrative Medicine (fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness), College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University

Pulitzer Prize winners from 2011 -- a sampler of narrative winners (Andrea Pitzer, Nieman Storyboard 4-19-11)

Radio shows featuring storytelling

Scanlan, Chip, "The First Peril: Fabrication" (The Legend on the License Revisited, Poynter)

A sampler of narrative winners from 2011 Pulitzer Prizes (Andrea Pitzer, Nieman Storyboard 4-19-11)

Searching for Gary Smith (Sarah Perry's profile in Mayborn Magazine of the great sportswriter -- who knows how to live in and then write the story)

The State of Narrative Nonfiction Writing (the entire Fall 2000 issue of Nieman Reports, with many important articles -- click on topics along left side)

Story-Based Inquiry: A manual for investigative journalists (free PDF, in English, French, Arabic, or Chinese, from UNESCO)

Storyful, a startup that started filtering videoclips about the turmoil in Egypt, is partnering with YouTube's CitizenTube, YouTube’s news and politics channel, in an experiment in teamwork to "curate" the news knowledgeably. Read Storyful Now: Egypt in Revolt (Nieman Journalism Lab, 2-4-11)

Story, interrupted: why we need new approaches to digital narrative (Pedro Monteiro, Nieman Storyboard 9-8-11). Well-illustrated guide to how narrative may need to adapt on new platforms.

StoryLab (reporters and readers come together to shape stories at the Washington Post)

Story structure, really reporting Christmas and the problem with the “sacred space” approach to narrative (Nieman Storyboard, by Hank Steuver,author of Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present

Stranger than Fiction: The Art of Literary Journalism. William McKeen, Lecture 1, Ancestors--storytelling, gossip, language, ways of preserving sounds as writing,newspapers, journalism, mass literacy, and so on. (Modern Scholar, available as audio downloads from LearnOutLoud.com). Free download of first 35 minutes, $35 for the whole tamale.

Thoughts on Finding a Memoir’s Narrative Arc (Gary Presley, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog, "Write Hard. Write Smart." 2-19-08)

Tips from Nieman Narrative (2004): What Works for Readers, Editors & Sources (Bill Kirtz, Poynter Online 12-6-04)

Tips and Tales from Some of the Best in the Business (Bill Kirtz, Poynter Online, 11-20-06, reporting on the Nieman Narrative Conference, 2006)

Transom (a showcase & workshop for New Public Radio)

25 Best True Crime Books as selected by Todd Jensen, whose forensicColleges.net blog provides advice to those considering becoming forensic scientists.

Vanity Fair's Bryan Burrough on writing narrative (Andrea Pitzer's Nieman Storyboard report from Mayborn Conference). "There’s only one way I know to get people to the end of the story...You have to have some mystery. There has to be a holdback."

The Vestigial Tale (Joel Achenbach on Gary Smith and the endangerment of detailed, long-form narrative in the age of Twitter, Washington Post 10-28-09). "In our modern click-and-skim world, there's dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative."

What Is Creative Nonfiction? by Lee Gutkind

What is creative nonfiction? (Phil Druker, Dept of English, University of Idaho, for his students)

What Is Narrative, Anyway? (Chip Scanlan, part of a series on Poynter Online, 9-29-03)

***When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips by Peter Ginna (Nieman Storyboard 12-15-11).

WriterL (a paid-subscription-only listserv for discussing the craft--still occasionally interesting, but the conversation is dying down)

Writers on Writing (archive of the New York Times column, in which writers explore literary themes)

Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel on creating compelling digital narratives: You've got to fight for every reader (on Nieman Storyboard).

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Journals and sites that feature narrative nonfiction and long-form journalism

• Atlantic Monthly (publishes great narrative nonfiction pieces)
• Brick, a literary journal
• Brevity, a journal of concise literary nonfiction--well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form. ("Brief nonfiction requires an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens ... until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human. ~ Bernard Cooper)
• Byliner (long-form narrative nonficton, old and new)
• Creative Nonfiction
• Esquire Magazine (and this link takes you to what the magazine billed its seven greatest stories)
• Etude, a journal of literary nonfiction
• Georgia Review
• Gangrey.com (small group at St. Petersburg Times, prolonging the life of print journalism, described by Word on the Street as Gangrey.com: Keeping Good Writing Alive
• Granta (UK literary magazine "the magazine of new writing"
• Grantland (sports stories even non-sports-lovers may enjoy
• Lapham's Quarterly (a magazine of history and ideas)
• Mayborn, the magazine, cousin of the Mayborn Conference
• Mountain Home Magazine, Michael Capuzzo's free newsprint Pennsylvania magazine, which is gaining readers through good storytelling combined with good illustrations
• Narrative Magazine
• Narrative Matters (Health Affairs), publishes "policy narratives," which take a story (or anecdote) and grow it beyond one person to include a big-picture view of the subject, the idea being to put a human face on policy discussions elsewhere in Health Affairs.
• New York Times Magazine
• The New Yorker
• Ploughshares, award-winning poetry, fiction, essays and memoirs
• Outside (active-lifestyle and adventure-travel magazine)
• ProPublica (journalism in the public interest)
• Pulse: Voices from the heart of medicine (catch up on these engrossing stories by reading the anthology: Pulse - The First Year
• River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative (Where Good Writing Counts and Facts Matter) and the River Teeth blog. "Somebody tells you a story, let's say, and afterward, you ask,'Is it true?' And if the answer matters, you've got your answer." -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
• Soundprint (radio) (the aural equivalent of photojournalism -- the evocative experiential documentary)
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sun (Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free.)
• Tiny Lights (a journey of personal narrative -- holds an annual essay contest, offering $1300 in prizes)
• Vanity Fair
• Wired

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Curators of long-form journalism (and "read later" bookmarking systems):
• The Atavist (publishes "original nonfiction and narrative journalism for digital devices like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook")
• Byliner (its "Read It Later" system saves an article for future reading and catalogs your wants)
• Instapaper ("a simple tool to save web pages for reading later" -- gives you a Read Later bookmark)
• Longform.org
• Longreads.com
• Notable Narratives (Nieman Storyboard, with commentary on the stories)
• ReaditLater (one reading list, wherever you are)

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Other Storytelling Venues

Where to hear, tell, and read good stories
Printed stories
• Pulse (voices from the heart of medicine). (Read Los Angeles Times story: When overwhelmed by health policy, take the Pulse of the profession
• Periodicals and sites that feature narrative nonfiction (a/​k/​a creative nonfiction)

Stories told aloud facing a live audience
• The Moth (True Stories Told Live).
• The Moth Radio Hour (PRX, listen here)
• The Moth (Events at different venues)
• National Storytelling Network ("We Grow Storytellers"), which hosts a National Storytelling Conference and has other resources, including a Directory of Storytellers and articles such as How to Become a Storyteller (for telling stories to an audience)
• Network of Biblical Storytellers (NBS International)
• Storytelling Links
• Storytelling: It's News (links to stories about storytelling, by National Storytelling Network)
• SpeakeasyDC (nonprofit arts organization, giving voice to people's life experiences, in Washington DC)
• Storytelling Associations (links, open directory project)

Digital and radio storytelling
• Art Of Storytelling Alive And Well In Audio Books (Lynn Neary, Morning Edition, NPR 11-16-10). Audio books as part of a long tradition of oral storytelling, except instead of sitting in a cave listening the tribe may be driving SUVs
• Can We Humanize the Web? New sites, such as Cowbird, aim for story-telling that connects us. (Wall Street Journal, Marvels, 12-31-11)
• Center for Digital Storytelling
• Cowbird (a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events and universal themes--see, for example, The Occupy Saga ("On Sept. 17, 2011, a handful of people set up camp in Zuccoti Park and called for others to join them. This is their story.")
• The Transformation of NPR (Jennifer Dorroh, American Journalism Review Oct/​Nov 2008). Long defined by its radio programming, National Public Radio is reinventing itself as a multiplatform force
• Fresh Air (Terry Gross's in-depth interviews, WHYY)
• A Prairie Home Companion (a live radio variety show hosted by Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio, stories and more)
• Radio Lab, with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, is a radio show and podcast weaving stories and science into sound and music-rich documentaries
• Snap Judgment,a themed, weekly NPR storytelling show that presents compelling personal stories
• Storify. This site (combining journalism and social media) lets you create stories using social media, dragging and dropping in narrative order tweets, photos, videos, comments, snippets, etc. Read What Is Storify And Why Did They Raise $2m?. Here's Storify story of the year 2011: Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests Around the Country (Josh Stearns)
• The Story (North Carolina Public Radio, American Public Media)
• Story Salon (Salon.com and The Story)
• Tell Me More
• This American Life (from WBEZ, hosted by Ira Glass). Start listening to one of these as you drive to buy groceries and you'll find yourself sitting in the parking lot, listening to hear the end of the story.
• More great radio listening (mostly NPR)

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Excellent online examples of narrative journalism

You can find links to MANY excellent pieces of literary (narrative) journalism at the Nieman Storyboard site, many examples from which I link to below.

The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine... in Full (as chosen by the magazine, 11-14-08):
• "The School" by C.J. Chivers (June 2006)
• "The Falling Man" by Tom Junod
• "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer (June 1986)
• "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" by Gay Talese (April 1966)
• "M" by John Sack (October 1966). "They hit a little girl..."
• "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!" by Tom Wolfe (March 1965)
• "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" by Norman Mailer (November 1960)

Scott Allen. Critical Care: The Making of an ICU Nurse (a four-part series in the Boston Globe, October 2005)

Moni Basu. Chaplain Turner's War (8-part series, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6-22-08). Compelled to serve where the suffering was greatest, he headed to Iraq. He has already lost 14 men. What will become of the rest of his flock?

Barry Bearake, The Day the Sea Came, Part 1 of a long feature about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, which David Hayes cites as an example, like John Hersey's Hiroshima, of parallel structure: a number of characters and a single event. Go here for Part 2.

John Biewen. Married to the Military (American RadioWorks, listen to hour-long radio program or read the transcript)

Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon (Globe & Mail series available online). Brown's memoir about his relationship with his son, Walker, born with a rare genetic disorder that leaves him profoundly developmentally disabled. In book form, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son is available at a reasonable price through Amazon Canada.

Janet Burroway. Life After Tim (St. Petersburg Times, 12-12-04). Tim shot himself dead after returning from Iraq. His mother Janet Burroway reflects on the life of “a fiercely honourable boy.”

Janet Burroway. My son, my soldier, my sorrow (St. Petersburg Times, 6-13-04). In three essays written over 20 years, a liberal, pacifist mother struggles to understand her conservative son, a proud soldier and member of the NRA.

Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin. Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of a special three-part report on the Church of Scientology (St. Petersburg Times, 6-21-09).

Roy Peter Clark. Amazing Grace in the Men's Room (Sunday Journal, St. Petersburg Times, 9-30-07)

Roy Peter Clark. "Three Little Words" (series that ran in the St. Petersburg Times over 29 days in 1996). "Clark worked for two years to piece together this intensely personal family history. Set in the time of AIDS, "Three Little Words" is a tale of trust, betrayal and redemption. The story, which unfolded here and on the pages of the St. Petersburg Times over 29 days, challenges us to reconsider our thoughts about marriage, privacy, public health and sexual identity."

Dudley Clendenin. The Good Short Life (Opinion piece, Sunday Review, The New York Times 7-9-11). Living with Lou Gehrig's disease is about life, when you know there's not much left, writes Clendenin, who plans to end his life before ALS prevents him from doing so. Nieman Storyboard has an interesting Editors' Roundtable: The New York Times on facing death as well as an interview with the author: Dudley Clendinen on building stories from life and choosing grace in death: “I don’t quibble with fate”

Joanna Connors. Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Story (The Cleveland Plain Dealer 5-4-08). Connors investigates her own 1984 rape and reports on it in a story that is part personal essay, part long-form journalism. "We tell stories to connect with each other. We tell our own stories -- sometimes just to ourselves -- to make sense of the world and our experience in it," she writes in part 3. "As a reader and a writer, I believe in the power of stories to bring us together and heal. I have asked so many other people to open themselves up and let me tell their stories, all the while withholding my own. I owed this to them."\

Andrea Curtis. Small Mercies (Toronto Life, December 2005). He was born at three and a half pounds, the length of a squirrel, with no eyelashes or toenails, and pencil-thin legs poking out of a diaper that covered almost his entire torso. He was too small to eat or breath on his own. Too fragile even to be held. Discussed by Bruce Gillespie, Why's this so good? (Nieman Storyboard, 1-24-12): "a textbook example of how to pace a story for maximum reader engagement that is sure to keep you glued to the page until the very last word."


Thomas Curwen. Ana's Story: Isolated by her appearance, she yearned for a place in the world(two-part series in the Los Angeles Times about how facial reconstruction may change the life of Ana Rodarte, whose life has been defined by facial disfigurement caused by neurofibromatosis, 4-4-09)

Lane DeGregory and Melissa Lyttle. The Girl in the Window (St. Petersburg Times, 7-31-08). The 'Plant City police found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child, pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost 7 years old." The story of Danielle, a feral child, deprived of her humanity by a lack of nurturing. With a follow-up story by Lane DeGregory: Three years later, 'The Girl in the Window' learns to connect (8-21-11)

Sheri Fink's story (in two venues, with different titles): The Deadly Choices at Memorial (ProPublica, journalism in the public interest, 8-24-09); Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices (New York Times Magazine, 8-25-09); and the story about the story: An extremely expensive cover story — with a new way of footing the bill by Zachary M. Seward, Nieman Journalism Lab (a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age). Also of interest: The Deadly Choices at Memorial (letters in response to the Times story).

David Finkel's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, for "explanatory journalism," Exporting Democracy (about U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Yemen).

FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus (New York Times blog), the first blog Nieman Narrative selected as a Notable Narrative.

Brent Foster and Poul Madsen, Nobody deserves this Hell Hole: Jharia's fiery mines (The Globe and Mail, 5-8-09, with a story that multimedia greatly improves)

Jon Franklin. Mrs. Kelly's Monster (Baltimore Sun, 1979) won the first Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Thomas French, Angels & Demons (this story in St. Petersburg Times won 1998 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for his detailed and compassionate narrative portrait of a mother and two daughters slain on a Florida vacation, and the three-year investigation into their murders)

Thomas French, Zoo Story. Life. Death. The Paradox of Freedom. (a special, outstanding nine-part series in the St. Petersburg Times, 12-2-07)

Stephen Fried, Cradle to Grave (Part 1) and Part 2 (Philadelphia Magazine, 1-17-08). In the 1960s, a local couple became the most famous bereaved parents in America, as their infants died one after another. This Philadelphia Magazine investigation revealed the deaths were indeed tragic, but perhaps not unexplainable.

Atul Gawande. The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial (Annals of Medicine, The New Yorker, 10-9-06)

James Glanz. Alley Fighters (New York Times, 3-30-08). In Shite Slums Victory Must Be Won in the Alleys -- an example of hard news told as first-person explanatory essay

Christopher Goffard. On the run from everything but each other (Los Angeles Times 5-13-09), young love in flight, which Mark Johnson writes about in “Why’s this so good?” (Nieman Storyboard 1-10-12)

Cynthia Gorney. Chicken-Soup Nation (Annals of Publishing, New Yorker, 10-6-03).

David Grann. The Squid Hunter (A Reporter at Large, The New Yorker, 5-24-04). Can Steve O’Shea capture the sea’s most elusive creature?

David Grann. The Chameleon (Annals of Crime, The New Yorker, 8-11-08). The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin, a thirty-year-old Frenchman who serially impersonated children.

Tom Hallman Jr. The Boy Behind the Mask (The Oregonian, 9-30-00). Received 2001 Pulitzer "for his poignant profile of a disfigured 14-year old boy who elects to have life-threatening surgery in an effort to improve his appearance")

Tom Hallman Jr. Fighting for life on Level 3 (Oregonian, Sept. 21-24, 2003). Hallman takes readers inside the ward where premature babies are tended. To cover this story, he had to first win over the hospital bureaucracy; he then spent nine months "immersion reporting." Wrote judges for a Missouri School of Journalism award for the series: "The reporting is outstanding; the writing is extraordinary. This is journalism at its highest level."

Jack Hitt. Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure (NYTimes Magazine, 7-22-09)

Dan Koeppel, How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive (Popular Mechanics, February 2010), with Nieman Storyboard's commentary on technique.

Michael Kruse, A Brevard woman disappeared, but never left home. How could a woman die a block from the beach, surrounded by her neighbors, and not be found for almost 16 months? Nieman Storyboard commentary: Exhuming a life (the lost history of Kathryn Norris)

Thomas Lake. The Way It Should Be (Sports Illustrated, 6-29-09, the story of an athlete's singular gesture continues to inspire)

Mark Larabee. Clinging to Life—and Whatever Floats (Oregonian, 12-12-07). A dogs-and-human rescue story.

Charlie LeDuff. Frozen in Indifference: Life goes on around body found in vacant warehouse ( Detroit News, 1-28-09)

Ben Montgomery, Waveney Ann Moore, and Edmund D. Fountain For Their Own Good (St. Petersburg Times), a story of abuse at The Florida School for Boys, Florida's home for juvenile delinquents. A Nieman Notable Narrative.

Errol Morris. Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (The Opinionator, NY Times commentary, 6-19-11). A fascinating exchange between Errol Morris and Tom Van Vleck about the role Van Vleck and Noel Morris played in starting the Internet (part 1 of 5).

Mary Otto. Hidden Hurt (Washington Post 11-9-08). Volunteer health care workers on a remote medical mission spend three days serving uninsured patients who flock to Appalachia for free medical care)

Sonia Nazario. Enrique's Journey (six-part Los Angeles Times series that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, for "her touching, exhaustively reported story of a Honduran boy's perilous search for his mother who had migrated to the United States").

Richard Read. The French Fry Connection (Oregonian, 10-18-98). Following one globe-hopping load of Northwest potatoes reveals a lot about the world economic crisis (winner of 1999 Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting). Brilliant use of narrative to explain economics.

Andrew Rice, The Fall of Niagara Falls. Decades of decay, corruption, and failed get-rich-quick schemes have made the city one of the most intractable disasters in the U.S. Read an interview with Rice about the story on Nieman Storyboard.

Michael Shnayerson, Crimes of the Art? (Vanity Fair, December 2010). Eight years after Larry Rivers’s death, Rivers is being accused of child pornography, for filming his adolescent daughters topless. Scnayerson asks whether the artist was shattering taboos or destroying innocence. See also Art or Abuse?, discussion on Nieman Storyboard.

Vicki Smith. Slow Death: What happens to mill towns when industry moves on? (Associated Press, 9-25-06, posted on Nieman StoryBoard)

Gay Talese. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (Esquire April 1966). "[O]ne of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction." And an example of immersion reporting, particularly helpful when the subject refuses to be interviewed.

This American Life (excellent radio narratives in Ira Glass's weekly one-hour show on WBEZ, Chicago, aired nationally through Public Radio International).

Stuart Tomlinson. After Devastating Car Wreck Right Before His Eyes, An Officer Reacts (Oregonian, 10-13-04 -- discussed by Jack Hart in Storycraft as an example of a standard news story presented as narrative nonfiction

Charles Van Doren. All the Answers. The quiz-show scandals—and the aftermath (New Yorker 7-28-08)

Gene Weingarten, The Peekaboo Paradox (WashPost 1-22-06), about the preschool entertainer, The Great Zucchini. Opinions vary on whether this is great or needs editing. Listen to Bob Edwards' radio interview with Weingarten about this story and Weingarten's collection The Fiddler in the Subway: The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts. . . And Other Virtuoso Performances by America's Foremost Feature Writer

Michael Weinreb on the Joe Paterno scandal. Growing Up Penn State (Grantland 11-8-11). The end of idealizing sports heroes at State College.
[Go Top]

Why's This So Good?

A "collaboration on the magic of long-form stories" (Nieman Storyboard pieces that explore what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading). From the archives:

• “Why’s this so good?” No. 1: Truman Capote keeps time with Marlon Brando by Alexis Madrigal 6-27-11). Truman Capote’s profile of the depressive, incoherent, brilliant Marlon Brando is one of the greatest of all time. Published in 1957 in The New Yorker, it nominally takes place one evening in the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto. One could point out many things about craft in the piece. The descriptions of characters are finely observed and [...]

• McPhee takes on the Mississippi by Carl Zimmer No. 2, 7-7-11). When the Mississippi River recently surged down through the middle of the country, a lot of people I follow on Twitter took the opportunity to point to John McPhee’s marvelous 1987 article “Atchafalaya.”I took their advice and revisited the piece.
After 24 years, the story is still valuable simply as a guide to the risks faced by [...]

• André Aciman on the geography of longing by Radhika Jones (No. 3, 7-12-11). André Aciman’s “Shadow Cities” comes out swinging. “On a late spring morning almost two years ago,” it begins, “while walking on Broadway, I suddenly noticed that something terrible had happened to Straus Park.”

• Heinz on Air Lift, son of Bold Venture by Chris Jones (No. 4, 7-19-11). On a rainy afternoon in 1949, W.C. Heinz watched a beautiful young horse break its leg and then get shot in the head. And then he sat down and wrote about it for the readers of the New York Sun, ordinary men and women, commuters and shoeshine kids.

• Raymond Chandler sticks it to Hollywood by Maud Newton (No. 5, 7-27-11). We tend now to think of Hollywood’s hackneyed, would-be blockbusters as a new phenomenon, one borne of desperation, unprecedented cynicism and the rise of narrative television. But Raymond Chandler’s wonderful 1945 essay-screed “Writers in Hollywood” reminds us that the motion picture industry was, by and large, as uninspired and ridiculous 65 years ago as it is today.

• Alma Guillermoprieto’s view on Bogota by Jay Caspian Kang (No. 6, 8-3-11)
• Barry Siegel and the weight of consequences by Deborah Blum (No. 7, 8-9-11)

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