I am writing from the National Association of Science Writers conference in Raleigh, North Carolina this weekend. Thank you to freelance journalist Maya L. Kapoor for organizing our panel on “Building Your Story’s Structure,” with speakers John Thomason, features editor at Grist, and Ashley Smart, associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and senior editor at Undark Magazine.
Below, I’ve put together some resources and books we mentioned in our Saturday discussion. I’ve also included seven story structures that can be useful for thinking about longform pieces, as well as links to a few examples of each style. Stories mentioned by our panel are also linked, categorized by structure.
We all agree, there is never just one way to structure a story. Structural choices are subjective. It often comes down to first figuring out what story you are trying to tell and how to best convey it. Structure, at least for me, is one of the hardest parts of writing. It’s always a work in progress, a journey you embark upon with your editors (until it publishes, and you have to let go).
“All narrative is an argument,” one of my mentors told me, “in how we select and order a story.” I return to this advice often when thinking about a nonfiction writer’s role in a story. Whether the narrator is omniscient, a confident guide, or a protagonist, you can find us in the details we choose to include, where we focus our lens, who we choose to interview and quote, how we decide to organize a story’s shape and flow.
I also suggested this resource: “The Narrative Power Edit,” a Google doc written by Sandhya Dirks. It’s an editing resource to check your reporting and think about how power, bias, and privilege are operating in your stories. Dirks points out that stories are always about systems, obvious and less obvious ones that are “always hovering.” Systems, she writes, can also be main characters.
Smart mentioned he learned from the book: “Writing for Story,” by Jon Franklin. “Telling True Stories” is another classic book about narrative journalism craft. And one book that Kapoor and I also appreciate, which is not about nonfiction, but is useful in rethinking structure is “Craft in the Real World,” by Matthew Salesses (Salesses also wrote a braided essay listed below).
The Open Notebook’s Siri Carpenter recently also celebrated the release of the second edition of “The Craft of Science Writing,” an expanded edition.
Seven Story Structures
