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A digital magazine about the art, craft and science of storytelling. Join our mailing list: https://the-story.media/?subscribe=true

The Story is for anyone curious about the narratives that shape our world, or who just enjoys a good yarn.

29/05/2024

Will listening to these songs turn you into a best-selling author? Unlikely! Will it reveal insights into these authors' inner lives? Maybe! Will it give you something to tap your feet to? Provided you enjoy classical, Motown, a genre we're generously calling ‘Gen X alt-country’, and—ah—Lou Bega's 1999 hit 'Mambo No. 5', then yes. Yes it will.

The songs Stephen King, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler and more played to get the words flowing.

16/05/2024

Conservatives have long dominated the political battlefield with simple slogans (and simpler thinking). PR legend David Fenton, whose campaigns helped reverse the nuclear arms race and end apartheid in South Africa, says it's time the left did the same.

In our latest dispatch from the wild world of progressive comms, we ask the so-called 'Robin Hood of public relations' how activists can fight fire with fire to shift the climate change debate.

Conservatives have long dominated the political discourse. PR legend David Fenton says its time for the left to fight back.

01/09/2023

In ‘The Heat Will Kill You First’, Rolling Stone editor Jeff Goodell turns an invisible, nebulous subject into a page-turning thriller.

It’s a masterclass in crafting fear and suspense out of unlikely materials. We sat down to find out how he does it, whether he thinks writing can actually save the planet, and why he quit professional motorcycle racing to tackle a far more dangerous pursuit.

In 'The Heat Will Kill You First', the best-selling author turns an invisible, nebulous subject into a page-turning thriller. Here's how.

15/08/2023

Do you wake up before sunrise, bang out couple dozen pages then complete a quarter marathon like Murakami? Or is a day of tortured, Didion-esque reflection and a handful of sentences more your style?

Of course, these aren’t the only options: Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S Thompson, Ursula Le Guinn, Susan Sontag—they all had their own writing routines (some healthier than others).

Find the one that’s right for you (or simply gawk at the odd hours they kept) in the article below.

“After 8:00 p.m. I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.”

16/05/2023

They were the beloved upstarts of the millennial era. Now publications like BuzzFeed and Vice are the ones being disrupted. Where did the dream of the 2010s go wrong?

They were the beloved upstarts of the millennial era. Now the BuzzFeed, Gawker and Vice set are being disrupted. Where did the dream of the 2010s go wrong?

01/05/2023

Nathan Anderson exposes corporate fraud (and makes millions in the process). Can activist short sellers like him replace the journalists who ordinarily do this work? Paddy Manning investigates.

The activist investor behind Hindenburg Research is doing the work once reserved for investigative reporters. Is this the new face of journalism?

06/04/2023

Dreams, italics, the word “lugubrious”—here’s everything America’s newspaper of record wants writers to stop, ahem, writing.

Dreams, italics, the word “lugubrious”—here’s everything The Washington Post wants writers to stop writing.

03/04/2023

For decades, newsrooms have followed an unbeatable ratings strategy: ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. But while negative stories tend to attract bigger audiences, they can also lead those same audiences towards what psychologists call ‘learned helplessness’—a state of fatalistic apathy where people start to believe the world is beyond saving.

As the director of one of Denmark’s biggest newsrooms, Ulrik Haagerup helped produce this kind of ‘doom-and-gloom’ reporting for ten years. Then one night, he found himself wondering if another form of journalism might be possible—one that gave audiences the tools to solve the world’s problems instead of throwing up their hands and changing the channel.

Together with a team of like-minded reporters and academics, he spent the next few years ironing out the details of what is now known as ‘constructive journalism’. Could it be the solution to our media woes?

Constructive journalism—also known as solutions journalism—is a more helpful way to report the news. Here's how it works.

01/03/2023

In hospitals across the world, doctors are putting down their scalpels and picking up novels to better understand—and better heal—the sick. The reason why? A woman named Rita Charon, and the burgeoning field of healthcare she founded called ‘narrative medicine’.

The idea behind narrative medicine, Charon says, is that patients tell stories about what’s wrong with them. And just like a novel, these stories are filled with plot, character and metaphor. To make sense of these stories—and to translate them into effective clinical care—Charon and her disciples are instructing doctors to read.

“We teach very complicated novels, hard fiction, heavy-duty Sebald, poetry,” Charon says. “We show them the complexities, how a sentence can mean 10 different things.”

If this all sounds like a load of liberal arts hoo-ha, you may be surprised to learn what the science says about narrative medicine, and why more and more doctors are starting to practise it.

More doctors are putting down their scalpels and picking up books to better understand the sick. But what is narrative medicine, and does it work?

11/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece from September, writer Patrick Pittman examined an idea that novelist Kurt Vonnegut came up with as a student in the 1940s, which he thought might say a lot about us as a species. It went something like this:

Every story ever told—from the earliest morality tales to Shakespeare right up to the latest episodes of 'House of the Dragon'—follows one of just seven basic 'story shapes’. Not yet one of the most successful authors of the 20th century, Vonnegut came up with the idea when he started charting the plot points of his favourite novels on paper, marking the good and bad things that happened to the books' protagonists over time.

Vonnegut took his idea to the anthropology department at Chicago University, hoping it might form the basis of a master’s thesis. Unfortunately for Vonnegut, the anthropologists rejected his idea, leading the would-be academic to pursue a career in creative writing. (A sliding-doors moment for which we can all be thankful.)

But Vonnegut never abandoned his idea of story shapes, and some 80 years later they continue to dazzle fiction writers. We couldn’t help but wonder whether current-day anthropologists might have softened their stance against Vonnegut’s theory. So we sent Pittman to investigate.

Read the full story—and check out Vonnegut’s nifty diagrams—at the link below.

Vonnegut believed every story could be described by one of just eight line graphs—and that their shapes might be of interest to anthropologists.

09/01/2023

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from 2022. In this piece, writer Fleur Macdonald explains what she learned from inhaling nearly 10,000 action-packed pages of Lee Child’s prose during lockdown.

From the role of pacing (“Where the reader expects pace, Child holds back”) to the importance of finding the bigger picture (“There is a before and an after in a Reacher story, just as there is a before and after in modern America”), Macdonald outlines a masterclass in storytelling for fiction and non-fiction writers alike.

As Macdonald writes, “ I can’t quite remember why I embarked on Reacher. I studied literature, I know I need to finish War and Peace, and I haven’t even been in an airport for a while. But last November, about three weeks into the U.K.’s sad wet second national lockdown, I downloaded the first in the series on Kindle. Perhaps the Amazon algorithm saw into my soul, or more likely I finally acted on the advice of a friend who listens to the audio versions while he illustrates children’s books, wiping the watercolour across his delicate lines as Reacher beats his enemies to a pulp. The beginning set the tone: ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner.’ For the next two hours, I didn’t look up.”

Read the full article—and contemplate Macdonald’s 7 storytelling tips—at the link below.

A writer sought distraction in the 26 paperback books of Lee Child. She came for the punch-ups. But she left with a masterclass in storytelling.

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