| Description: |
|
Product Description
An indispensable guide to nonfiction writing from the Columbia Journalism School professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist behind the bestsellers Blind Eye, Blood Sport, and Den of Thieves.
In Follow the Story, bestselling author and journalist James B. Stewart teaches you the techniques of compelling narrative writing, from nonfiction books to articles, feature stories, or memoirs. Stewart provides concrete directions for conceiving, reporting, structuring, and writing nonfiction—techniques that he has used in his own successful books and stories. By using examples from his own work, Stewart illustrates systematically a way of thinking about and executing stories, a method that has helped numerous reporters and Columbia students become better writers.
Follow the Story examines in detail:
- How an idea is conceived
- How to “sell” ideas to editors and publishers
- How to report the nonfiction story
- Six models that can be used for any nonfiction story
- How to structure the narrative story
- How to write introductions, endings, dialogue, and description
- How to introduce and develop characters
- How to use literary devices
- Pitfalls to avoid
Learn from this book a clear way of looking at the world with the alert curiosity that is the first indispensable step toward good writing.
Amazon.com Review
Forget everything you thought you knew about journalism. James B. Stewart shuns pyramid style and all its accoutrements for a more creative type of nonfiction, nonfiction that tells a compelling story. Stewart's ideas about nonfiction stem directly from his experience as a writer and editor of The Wall Street Journal's lengthy page-1 feature stories, which explore subjects, as Stewart says, "in depth, with style, and often ... with wit." "Good writing," Stewart says in Follow the Story, "is rooted not in knowledge, but in curiosity." Curiosity too, says Stewart, "is what make readers read the stories that result." Using examples from his own writing (for the Journal, The New Yorker, and SmartMoney, and also from his books Blood Sport and Den of Thieves), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stewart shows how to turn your curiosity into ideas, story proposals, and then the stories themselves. Each part of the writing process-- cultivating sources, gathering information, writing the lead and the transition, structuring your piece, and then concluding it--is discussed with authority and demonstrated masterfully. Stewart also includes chapters on how to use (but not overuse) description, dialogue, anecdotes, humor, and pathos to strengthen your work. --Jane Steinberg
|
