Tommy Tomlinson deconstructs the 1976 hit "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" for Nieman Storyboard and shows how it resembles a well-written short news story, complete with a literary hook, shifts in perspective, rising tension, and details that foreshadow the ship's tragic sinking: "He even has a nut graf! It’s not explicit, but you know the gales of November did something bad to a very big ship. That’s enough — and better than revealing everything up top."

What is a narrative? Does it require "a central character who encounters a problem, and the problem is somehow resolved?" Or is it, more broadly, "an account of connected events?" DeLene Beeland discusses that question — and how writing is like deconstructing a Jenga tower ("what we take out of our writing is just as important to the integrity and strength of a piece as what we keep in") — in a recap of a session at the just-concluded ScienceOnline2013 conference.

Starlee Kine from This American Life discusses what makes a story, and how one can get away, on Nieman Storyboard: "I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re like fighting over who sleeps where and, like, showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside."

The first question Paige Williams had for author Jon Franklin was, "So, were you in the operating room during the surgery or some sort of viewing gallery?" Franklin, a former NASW board member, answers that question and others about his classic 1979 story about a brain surgeon and his patient's operating room death: “It wasn’t until four or five hours passed that I thought, 'Well, wait a minute, it’s a better story because she died,'” Franklin says.