✏️🛠️ An Insider’s Guide to the Narratively Story Structure
Want to write for Narratively? Or just interested in how our articles come to life? Here’s the breakdown of how a good idea becomes a great story.
Over the past 11 years, I’ve edited more than 2,000 stories for Narratively. 🤯 Recently, I was speaking to a group of Danish journalists who visited Narratively HQ in New York and wanted to chat about how we edit longform stories. One of them asked a great question: Do we follow any specific story structure, such as the classic “inverted pyramid” used by many newspapers? In this structure, the most essential newsworthy info comes at the top, followed by other important details in the middle, trickling down to less essential background at the end. While we don’t follow any of those specific models, over the course of those 2,000 stories, we have developed our own format of sorts, and their question inspired me to finally get it out of my head and down on paper.
So, if you have an assignment to write a story for us — or hope to in the future — this is the now-official, actually-written-down guide to the Narratively Story Structure.