Advice from a National Writers Workshop

If you can’t go to a writers’ workshop, at least you can get some of the advice. William Ketter, Tom French, Sebastian Junger and others share their tips for top storytelling at Poynter. My favorites:

The inverted pyramid lead on a story of more than three paragraphs is an “instrument of Satan,” and “formulaic” fourth paragraph nut graphs are overrated.
To “convey the vividness of the world … quote people talking the way they talk.”
To get your voice into any story, find one thing — a detail, a quote, a paragraph, a metaphor, a transition — that pleases you.

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