✏️🛠️ 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.

Illustration by Yunuen Bonaparte

Hey, readers! As you may have seen, we recently reopened submissions for our Deep Dives, Memoir and Secret Live sections. For those of you thinking about writing a story for Narratively, this post is the most comprehensive guide we have for how a Narratively story comes together. (Want to know even more? You have just one week left to sign up for my first-ever Narratively Academy class, The Longform Feature: Reporting Big Stories That Demand Attention.)

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 do…