Writers and Editors

Narrative nonfiction goes under many names, including creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and fact-based storytelling. In short form, it's an alternative to the traditional newspaper pyramid structure (in which, if you lopped off the bottom part of the story, the reader would still have all the key information). With narrative nonfiction you don't present the main point in the first paragraph—compelling narrative keeps the reader reading to find out what happens, and the journey to the epiphany is half the point. "Creative nonfiction" is misleading in that it implies the facts can be made up. You stick to the truth--the storytelling is fact-based--but you adapt some of the features of fiction (setting scenes, presenting interesting characters, and creating the look and feel of a setting) to the purposes of journalism. Basically, it's storytelling that makes you want to keep reading.

The Nieman Narrative Digest (see links below) provides links to many excellent newspaper series that take advantage of the form. Among magazines, you can find excellent examples of narrative nonfiction in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Points of Entry, and
River Teeth. After a series of links here you will find a list of classic book-length narrative nonfiction, followed by links to a few exceptionally good short narratives or newspaper series readable online.

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Helpful books on the craft of nonfiction, including useful anthologies:

· The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism , ed. Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda
· Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction by James Stewart
· Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, by Janet Burroway
· Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, ed. Walt Harrington
· Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction , by Lee Gutkind
· Literary Journalism, ed. Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
· Literary Nonfiction: Learning by Example, ed. Patsy Sims
· The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton
· The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrativeby Vivian Gornick
· Story Building: Narrative Techniques for News and Feature Writers by Ndaeyo Uko
· Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, ed. Mark Kramer, Wendy Call (an excellent guide!)
· Writing a Book That Makes a Difference, by Philip Gerard
· Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by Jon Franklin
· Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, ed. Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard

Some works aimed at fiction or screen writers may also be useful to writers of narrative nonfiction:
· The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner
· The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart's Truth into Literature, by Carol Bly (you'll have to buy used copies as it's out of print)
· The Screenwriter's Workbook, by Syd Field
· Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew,by Ursula K. Le Guin
· Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee
· The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters by Christopher Vogler


Tom Wolfe's mid-century anthology, The New Journalism, is out of print but available as used books. As one amazon.com reviewer observes: "The predictions in Wolfe's manifesto haven't panned out as pervasively as he expected - if anything, today's writerly writers, by and large, are more gimmicky, narcissistic and insulated than ever - but that's capital-L Literature's loss, and the night is young."

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Links to narrative nonfiction resources

CBC Dispatches, Part 1: Sounding out your story. Nieman Storyboard features best tips from the audio storytelling handbook of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Dispatches weekly radio show of documentaries, essays, interviews and reports from around the world. Followed by (Part 2: Composing with sound and Part 3: Writing for radio.

Center for Digital Storytelling, a California-based community arts organization rooted in the craft of personal storytelling, with an emphasis on first-person narrative, meaningful workshop processes, and participatory production methods. Newsletter focuses on five core area: Stories of Health, Silence Speaks (stories to fight gender-based violence), Witness Tree (stories of place and environmental change),Immigrant Voices, and Women, Girls, and Leadership.

Creative vs. narrative vs. literary nonfiction (Caroline Kettlewell, on her narrative nonfiction blog). Also, check out Kettlewell on What is the personal essay? and What is this thing called nonfiction (about the differences between fiction and nonfiction).

The future of long-form narrative by Gerry Marzorati, the NY Times Magazine editor's keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors' Forum

The human heart of the matter. Novelist Geoff Dyer argues that recent reportage about military conflict trumps fiction in its characterisation, observation and narrative drive (The Guardian 6-12-10). He compares two new books, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers and Sebastian Junger's War to a shelf of other first-rate books on the subject: Steve Coll's Ghost Wars; Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower; George Packer's The Assassins' Gate; Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and Dexter Filkins's The Forever War.

Interview with Jack Hitt (Part 1) and Part 2, by Conor Firedersdorf (and if your writing has been a struggle, Part 2, on the writing process, will make you feel better, or smile)

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference (Grapevine, Texas, July), as experienced by Sam Eifling and described in I Heard It While in Grapevine (Columbia Journalism Review, 7-28-09).

Menand, Louis. Excellent New Yorker essay, The Historical Romance: Edmund Wilson's Adventures with Communism ( 3-24-03), in which Menand writes: "Intuitive knowledge—the sense of what life was like when we were not there to experience it—is precisely the knowledge we seek. It is the true positive of historical work." Read full essay at http:/​/​www.newyorker.com/​archive/​2003/​03/​24/​030324crbo_books1.

National Book Award winner T.J. Stiles on telling good stories and asking big questions (nieman storyboard)

Stranger than Fiction: The Art of Literary Journalism. William McKeen, Lecture 1, Ancestors--storytelling, gossip, language, ways of preserving sounds as writing,newspapers, journalism, mass literacy, and so on. (Modern Scholar, available as audio downloads from LearnOutLoud.com). Free download of first 35 minutes, $35 for the whole tamale.

25 Best True Crime Books as selected by Todd Jensen, whose forensicColleges.net blog provides advice to those considering becoming forensic scientists.

Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel on creating compelling digital narratives: You've got to fight for every reader (on Nieman Storyboard).

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Classic narrative nonfiction books ~
a reading list to start with, anyway:

• James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
• H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City
• Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down
• Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession
• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker:Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; The Years of LBJ: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate
• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
• Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
• Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes
• Joan Didion, Where I Was From; Salvador; The White Album
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (You can download the book free at the Gutenberg Project: http:/​/​www.gutenberg.org/​etext/​23)
• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
• Finkel, David. The Good Soldiers. See also Nieman Storyboard interview with Finkel and Wikileaks video showing an incident he describes in the book.
• Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
• Jon Franklin, Alan Doelp, Shock-Trauma
• Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
• Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year
• Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda
• Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock; The Temple Bombing
• Alma Guillermoprieto, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now
• David Halberstam, Firehouse; The Teammates; The Best and the Brightest
• Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action
• Walt Harrington, At the Heart of It, The Everlasting Stream
• Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
• Paul Hendrickson, Looking for the Light
• Michael Herr, Dispatches
• John Hersey, Hiroshima
• Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit
• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
• Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding
• Pico Iyer, Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign
• Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• Tracy Kidder, Among School Children, The Soul Of A New Machine, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, Strength in What Remains, others
• Jamaica Kincaid, Talk Stories
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, others
• Mark Kramer, Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat, and Money from the American Soil
• Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm; The Devil in the White City
• Adrian LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
• Nicholas Lemann, Promised Land; The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
• Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
• Steve Lopez, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
• Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (1979), The Armies of the Night
• Ruben Martinez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
• Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
• John McPhee, Basin and Range; Coming into the Country; The Pine Barrens; The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed; Encounters with the Archdruid; The John McPhee Reader, many others
• Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel (short pieces from the New Yorker)
• N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
• Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
• Sonia Nazario, Enrique's Journey:The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother
• Susan Orlean, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People
• Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
• Richard Preston, The Hot Zone
• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Looking for America
• Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America
• Lillian Ross, Reporting (short pieces from the New Yorker); Portrait of Hemingway
• P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell
• Mike Royko, One More Time (short pieces)
• Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
• Barry Siegel, Actual Innocence
• Gary Smith, Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith (short pieces)
• Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
• Gay Talese, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (included in The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters), The Kingdom and the Power
• James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves
• Hunter Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels
• Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President
• Calvin Trillin, Remembering Denny
• Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
• Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway:A True Story
• Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
• Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman
• Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, others

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Excellent online examples of narrative journalism

You can find links to MANY excellent pieces of literary (narrative) journalism by clicking on the link below (Notable Narrative Archive, on the Nieman Narrative Digest website).

Barry Bearake, The Day the Sea Came, Part 1 of a long feature about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, which David Hayes cites as an example, like John Hersey's Hiroshima, of parallel structure: a number of characters and a single event. Go here for Part 2.

Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon (Globe & Mail series available online). Brown's memoir about his relationship with his son, Walker, born with a rare genetic disorder that leaves him profoundly developmentally disabled. In book form, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son is available at a reasonable price through Amazon Canada.

Sheri Fink's story (in two venues, with different titles): The Deadly Choices at Memorial (ProPublica, journalism in the public interest, 8-24-09); Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices (New York Times Magazine, 8-25-09); and the story about the story: An extremely expensive cover story — with a new way of footing the bill by Zachary M. Seward, Nieman Journalism Lab (a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age). Also of interest: The Deadly Choices at Memorial (letters in response to the Times story).

Chris Jones, on structuring a mystery, about two stories he wrote for Esquire: The End of Mystery (what happens when a helicopter goes down and the men on the ground try to unscramble the mystery of why) and The Things That Carried Him (the true story behind one soldier's last trip home)

Dan Koeppel, How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive (Popular Mechanics, February 2010), with Nieman Storyboard's commentary on technique.