5 shared lessons from some masters of narrative nonfiction

EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this piece is co-posted with our friends at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

When I went to journalism school after studying piano performance as an undergrad, I encountered a fair number of raised eyebrows. The two fields might not seem intrinsically related, but they are for me. Both musicians and journalists create order out of chaos, telling stories that are true and, in their own ways, beautiful.

During my senior year of college, as I made the decision to apply to journalism master’s programs, I took a creative nonfiction class with Drew Bratcher. He introduced us to one piece of writing that has stayed with me ever since, “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” written by Michael Paterniti and originally published in 2000 in Esquire.

This piece is about a 1998 plane crash that left no survivors. It is a bizarre, horrifying yet beautiful account of the effort to identify victims and of the grief of the victims’ family members. It is bookmarked with what is essentially a prose poem about the night of the crash.

I can’t do it justice here, but it taught me that journalism can be beautiful. Perhaps more importantly, journalism about tragedy and pain can be beautiful. So turning from music to writing journalism never seemed like too big a leap.

Narrative journalism, or what some call literary journalism, is not new. It was popularized by the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, but it has continued in various iterations across mediums and publications. Literary journalism has, at times, raised ethical questions. The nature of narrative means that journalists often need to become intimately familiar with their sources and the personal, stylized approach to writing can sometimes seem less objective.

However, I chose to research narrative journalism because I wanted to understand what it does well. Why do journalists gravitate towards this type of journalism? Many of the answers are embedded in the very way they go about their work. As part of my master’s study at the Missouri School of Journalism, I reached out to several. They talked about crafting nonfiction narratives by thinking about characters and scenes. They talked about how lucky they feel to be able to tell compelling stories in a way that helps the reader understand issues at a deeper and more personal level. They spoke to me about doing the kind of work that made me fall in love with journalism in the first place.

Here are some key things I learned:

If you want to write a scene, you need enough details to make the reader feel like they are there with you. If you want to write a narrative, or if you want to write a news story that engages the reader, the only details you will be able to choose from are the details you collect while reporting. Collect as much information as you can, way more than you think you need.

Collecting the maximum amount of material can happen differently depending on the story and the type of information available. It can mean spending extra time with your sources, having a follow-up conversation (or two, or three) or finding ways to observe them in action. It can mean asking people to walk you through past experiences, recreating scenes or even visiting places that are important to the story. In some cases, there might be videos or recordings of events. Gather it all.

The traditional view is of the reporter as an impartial observer. Although we must be vigilant about how our personal beliefs might affect our perceptions, there also is also a place for being attuned to our emotions and tapping them for better reporting. Thomas Lake, a senior writer at CNN, told me about a story he wrote about a man who had been the longest wrongfully-imprisoned person in the country. Richard Phillips had endured his 46-year imprisonment by writing poetry and painting. Lake told me about a moment where he stood in Phillips’ apartment and was struck by one of his paintings: “If I’m out there, doing an interview or watching something happen, and I really feel something, I get that tingly feeling or suddenly feel a little choked up. That’s a pretty good indicator that if I do it right, the reader might feel something similar.”

This is a question journalists ask every day, whether because they need to get to the core of an issue or figure out what is most newsworthy to put in the lede. Many of the narrative journalists I talked to, however, went deeper. For them, the question was used to identify universal experiences that readers will relate to, even if they haven’t experienced the exact situation recounted in a story.

Lane DeGregory, longtime enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, says she is always looking for universal themes in her stories: “Even if (readers) can’t relate to the person I’m writing about, they can relate to revenge or love, or hope or heartbreak.” These themes give stories staying power beyond the immediate news cycle and also give journalists a way to focus their writing.

Narratives are often characterized by rich details. Readers are immersed in the world they are reading about, including the thoughts and feelings of the people in the story. Obtaining these details for journalistic narratives requires long interviews and detailed questions, but the journalists I spoke with felt the time and effort is worthwhile.

“You bring the reader inside their thought process, so that the distance between the reader and the subject collapses and for a brief instance, the reader is sort of there with the subject as they’re doing, what they’re doing, thinking about their thinking,” said Jenna Russell, a New York Times journalist who also wrote for the Boston Globe for many years. “To me, that’s where you create empathy, when that distance collapses.”

All of the journalists I spoke with, each in their own way, emphasized the importance of spending time — a lot of time — with sources. Some spoke about the privilege it is to be allowed into people’s lives, often becoming intimately familiar with difficult circumstances and situations. Robert Sanchez, a staff writer for the Denver-based 5280 Magazine, thinks it’s unfair to conduct an interview where he asks all the questions and his sources carry all of the vulnerability of sharing their lives. Instead, he approaches sources with his notebook in his back pocket, only taking it out once he has made a personal connection. He also shares parts of his life, as appropriate, and prefers to approach reporting as conversations with characters as opposed to interviews with sources.

“When I sit down and have a conversation with a character, I’m trying to understand the full humanity of that human being, right?” Sanchez said. “I’m trying to learn the absolute most about that human being, and the only way I’m going to be able to do that is to also be able to talk about myself.”

The other day, I was covering an event and I hung around to interview the guest performer. The event organizer pulled me aside and thanked me for staying so long — not just dropping in and out. Covering a small community for a small newspaper, I am lucky to be thanked often for my work. But when I am, this is my favorite thing to be thanked for. Journalists have hectic schedules, but the thing we have in short supply is also the best thing we have to give: time.

I’m reminded of the hours I spent as a music major in a windowless practice room, working through the minuscule details at a pace that made any improvement in my playing indetectable in the moment. Musicians spend hours doing the same thing over and over until they emerge onto the stage with a polished product.

If any journalist aspires to achieve a sort of art with their work — and I certainly do — we need to work with equal persistence and attention to detail. In many ways, our craft is spending time with people. I hope and pray that I continue to learn to do that well.

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Grace Kenyon covers Lake Placid for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in upstate New York. She interviewed eight narrative journalists as part of her research at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she received her master’s degree.