When writers, readers, English teachers, librarians, bookstore people, editors, and reviewers discuss extended digressive narrative nonfiction these days, they’re fairly likely to call it literary journalism. The previous term in circulation was Tom Wolfe’s contentious “New Journalism.” Coined in the rebellious mid-’60s, it was often uttered with a quizzical tone… Read More

“It wasn’t by accident,” wrote Hemingway, “that the Gettysburg Address was short.” His 1932 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, went on to lament every writer’s tendency to write too long, drifting beyond the story’s natural focus. He was, he admitted, as guilty as the next guy. “My… Read More

This essay is based on presentations given in advanced feature writing seminars the author taught at The Washington Post. On Thinking About Intimate Journalism It’s the kiss of death for anyone aspiring to do intimate journalism to think of what he or she does as lighteners, brighteners or… Read More

We’ve heard it to the point of numbness: “Get people into your stories. Tell it in human terms.” Who’s to argue? Yup, human beings are more interesting than paper creeping through a bureaucracy. Yup, real human experiences bring abstractions to life. Yup, readers are endlessly fascinated with the peccadilloes of… Read More

Think of the great characters from fiction. Gustave Flaubert’s romantic and unfocused Emma Bovary. Mark Twain’s spunky Huck Finn. Larry McMurtry’s lusty Gus McCrae. Margaret Mitchell’s willful Scarlett O’Hara. Each is memorable because each is a whole person, carefully crafted with a volume full of specific actions, revealing… Read More

The doctor at the Army base had a young corporal as his assistant to keep track of the paperwork. The young man was curious about the doctor’s affairs. He was always asking questions and one morning said, “In civilian life were many of your cases accidents?” “I don’t… Read More

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of Nieman Reports, the Nieman Foundation’s quarterly magazine. Narrative writing is returning to newspapers. No one has added up the reallocated column-inches to quantify this change, but there are many signs of the increasing interest: The Associated Press has… Read More

Note: The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Jim Collins at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. It was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Nieman Reports. These are things I have learned from my best writers, and now I pass them on to you… Read More

Editor’s Note: This is an edited transcript of comments made by Gay Talese at the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Dec. 1, 2001. It was first published in the Spring 2002 issue of RiverTeeth. Reprinted with permission. I am a man who has never had… Read More

Shane links infant mortality in Nepal to the U.S.’s own history. He takes a muscular approach to the topic by pointing out the paradox inherent in public health: treating people as statistics in order to save lives. We welcome this well-written series, an effort to apply narrative to an important… Read More

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, filmmakers and painters. Artists, after all, build… Read More

Newspaper folks talk a lot about getting people into stories. But all too often that means trotting out direct quotes from a variety of sources. True characterization taps an array of techniques that novelists and literary journalists use to bring human beings alive on… Read More