In good fiction, the reader absorbing a compelling narrative never notices the writer as intermediary. In nonfiction, that translator’s presence is inevitable. Since the former is the ideal relationship with the reader, the more you can bring that non-point of view to nonfiction narrative, the better. In other words, as a writer, no matter what the hell you’re writing, do your best to kill your ego, even if those are mutually exclusive ideals. (i.e.: He could have told the story of the effect of that atomic bomb on an innocent city by telling us what he found when he went over there, and it would have been a good piece. Instead he gave the story over to the six survivors, and it earned a place in immortality.) Read more
Word nerds, you’ll want to stock up on yellow highlighters for Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, Constance Hale’s newest book on writing and language. In her follow-up to Sin and Syntax, Hale, a journalist and writing teacher, autopsies and … Read more
The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s – by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and others – made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years from now, will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee. Read more
We may as well begin the way Gary Smith begins – with a question, and near the end. Why is it that when you finish reading “Lying in Wait,” Smith’s 2002 profile of coach George O’Leary, you feel the … Read more
Over the years Roy Blount Jr. has written a number of superb magazine articles, one of my favorites being “Knock ’im Out, Jay-ree!” a profile of the great Southern raconteur Jerry (pronounced Jay-ree) Clower. The piece, which appeared … Read more
When I first read the New Journalism manifestos by Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, they changed forever my vision of narrative. In spite of my Ph.D. in English, I realized for the first time that a narrative had parts … Read more
Last week, veteran writer Tracy Kidder offered his reflections on narrative nonfiction a public conversation with current Nieman Fellow Darcy Frey. Part of the Harvard Writers at Work series, the talk took place in a packed campus auditorium … Read more
