A Brief Introduction to Narrative Nonfiction
Edward Humes
Somewhere between the newspaper on your doorstep and the novel on your nightstand lies narrative nonfiction, literary journalism — the nonfiction novel.
Whatever you want to call it, to me, this sort of writing occupies a fascinating and fertile boundary, full of possibility and peril, as it can so easily combine the best of both worlds — an Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, or pick your title by John McPhee. It is hard to imagine a more vibrant genre, combining the immediacy of journalism and the power of true accounts with the texture, read, drama, emotional punch, point of view and broad themes of a novel. Then again, narrative nonfiction also can deliver the worst of both worlds, when the desire to construct a story trumps the responsibility to stick to the facts, no matter how inconvenient.
You might remember Joe McGinnis’s disastrous Ted Kennedy book a few years ago, with its fabricated dialogues and interior thoughts of sources he never interviewed. And there have been other scandals involving the accuracy of some recent journalism-memoirs such as Sleepers and The Kiss, as well as the veracity of authors themselves, most recently (and spectacularly) the popular historian Joseph J. Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, National Book Award recipient author of Founding Brothers and American Sphinx, who fabricated a personal past as a Vietnam war hero. Narrative nonfiction, above all else, requires the trust of the reader — which means no compromises on integrity by the author.
Perhaps because I came to narrative nonfiction writing from a news reporter’s perspective — I was a daily journalist for ten years, and continue to write for magazines — I tend to believe the most crucial skills necessary for this genre are the reporter’s, the information gatherer’s, rather than the writer’s. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a seminal work of nonfiction not because of his beautiful prose, but because of the awe-inspiring reporting he did, the incredible detail he eked from his sources. The book reads as if he were a witness to the public and private events of the first years of the Space Race, when the reality is he reconstructed the narrative many years later. It was not his gifts as a writer that brought this about — it was the exhaustive interviewing and assembly of materials.
Like a novel, narrative nonfiction imposes structure, theme and subtext to events, place and character. Unlike novelists, authors of narrative nonfiction must live with the fact that real people and real facts seldom conform very tidily to these conventions. Reality is messy, and sometimes you have to put up with unsatisfying turns to the story.
I hated the fact that Bill Leasure, the corrupt LAPD traffic cop in my second book, Murderer with a Badge, chose murder as his first crime. Only later did he segue into stealing a few million dollars worth of yachts. Chronicling events in that order would have been anticlimactic. So I abandoned any pretense of a chronological structure, and started the first chapter with Leasure aboard a stolen boat. The murders unfolded later in the book, in a section that dealt with an earlier period in Leasure’s life. Then the narrative jumped forward again to a time after the yacht thefts, when those unsolved murders were finally linked to Leasure by the police. That kept the tension in the narrative building, through structurally, it was kind of messy — like my main character’s life.
Finding the right structure for No Matter How Loud I Shout, my juvenile court book, was even more challenging, as I was weaving together an ensemble of characters with different story lines that only occasionally intersected — a kind of literary version of Hillstreet Blues or ER. Yet these varied threads had to build toward some sort of critical mass and shared climax in order to make sense. Finding those intersection points was not a matter of clever writing. It was a matter of being there, day after day, haunting the courtrooms, the juvenile hall, the offices of the prosecutors and public defenders and judges. In the end, I have found, even the most thorny sorts of questions about structure and character development end up being less about writing technique, and more about reporting technique. Narrative nonfiction requires authors to immerse themselves in their subjects, to painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) interview characters, research place (past, present and future), and reconstruct dialogue (spoken and interior).
There are some superb practitioners of the art of narrative nonfiction, of immersion journalism, who have produced surprising and illuminating works. Click here for my list of must-reads in narrative nonfiction. If you have suggestions for this list, email them and I’ll consider adding your recommendations.
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