what is narrative nonfiction writing

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Narrative Nonfiction Books: Definition and Examples

Hannah Yang

What is narrative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction examples, how prowritingaid can help you write narrative nonfiction.

There are countless types of nonfiction books that you can consider writing. One popular genre you might have heard of is narrative nonfiction.

So, what exactly is narrative nonfiction?

The short answer is that narrative nonfiction is any true story written in the style of a fiction novel.

Read on to learn more about what narrative nonfiction looks like as well as some examples of bestselling narrative nonfiction books.

Let’s start with a quick overview of what narrative nonfiction means.

Narrative Nonfiction Definition

Narrative nonfiction, which is also sometimes called literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, is a subgenre of nonfiction . This subgenre includes any true story that’s written in the style of a novel.

It’s easy to understand this term if you break it down into its component parts. The first word, narrative, means story. The second word, nonfiction , means writing that’s based on fact rather than imagination.

So, if you put those two words together, it’s clear that narrative nonfiction refers to true events that are written in the style of a story.

Narrative Nonfiction Meaning

You can think of narrative nonfiction as a genre that focuses both on conveying the truth and on telling a good story.

Everything in a narrative nonfiction book should be an accurate portrayal of true events. However, those events are told using techniques that are often used in fiction.

For example, narrative nonfiction writers might consider writing craft elements such as plot structure, character development, and effective world-building to craft a compelling story.

Most narrative nonfiction books include the following elements:

A protagonist (either the author themselves or the core subject of the story)

A cast of characters (who are real people)

Immersive, fleshed-out scenes

A plot arc similar to the plot arcs found in fiction novels

Use of literary devices such as metaphors, symbols, and flashbacks

Some narrative nonfiction writers also play with more creative elements to make the story more intriguing, such as multiple POVs, alternating timelines, and even the inclusion of emails, diary entries, and text messages.

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

At the end of the day, though, narrative nonfiction is still a form of nonfiction. That means it’s important to try to be as accurate as possible.

Authors writing in this genre need extensive research skills, whether that means combing through historical records or interviewing experts. It’s impossible to create a completely accurate representation of any true story, so it’s fine to take some creative license when writing narrative nonfiction, but most authors still do as much research as they can to make sure they’re correctly depicting what happened.

Which Genres Count as Narrative Nonfiction?

It’s hard to draw a clear line around what counts as narrative nonfiction since many works of writing blur the lines between subgenres.

Two genres that commonly intersect with narrative nonfiction are memoir and autobiography, which are terms that apply when an author tells the story of their own life. When these stories are told in a narrative style, some people consider that to be narrative nonfiction or literary nonfiction, while others believe memoir and autobiography should be a separate category.

Most journalism and biographies aren’t included under the narrative nonfiction umbrella, since they usually focus more on reporting than on telling a story. Still, a form of journalism called literary journalism deliberately aims to tell personal stories in a more creative way, and there are also biographies that do the same.

Some books in other nonfiction subgenres, such as travel writing, true crime, and even food writing, can also be told in a way that resembles narrative nonfiction. In fact, more and more nonfiction books these days are using literary techniques to hook readers in.

Narrative nonfiction books can focus on just about any topic as long as they use literary styles to tell true stories. If you’re writing nonfiction, you can definitely consider incorporating literary elements to craft a compelling narrative around your topic.

The best way to understand a genre of writing is by reading examples within that genre. Here are ten of the best narrative nonfiction books to add to your reading list.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)

Truman Capote, best known for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, started out as a fiction writer. When he wrote In Cold Blood , he famously called it a “nonfiction novel,” which introduced that term into the popular consciousness for the first time.

In Cold Blood tells the story of a brutal quadruple murder that took place in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas. The book describes the details of the murder, the ensuing investigation, and the eventual arrest of the murderers.

In many ways, In Cold Blood defined the narrative nonfiction genre. It was one of the first times an author had written journalism in the structure of a novel, and it inspired many future writers to try creative nonfiction too.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)

Jon Krakauer is a journalist and a mountaineer who summited Mt. Everest on the day a terrible storm hit the mountain. That storm ended up claiming five lives and leaving Krakauer himself ridden with guilt.

Into Thin Air is Krakauer’s account of his adventure and its deadly aftermath. It portrays the entire cast of characters that accompanied him up the mountain and also shows the character growth Krakauer experienced as a result.

This book is a famous example of a memoir that reads like an adventure novel. The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave this book an Academy Award in Literature in 1999 and described it as combining “the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.”

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (1999)

Seabiscuit was a California racehorse in the 1930s. Because of his crooked leg, he was never expected to win.

However, when Seabiscuit was bought by Charles Howard and ridden by a jockey named Red Pollard, he rose to unexpected success. Now, Seabiscuit is remembered as one of the most iconic racehorses of all time.

Laura Hillenbrand, an equestrian writer, tells Seabiscuit’s story in this classic work of narrative nonfiction. Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and all the other characters involved in Seabiscuit’s life are researched and portrayed in a masterful way.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)

From 1995 to 1997, Nafisi led a secret book club at her house in Tehran. Every Thursday, she met with her most dedicated female student to read banned Western classics together, from Pride and Prejudice to Lolita.

In Reading Lolita in Tehran , Nafisi describes her experiences throughout the Iranian revolution. It’s a gripping book that provides rare and extraordinary insight into what it was like to be a woman in Tehran in the late 1990s.

Like all great narrative nonfiction, this book would be a compelling novel even if you didn’t know it was a true story, but the fact that it’s all true makes it even more powerful.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman whose cells were taken by medical researchers in 1951 without her knowledge or consent. Ever since then, her cells, now known as HeLa cells, have been kept alive for medical uses.

HeLa cells have been essential for researching diseases, creating the polio vaccination, and making other medical breakthroughs. And yet, her family never benefited from or consented to their use.

Rebecca Skloot’s bestselling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells Lacks’ story in a thoughtful and illuminating way, weaving in research on the unjust intersection of medicine and race. The book won many awards and was later made into an HBO movie.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)

America’s achievements in space could never have happened without the contributions of Black female mathematicians at NASA, known as “human computers.” Before modern computers existed, these women used pen and paper to perform the calculations that launched rockets into space.

Shetterly’s book tells the stories of four of these brilliant women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden. The story follows them for over three decades as they overcame racial and gender prejudices to help shape American history.

This work of literary nonfiction is well-researched, informative, and powerful. It was also made into a major motion picture by Twentieth Century Fox.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

Paul Kalanithi, a Stanford neurosurgeon, was only 36 years old when he received his Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis. He went from treating patients to becoming the patient in such a short span of time that he had to quickly learn how to accept his own mortality.

Kalanithi wrote this medical memoir during the last years of his life, describing how he came to terms with his diagnosis. When Breath Becomes Air tells Kalanithi’s story in a poignant and unforgettable way.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (2017)

Killers of the Flower Moon is a true crime murder mystery about a terrible crime in the 1920s, when members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma started getting killed one by one. Anyone who tried to investigate was in danger of getting murdered too until the death toll rose to over two dozen.

When the truth was finally uncovered, it turned out to be a chilling conspiracy bolstered by prejudice against Indigenous people.

Journalist David Grann tells the story of this shocking crime in this narrative nonfiction book, which is soon to be made into a major motion picture.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara (2018)

The Golden State Killer was a serial killer who raped and murdered dozens of people in the 1970s and 1980s. Michelle McNamara was a true crime journalist who coined the name “Golden State Killer” in 2013 when she was poring over police records, determined to figure out the killer’s identity.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which was still in the process of being written when McNamara died, blurs the genres between nonfiction, memoir, and crime fiction. The book eventually helped lead to the killer’s capture.

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in WWII by Daniel James Brown (2021)

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans faced suspicion and systemic prejudice from their own country. In spite of the injustices they faced over the next several years, many Japanese Americans still signed up to fight for the US in World War II.

In Facing the Mountain , Daniel James Brown tells the stories of four Japanese American heroes: Rudy Tokiwa, Kats Miho, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Shiosaki. The book follows these four men and their families and communities, who were irreversibly impacted by the events of the war.

Writing narrative nonfiction can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also be unusually tricky because you have to accomplish two goals at once. Unlike other nonfiction, which aims to inform, or most fiction, which aims to entertain, narrative nonfiction seeks to inform and entertain at the same time.

To inform, you’ll need your writing to be clear and easily readable. To entertain, you’ll need it to be gripping and active.

ProWritingAid can help with both of those goals. At the most basic level, the AI-powered grammar checker will make sure your writing is free of grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. At a more sophisticated level, it will also make sure you’re hooking your reader in by using the active voice, precise word choices, and varied sentence lengths.

In addition, you can also use ProWritingAid to make sure you’re writing in the right tone and for the right reading level. Running your narrative nonfiction manuscript through ProWritingAid will ensure your writing truly shines.

There you have it—our complete guide to narrative nonfiction.

Good luck, and happy writing!

Hannah is a speculative fiction writer who loves all things strange and surreal. She holds a BA from Yale University and lives in Colorado. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her painting watercolors, playing her ukulele, or hiking in the Rockies. Follow her work on hannahyang.com or on Twitter at @hannahxyang.

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Table of Contents

What is narrative writing?

First-person versus third-person narrative
How to get out of your own way & write
Examples of great narrative writing

How to improve your narrative writing

What is narrative writing (& how to use it in a nonfiction book).

Narrative writing isn’t just for fiction. Not by a long shot.

In fact, the art of storytelling in written form can make or break just about any book.

Why? Because books are long . They have to hold a reader’s attention over thousands of words, and nothing holds a reader’s attention like a good story.

Well-told stories can:

grab and hold the reader’s attention
illustrate new ideas in an entertaining way
help readers relate those ideas to their own lives

If you want readers to love your book, to see themselves in it, and to recommend it to other readers, chances are you’ll need to tell a few good stories.

Narrative writing is any writing that tells a story.

The story can be fiction or nonfiction. It can be a full-length memoir (or novel) that tells one long story from start to finish, or it can be a quick anecdote in the middle of a how-to book.

No matter how long or short it is, whether it’s true or made up, every story in written form is narrative writing.

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to be a professional writer to write a good story .

Whether or not you’ve ever written even one story in your life, I’d bet good money that you’ve told a few.

In fact, you probably have a whole collection of stories. About the best and worst and craziest things that ever happened to you. Stories you’ve told a hundred times or more.

Narrative writing is just storytelling that’s written down.

First-person versus third-person narrative in nonfiction

There are two basic forms of storytelling: first-person and third-person.

One isn’t any better than the other, but first-person stories are the kind most people think of when they think about storytelling.

What is first-person narrative writing?

The first-person point of view uses “I” or “we” to tell a story.

The narrator is the main character, so the story is being told by the person who lived it.

“I’m finally on the road, heading for the convention, and I’m feeling pretty good. Despite the morning from hell, I hadn’t broken my neck, I hadn’t destroyed my marriage, and by some miracle, I’d managed to leave the house just 15 minutes behind schedule.

If I skipped lunch, I could still make it in time to give the keynote address.

This is what I was thinking, mentally patting myself on the back, when I suddenly realized I’d left my lunch on the counter, back in the kitchen, dropping it there during my meltdown.

Along with my speech.”

What is third-person narrative writing?

Third-person narrative writing uses “he,” “she,” or “they” to tell a story.

In nonfiction, third-person narration is often used to illustrate a point through a short story or case study.

“It was the worst setback the company had ever faced. The market for their revolutionary plastics had dried up overnight. And, given their recent expansion, the cash in the bank could only meet their payroll for about six more weeks.

The CEO called an executive meeting. Everyone assumed she was going to lay out a plan for a global shutdown. But what she proposed instead proved to be one of the greatest operational pivots in the history of manufacturing.”

Which one is better?

Like most writing, what’s best depends on the situation.

When the main character or actor in your story is someone else, third-person narrative is the obvious choice.

This is common in business books that include case studies, or in books by investigative journalists who track down stories about other people to learn about a given topic or idea.

When you’re writing a memoir, or when you’re writing a knowledge-share book that includes stories from your own experience, first-person narrative is extremely powerful.

But you don’t need to get bogged down in this kind of literary analysis.

Whether you’re writing a personal narrative or presenting a case study, just write it.

How to get out of your own way and write

Here’s the thing: you already know how to tell a story.

Don’t make the process of writing more complicated than it has to be.

Your book might jump back and forth between different points of view depending on what story you’re telling, but that isn’t something you’ll have to think about.

If you’re writing about something that happened to you, you’ll write “I” or “we” without paying any attention to it. It’s as natural as breathing.

If you’re writing about someone else, you’ll refer to them in the third person without any conscious effort.

The advice I am about to give you goes against most conventional writing wisdom:

People are natural-born storytellers. Trust yourself to tell the stories you need to tell.

What’s far more important is to think about how to tell the story. What should you focus on? What should you leave out?

Those decisions need to happen on a case-by-case basis, and the best way to learn how to make them is to see the results of good writing and editing in action.

Examples of great narrative writing in nonfiction books

Instead of getting hung up on literary terms like first-person or third-person narrative, great Authors worry about entertaining the reader.

No matter what kind of nonfiction you’re writing, people respond to stories, especially stories that start out with a problem.

Like these first paragraphs of Tiffany Haddish’s The Last Black Unicorn.

Tiffany Haddish: The Last Black Unicorn

“School was hard for me, for lots of reasons. One was I couldn’t read until, like, ninth grade. Also I was a foster kid for most of high school, and when my mom went nuts, I had to live with my grandma. That all sucked.

I got popular in high school, but before that, I wasn’t so popular. Kids would tease me all the time in elementary and middle school. They’d say I got flies on me and I smell like onions.

The flies thing came from the moles on my face. I got one under my eye, I had one on my chin, and so on. That was kind of mean.

The onions thing was because my mom used to make eggs in the morning with onions in them. Every damn morning, I had to eat eggs and onions. That would just make you stink. The whole house would stink.

Yeah, it was mean to say I stunk like onions, but…I did stink like onions.”

Story structure: why this is great

These opening paragraphs of Tiffany Haddish’s memoir grab the reader’s attention. Understanding how and why is the first step to strong narrative writing.

1. The style is conversational

There’s nothing formal or stilted about the writing. In fact, it reads like the Author is talking directly to the reader.

That’s the first key to writing narratives: write like you’re talking to someone. In fact, don’t even think of it as writing. Think of it as storytelling.

2. It starts with a highly relatable problem

School might have been hard for different people in different ways, but we’ve all been kids. And most of us had some kind of trouble with school at some point or another.

Opening with a universal problem gives readers something to relate to personally.

3. It gets personal and vulnerable quickly

If the first line of the book presents a problem almost everyone can relate to, the second line moves like lightning into the Author’s specific experience: “I couldn’t read until, like, ninth grade.”

Sharing a vulnerable and personal experience makes the story come alive. It’s straightforward, open, and honest, and admits something that most people would be far too ashamed to admit.

A lot of great writing comes down to the simplest writing lesson of all: be brutally honest about the things that feel the most private or make you feel the most vulnerable.

That’s virtually guaranteed to grab the reader’s attention.

4. It doesn’t over-explain things

In the first few lines, the reader learns that the Author couldn’t read until the ninth grade, that she was a foster kid, and that her mother “went nuts.” But we don’t get any details about any of those things.

At least, not yet.

By not explaining them here, the Author uses those revealed facts to invite the reader deeper into the story. The explanation can come later.

5. It offers the right sensory details

At the same time, the Author does explain some things.

Specifically, she tells the reader where her tormentors’ taunts came from. Details like the stink of onions are vivid in the reader’s imagination.

But these details aren’t just sensory. They’re intensely personal, which is the toughest part of the writing process.

Even in this very short piece of writing, the Author was willing to cut deep.

6. The reader’s interest drives the organization

When they first sit down to write, a lot of Authors feel compelled to present their story in chronological order. But the actual timing of events isn’t what drives a good story.

Instead, narrative text should be driven by the reader’s interest.

In three short paragraphs, the Author jumps from high school to middle school to serve the reader. She uses these miniature flashbacks to set the scene for the whole book.

She isn’t trying to present an ordered storyline.

She’s presenting new information in the order that will best draw the reader into the story. And it works brilliantly.

David Goggins: Can’t Hurt Me

“We found hell in a beautiful neighborhood. In 1981, Williamsville offered the tastiest real estate in Buffalo, New York. Leafy and friendly, its safe streets were dotted with dainty homes filled with model citizens. Doctors, attorneys, steel plant executives, dentists, and professional football players lived there with their adoring wives and their 2.2 kids. Cars were new, roads swept, possibilities endless. We’re talking about a living, breathing American Dream. Hell was a corner on Paradise Road.

That’s where we lived in a two-story, four-bedroom, white wooden home with four square pillars framing a front porch that led to the widest, greenest lawn in Williamsville. We had a vegetable garden out back and a two-car garage stocked with a 1962 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, a 1980 Mercedes 450 SLC, and, in the driveway, a sparkling new 1981 black Corvette. Everyone on Paradise Road lived near the top of the food chain, and based on appearances, most of our neighbors thought that we, the so-called happy, well-adjusted Goggins family, were the tip of that spear. But glossy surfaces reflect much more than they reveal.”

Although the paragraph structure here is more like a narrative essay than a casual conversation, the writing skills are just as obvious.

1. It starts with a personal problem

Here, again, the very first line presents a problem. By using the first-person “we,” the Author makes the problem personal.

But, in this case, what draws the reader in isn’t relatability but curiosity about the unexpected.

“We found hell in a beautiful neighborhood.”

The juxtaposition between hell and a beautiful, presumably peaceful neighborhood catches the reader’s attention and holds their interest, making them want to know more.

2. It presents a powerful conflict

The opening line mentions hell. Then several sentences describe a beautiful neighborhood, but the paragraph ends with hell again.

One of the most basic facts about stories is that readers need conflict to stay interested.

Paradise, in and of itself, is boring.

Why? Because the human brain was built to solve problems. When we find one, we latch onto it.

Here, the Author paints the picture of an affluent American neighborhood but continues to touch on the idea of finding hell there, creating tension through foreshadowing.

“But glossy surfaces reflect much more than they reveal.”

3. It paints a picture with details

The Author could have simply said it was a wealthy neighborhood, but the writing paints a more vivid image by using just the right level of detail.

“Doctors, attorneys, steel plant executives, dentists, and professional football players lived there with their adoring wives and their 2.2 kids.”

By listing specific professions, the Author brings the street alive. These are real people.

At the same time, he shows the reader the facade they’re all hiding behind by using the phrase “2.2 kids.” There’s no such thing as two-tenths of a kid. The street is both real and fake at the same time.

Which is exactly the Author’s point, without having to say it directly.

The art of good storytelling is important, but you can’t get hung up on it while you’re trying to write your first draft.

Just write your book. And be as honest as you can while you’re doing it.

I can’t stress that enough.

All great books move through several rounds of editing before they’re published . They don’t come out looking perfect in the first round.

But the core value of a good book comes from being true to yourself when you’re writing it.

So, don’t worry about your writing style or choosing the right sensory details or any of that when you’re writing your rough draft.

Just get your truth down on the page.

Once your draft is finished, the polish comes in the editing . Hire a great editor , and trust them.

They’ll help you hone that draft until it grabs the reader’s attention and holds it until the end.

The Scribe Crew

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

Narrative nonfiction infuses true-life accounts with the storytelling techniques of your favorite fictional narratives. From mind-boggling scientific odysseys and eye-opening historical reports to nerve-jangling true crime investigations, the genre has something for everyone. But what is narrative nonfiction, and how is it different from other literary genres? Buckle up as we journey into the history and controversies of narrative nonfiction, where we’ll discover some captivating reads that are anything but dull.

What Is Narrative Nonfiction?

Sometimes referred to as literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction draws on the literary methods of fiction writing to present well-researched information. It’s a flexible term that can be applied to various works and styles, including memoir , history , investigative journalism , current affairs , and scientific accounts. What sets the genre apart from more traditional nonfiction is that narrative nonfiction aims to entertain as much as inform by building a compelling story around its central subject.

As such, some of the most popular narrative nonfiction books center on groundbreaking discoveries, ripped-from-the-headlines investigations, or major historical events. Recent examples include Paul Kix’s You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live , which chronicles a crucial moment in the Civil Rights Movement, and Elon Green’s Edgar Award–winning true crime book Last Call , which examines a harrowing murder case from 1980s and ’90s New York. Narrative nonfiction also excels at telling quieter human stories that connect to deep social issues. One such example is Brothers on Three by journalist Abe Streep. The award-winning nonfiction book follows a group of young basketball players from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation as they embark on their final year of high school. What begins as a seemingly straightforward sports book about a championship season soon blossoms into a moving examination of identity, community, and growing up under the weight of generational trauma.

The appeal of narrative nonfiction is that it invites us to learn about real-life people and events in a way that’s both edifying and enthralling. By enhancing factual accounts with literary techniques like world-building, character development, rising action, and compelling dialogue, authors of narrative nonfiction connect with their readers on multiple levels — and, ideally, help them gain a more thorough understanding of the topic at hand. The key, of course, is applying these narrative enhancements without damaging factual accuracy.

What Are the Origins of Narrative Nonfiction?

Perhaps you noticed that a number of the authors mentioned thus far are journalists . In fact, the origins of narrative nonfiction can be traced back to the New Journalism movement of the 1960s, which sought to infuse nonfiction reporting with literary sensibilities. Traditional journalism typically featured reporters who delivered the news with impartial authority. New Journalists, in contrast, saw personal transparency, subjective reporting, and uniqueness of voice as keys to capturing a moment and connecting with an audience. Leaders of the New Journalism movement included Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote , Joan Didion , Hunter S. Thompson , and Norman Mailer . While their works differed in tone and format — for instance, Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night tended toward novelistic memoir, while Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was an innovative true crime book — they all pushed back at the notion that neutrality was necessary for impactful and effective journalism.

Are There Controversies About Narrative Nonfiction?

When you test the limits of nonfiction, you inevitably run into thorny issues about the truth. After all, how much creative license are you allowed to take before your true-life account crosses into fiction? As a result, narrative nonfiction has had its share of controversies. Throughout his career, Capote faced questioning about the veracity of certain scenes and dialogue from In Cold Blood. Janet Malcolm, an author and a New Yorker journalist who frequently explored issues of journalistic objectivity in her work, was sued for libel by a subject of her 1984 book In the Freud Archives . She later provoked debate in 1990 with The Journalist and the Murderer, which delves into the ethics of journalism and the troubled relationship between an author and their subject. Perhaps the most high-profile narrative nonfiction controversy centers on James Frey’s 2003 book A Million Little Pieces . While the work was marketed as a memoir, it was later revealed to contain multiple alterations and outright fabrications . The revelation sparked a heated conversation over what constitutes a memoir and led to a notoriously tense interview with Oprah Winfrey just weeks after she had picked the book for her book club.

What Are Some Different Styles of Narrative Nonfiction?

As discussed, narrative nonfiction covers an array of subjects, styles, and authorial positions. Here are just a few of the most popular subgenres of narrative nonfiction.

Historical Nonfiction

Historical nonfiction books investigate the chapters of the past from a lively perspective, bringing yesteryear to life and often drawing parallels to present-day events. Popular works include In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, an award-winning account of Black migration in America. Another excellent example of historical nonfiction is You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by journalist Paul Kix. In it, Kix vividly chronicles Project C, the 10-week 1963 Civil Rights campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, that was led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. Kix’s gripping prose and fine eye for detail transport readers back to this crucial moment in history, guiding us through the campaign and tracing a clear line from the events of 1963 to today’s continuing fight against discrimination and racial inequality .

True crime is a popular literary genre that traces back through history but reached a new level of readership with the 1966 publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . The influential work centers on the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. Capote spent years researching the murders, gathering accounts from locals, and interviewing the convicted killers before crafting his account. The resulting narrative was a national bestseller that read more like a novel than a work of reporting — indeed, Capote himself viewed In Cold Blood as a “ nonfiction novel .” Today it stands as a landmark of true crime and narrative nonfiction. A modern-day example of exceptional true crime is Elon Green’s Last Call : A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York . The Edgar Award–winning book examines the lesser-known case of the Last Call Killer, a serial murderer who targeted gay men in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Green’s book not only recounts the investigation but condemns the entrenched intolerance that allowed these killings to go overlooked for years, and it champions the strength of the gay community in the face of violence, persecution, and sustained social ostracization.

Investigative Journalism

In many ways, investigative journalism is an ideal form of narrative nonfiction: Each account examines a harrowing real-life event from a deeply personal perspective, often with the journalist at the center of their own story. All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward is a seminal work. More recent examples include Beth Macy’s Dopesick, which examines the opioid crisis in America, and She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, which recounts the sexual harassment investigation that sparked the #MeToo reckoning. In Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels , Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Pringle combines investigative reporting with personal narrative to compelling effect. The nonfiction thriller takes readers along for the ride as Pringle and his colleagues at the L.A. Times unearth a web of criminality at the University of Southern California and root out corruption across Los Angeles. Rather than writing an impartial report, Pringle chronicles the investigation from his perspective, beat by beat. As a result, Bad City reads like a noir novel come to life, merging true crime and investigative reporting with the shocking twists of an L.A. mystery .

We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of narrative nonfiction, and there’s a vast world to explore. Whether you’re looking to dive deep into the past, learn about scientific breakthroughs, or lose yourself in a true-life story, there’s a perfect nonfiction book out there that will open your eyes and keep you enthralled until the last page is turned.

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What is Narrative Nonfiction? Meaning and Types

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Have you heard about the term Narrative Nonfiction? This form of writing is popular among readers.

Narrative nonfiction brings life to true stories by inducing the element of fiction to make it more exciting and engaging. When a real-life story is told with a proper plotline, dialogues, and added suspense, it becomes all the more interesting!

In this article, I have explained the concept of narrative fiction in detail, along with recommending some books under the category. Want to learn more about the topic? Then stay with me throughout the article!

Table of Contents

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

Before stating the meaning of narrative nonfiction , let me briefly describe what fiction and nonfiction are. Fiction is a type of writing based on a person’s imagination, whereas nonfiction is based on facts and features.

Narrative nonfiction is a type of nonfiction writing where a story is written based on facts, information, and true events, but it is written in the style of a fiction novel, inducing entertainment, suspense, character development, and more to make it interesting and engaging for the readers.

Creative nonfiction and literary nonfiction are other terms that can be used instead of narrative nonfiction. In short, it means incorporating literary styles and techniques to tell a true story.

In this kind of writing, a balance must be maintained between imagination and ethical behavior so that the content remains true throughout. A blend of accurate information and entertainment!

Types of Narrative Nonfiction

If we talk about the types of narrative nonfiction, then there are two categories they can be divided into: Media and Novels.

Modern Media

Nowadays, the media sector is also using narrative nonfiction writing. Whether it be publishing news articles, magazines, podcasts, etc., fact-based storytelling is taking its place everywhere. The difference between both styles of writing is a blur.

Modern Books

Many authors are incorporating fictional methods into nonfiction writings to make the books engaging.

Writing true factual information using elements such as plot, dialogues, mystery , and scenes is a new way to narrate the stories, known as narrative nonfiction.

What Makes Narrative Nonfiction Writing Good?

It is essential to understand the basic elements to make a narrative nonfiction writing good. You need to know a few major aspects before diving into this category. I have mentioned some points below for you to check out!

Research is a very important step in the writing process. Every type of writing requires thorough research, and every writer, regardless of the genre and category in which they are writing, has to do research beforehand.

Narrative nonfiction is a combination of fiction and nonfiction, so with the storytelling element, it should also be informative.

The factual information should be gathered through interviews, diary entries, newspaper articles, historical reports, etc., in order for the data to be accurate and reliable.

So, the writers should ensure conducting proper research, developing an understanding of the topic, and fact-checking everything before putting the data in writing.

Balance Between Fact and Fiction

While writing narrative nonfiction, it is essential to understand how much fact and fiction can be included to maintain the overall balance.

This kind of writing uses literary styles and techniques to make the story interesting, along with stating the facts and information accurately.

But it is tough to represent every detail of an event that happened long ago with complete accuracy and reliability until and unless you have records and sources for everything.

So, in these situations, authors use conjecture in the narratives to fill the gap and maintain the flow.

As a writer, ensure to maintain the balance between fact and fiction so the story is entertaining without losing the essence of truth. Also, while using conjecture, keep it subtle and informed so it does not sound like a true statement.

Author Presence

It is important to have an individual perspective within the story so it feels authentic to the readers. In narrative nonfiction, the presence of a strong authorial voice is less, but it must be subtly present throughout to drive the story.

In the stories, there are a lot of interviews, original research, reports, etc., so the readers may feel the lack of narration, but including the author’s perspective in several areas makes them a part of the story.

Writers should keep in mind to involve their voice in the story so the readers can connect with it more and understand the motive and thoughts behind the actual work.

High Quality

The quality of writing plays a vital role in narrative nonfiction. As a writer, you cannot state the facts directly without adding other elements because it will make the story bland.

Narrative nonfiction needs the elements of fiction, plot, dialogues, suspense, etc. so that readers can find it entertaining to read. Using various writing styles and techniques is essential to enhance the quality of the writing.

You can be playful, switch timelines, change perspective, make it intriguing, and add mystery to make the story overall a worthy read.

Some Narrative Nonfiction Books to Read 2024

There are several good narrative nonfiction books to read, and I have added three books below. You can have a look!

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger

Brief Descriptions of the Nonfiction Books

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

In 1740, the British vessel called Wager left England on a secret mission during the war but was wrecked on an island. After suffering months of starvation, the men on the ship built a craft and sailed for over a hundred days; finally, thirty men reached the coast of Brazil. These men had tales to tell and were greeted as heroes.

Six months later, another group arrived who had a very different tale of the past. They claimed the other group as mutineers, not heroes. Both groups accused each other, and the fight carried on. A court-martial revealed a shocking truth.

The author has incredibly narrated this incident.

In Cold Blood

This narrative nonfiction book narrates the incident of November 15, 1959, where members of the Clutter family who lived in Holcomb, Kansas, were brutally murdered. They were killed by a shotgun held a few inches away from their faces.

A real-life cold-blooded murder mystery . The author reconstructs the murder case and the entire investigation that led to the final execution of the culprits.

Friday Night Lights

This is a classic story of a high school football team. Permian Panthers of Odessa is the best high school football team in the history of Texas. Friday Night plays of the Panthers from September to December were known to be a big deal.

The author narrates a season in the life of Odessa and shows the devotion of the community toward the team.

Nonfiction lovers should know the various types of this category to differentiate and pick their reads. Lately, this form of writing is preferred by many. I hope this article clarifies the concept of narrative nonfiction.

Do you like to read narrative nonfiction books? Which is your favorite?

Narrative Nonfiction: Making Facts into a Story

When editors say they are looking for narrative nonfiction, what does that mean?

Narrative nonfiction is creative nonfiction yet while both are fact-based book categories , narrative nonfiction is also about storytelling, not just presenting facts in a clever way. It gives people, places and events meaning and emotional content – without making anything up. If you make up dialog or alter facts, then it becomes fiction.

The primary goal of the narrative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.

So how do you do that?

✏️ Set the tone with opening images or word usage or even a juicy quote. My book, An Eye for Color , starts out: “Josef Albers saw art in the simplest things.” I wanted to set the tone that this story was about art, but simple art that kids could relate to. As the story unfolded, I connected to that idea of keeping it simple.

✏️ Voice . When writing narrative nonfiction, avoid the dull, droning textbook voice that makes you feel like you’re reading a reference book. Perky, fast-paced and humorous works better to capture your reader right from the start.

✏️ Don’t give away the point you’re trying to make, build up to it . Use obstacles and rising stakes. Ask yourself, if this thing doesn’t happen, then what?

✏️ Use poetic language rather than dry statements . Using my new biography, When Jackie Saved Grand Central , as an example, I wanted to say that Jackie was mad and she wanted to join the protestors so I wrote: “Like a powerful locomotive, Jackie led the charge to preserve the landmark she and New York City loved.” This language ties into the train theme.

✏️ Use active verbs! Trim out phrases like: decided to. For example, She decided to build another model. Change to: She built another model.

✏️ Build your world or era. But do it quickly! Don’t spend a lot of opening text on setting up the year, the location, or the era. Here’s how the Jackie story starts out: “When Jackie became First Lady of the United States in 1961, she moved into the White House with President John F. Kennedy and their children.” Nuff said. I didn’t have to tell you when Jackie was born, or how many kids she had and their names, or what number president John Kennedy was, or that the White House was in Washington, D.C.

✏️ Find tension . Like all books, narrative nonfiction requires tension and conflict to grab a reader. Does your main character have a competitor who is trying to beat your guy to the patent office? Is the event something that could change the world? Is the main character full of doubt which could sabotage everything?

✏️ Find “aha” moments . Did your character have a breakthrough on her invention? Did the artist discover something he’d never seen before in his paintings that made him follow a new path? Did your character get an idea while observing ladybugs that helped solve his problem?

✏️ Is there an emotional journey for the main character? How does she succeed or grow? This works great for narrative nonfiction inventor stories. Why did the person want to invent something in the first place? Did he have a sick mother? Was a machine too cumbersome? During his journey did he ever want to give up? Did he have a breakthrough, or a break down? Did he get the recognition he wanted, or choose to live alone in a cabin instead?

✏️ Is there a kid-friendly or universal theme? Historic preservation is a tough theme to sell to younger kids, so I had to make it about saving buildings people love to use rather than pontificating about the value of restoring the architectural integrity of a landmark. See the difference?

✏️ Make us care about the person or object or invention . In my Jackie book, the biggest breakthrough in my revisions came when I started looking at the object that Jackie was trying to save – Grand Central Terminal – as something people cared about. Rather than just describing the building, I showed examples where people attended dances there, where politicians gave speeches, and friends met for lunch. That way the reader could have an emotional attachment to the building and therefore care if it was going to be destroyed or not.

✏️ Limit use of facts . This sounds odd when you’re writing narrative nonfiction, but too many facts can drag down the poetic flow of the text. Choose the facts that support your theme or opinion about the topic. Interesting nuggets that are visual or help children relate to the topic are keepers.

And don’t pile them up in one giant paragraph. Sprinkle them throughout the story, and use quotes to break up stretches of text. Visually, quotes give the eye something different to see, therefore re-investing the reader in your story.

If you still think some facts are pertinent, put them in the endnotes instead.

When you’re writing narrative nonfiction, always keep in mind, is it kid friendly and am I telling a story? Then weave those facts into your story so that readers will learn while also being entertained.

Before you start writing your narrative nonfiction manuscript keep these things in mind:

🔸 How can you connect kids to your topic? For example, how does an invention affect their lives today?

🔸 Does your story have an unusual slant?

🔸 Is your biography of someone not heard about or someone kids should know about?

🔸 Check to see what other books have been done on that topic and how the author treated the telling and incorporated the information. Check out their sidebars and endnotes, too.

🔸 Is yours different and fresh?

🔸 Has new information come out on that topic to warrant a new book? Such as when a new president is elected. Or a new technology invented. How does this new bit of information make what’s out there obsolete – the topic could use a freshening up.

🔸 Has the publisher you work with already published that topic? Then don’t submit to them.

🔸 Did you publish a chapter book on a topic that would make a good picture book? If so, choose one through line and simplify and use poetic language. Choose one thing the person did and focus on that.

🔸 Is there an anniversary coming up in 4-5 years that you can hook your topic to? Start gathering research now.

🔸 Make sure you document where every fact is from so you can easily find it when you need to revise with an editor, or when you need proof where you got a quote.

🔸 Keep a list of experts you contacted so they can vet your manuscript before you submit it.

Natasha Wing is a best-selling author who has been writing for 25 years. She is best known for her Night Before series, but also has written several narrative nonfictions. When Jackie Saved Grand Central: The True Story of Jacqueline Kennedy’s Fight for an American Icon (HMH Books for Young Readers) received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus .

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June 18th by Guest Author

I love the suggestion to limit use of facts! It’s really true, but we as writers are often compelled to include every little detail in a story when most of them are irrelevant (though it’s difficult to see that sometimes without the help of a good editor). Great tips here!

Learning from experience can’t be beat! Experience is the best “teacher” in the world…no matter if it’s not YOUR personal experience. Listen, observe, learn…just keep your “mouth closed,, eyes, ears and mind OPEN!” Thank You, Thank You, Thank You…for sharing your priceless list of advice to others less “bruised from the rough road traveled on the interstate of writing. Best Regards, “Cartoon Bill” Crowley PS: Brief background: I’m an artist / cartoonist and have illustrated my share of mostly Children’s books and truly love doing so. Yes, I’ve written my own children’ book…but…have re-written and re-written it several times. The illustrations are all in my head screaming and screaming “Let me out! Let me out!!!” For sure, they will be “let out’ some time in 2018. Count of it! My story has the “Judy Seal of Approval” ( my wife) …and she is NOT a “Yes” person.If it’s bad, she says so, and likewise on the affirmative side of the equation…the best type of person to have as a partner, for sure!! Thank You Again, “Cartoon Bill” Crowley.

Natasha….this is a goldmine of info and recommendations…..wow! Can’t wait to share. I think many of the action items you listed also will help with my songwriting. Congratulations to all involved in this interesting and beautiful book.

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How to Master Narrative Nonfiction – A Guide to Telling Great True Stories

by Harry Wallett

Do you have an incredible true story but are unsure how to tell it? Indeed, personal accounts can be difficult to write if they’re too personal. So, consider the approach of narrative nonfiction writers who reveal their true stories through the devices relied on by fiction writers.

There are undoubtedly many ways to tell personal stories – you might choose to stick directly to the facts and give a straightforward account of the real-life events leading to the story’s climax. Or you might consider a more creative approach to bringing your story to life.

This article is about narrative nonfiction and literary techniques you might consider borrowing from fiction storytelling. We’ll share some great examples of narrative nonfiction encompassing true crime, travel writing, and serial killer tales that have contributed to this increasingly popular genre.

What is the definition of narrative nonfiction?

Narrative nonfiction is often referred to as literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, and these terms are used to describe true stories written in the typical style of a fiction novel.

Some narrative nonfiction examples:

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand – the story of a real-life racehorse and its rise to success during World War II.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – written through intense research of interview and meeting transcripts, photos, and notes from a real-world event.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – attributed as the piece that changed literary journalism, using true crime events with fiction storytelling techniques. One man’s journey into the depths of crime and its consequences.

Narrative nonfiction writers aim to take the facts of true events and compellingly tell them – in the way that fiction writers make creative choices about how they reveal revelations and plot points.

And while there’s an emphasis on storytelling, the best narrative nonfiction books rely on the truth as much as possible.

What Is the Difference Between Nonfiction Narratives and Memoir?

Good question!

While memoir and narrative nonfiction aim for factually accurate storytelling, there are some significant differences in the mediums.

What is a memoir?

A memoir uses a first-person narrator regaling personal stories, seeking the emotional truth. Memoir writers examine and re-evaluate the events of their lives rather than simply retell the story parrot-fashion.

And while memoir usually tells a story with a linear narrative (in order of the events as they happened), the medium is most interesting when the writer views their own experiences through a critical lens.

This provides the reader with a deeper understanding of the writer’s motivations, driving the success or failure that drives the narrative. The writer might identify significant moments in the story, reflecting on how things could have been if they hadn’t made a particular decision.

What is narrative nonfiction?

Narrative nonfiction is similar to memoir in that it’s a true story written to convey real events, but it uses significant creative license in the telling. Stylistically, narrative nonfiction is closer to a fictional novel.

Narrative nonfiction requires a lot of research as the writer needs to understand every angle of the characters’ motivations and objectives within the prism of the specific world of the story.

Factual and well researched

A narrative nonfiction writer will use extensive research techniques, such as:

Extensive interviews – exploring the story from every possible angle through the people who were there
Newspaper articles and news reports – helping the writer understand the popular interpretation or events
Geological history – recognizing the significance of location in a historical context
Personal essays or journals – analyzing first-person accounts from the protagonists and central characters of the action

Which techniques do narrative nonfiction books borrow from literary fiction?

A remarkable fictional novel has great characters with clear objectives, a problem that leads to a crisis, and a confrontation that leads to a resolution. And narrative nonfiction books rely heavily on these tropes to regale a true story in an exciting way.

Let’s look at those in a little more detail:

Narrative nonfiction needs fascinating characters

The narrative nonfiction writer gathers personal experience from the principal “characters” in the story. They seek out the truth and make creative decisions regarding the details of the characters’ pasts that may have contributed to their significant actions in the true story.

A compelling character has:

An objective – something they want that they believe will help solve the problem of the world
A redemption arc – something in the past that haunts them and drives them to redeem themselves
A fatal flaw – something that threatens their ultimate success (some kind of self-destructive behavior, such as addiction or poor life choices)

Narrative nonfiction needs a problem, a crisis, and a confrontation

In creative fiction, a character is nothing without a problem to overcome. In great novels, the problem of the world is almost insurmountable – it requires the protagonist to go on a journey of self-discovery to overcome the obstacles holding them back from self-actualization.

What is the structure of narrative nonfiction books?

In a literary fiction novel, the problem of the world drives the character’s objective, and this kickstarts our storyline structure.

The second part of the story is where the protagonist pursues their objective and achieves it, but this turns the problem into a crisis because the pursuit didn’t solve it.

So, the story’s third section forces the protagonist to confront the problem head-on. But they often fail, or the problem becomes too complicated to overcome. Typically, they hit the reverse climax (or their low point) at this stage.

And that low point drives the protagonist to make the final confrontation in the fourth section of the story, truly addressing the problem holding them back at the novel’s beginning.

Of course, in real life, stories don’t always have a happy ending, so the fourth section – the confrontation – can equally result in failure as success.

And the narrative nonfiction genre is most successful when the writer considers these storytelling elements.

Some great narrative nonfiction books for you to read

Some of your best learning as a writer comes from your dedication to reading. So, it’s always helpful to be well-read in the creative genre you seek to pursue. I think these books find the right balance between fact and fiction.

The right balance between fact and fiction

If you’re new to the narrative nonfiction genre, check out our top recommendations:

Best-selling books to read

Hidden figures by margot lee shetterly .

You might have seen the 2016 movie starring Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner, about the team of brilliant black women who significantly contributed to launching the first rockets into space.

This story has it all:

An insurmountable world problem.
Clear-cut objectives of the principal characters.
Intense obstacles to overcome.
A compelling story that drives you all the way through to the end.

A brilliant read.

My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams

A narrative nonfiction book that has inspired a compelling podcast and a Netflix series about Anna Delvey, who swindled her way into the New York art scene, leaving a string of huge debts in her wake.

This story is driven by a compelling narrative that effectively shines a light on the capitalistic greed that has shaped American history.

Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking

This is the nonfiction narrative that inspired the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything . We follow fascinating and somewhat eccentric characters as we explore the devastating personal life of world-famous British scientist Stephen Hawking, told from the perspective of his wife, Jane Hawking.

An emotional journey that keeps you hooked to the end.

True stories to engage and educate middle-grade readers

You’re never too young to adopt the narrative nonfiction writing style. Check out some of our recommendations for literary works that rely on stories that explore personal experiences, high-school football, the plight of African Americans, and the American dream.

Check out these collections of short stories and full-length narrative nonfiction books:

Mud, Sweat and Tears by Bear Grylls
The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony
The Acclaimed Biography of Sean Smith by JK Rowling
Children of the Blitz by Robert Westall
Alma’s Suitcase by Karen Levine
Nothing is Impossible by Christopher Reeve
If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Last Rhinos by Rose Humphreys

Want to Learn More About Writing Narrative nonfiction?

Check out Cascadia’s blog for tons of helpful articles that help develop your skills in writing narrative nonfiction books with high-quality narratives.

We help ambitious people who want to kickstart their book careers, helping time-pressed people connect with reputable publishing professionals.

Find out more about Cascadia here .

Harry Wallett is the Managing Director of Cascadia Author Services. He has a decade of experience as the Founder and Managing Director of Relay Publishing, which has sold over 3 million copies of books in all genres for its authors, and looks after a team of 50+ industry professionals working across the world.

Harry is inspired by the process of book creation and is passionate about the stories and characters behind the prose. He loves working with the writers and has shepherded 1000s of titles to publication over the years. He knows first-hand what it takes to not only create an unputdownable book, but also how to get it into the hands of the right readers for success.

Books are still one of the most powerful mediums to communicate ideas and establish indisputable authority in a field, boosting your reach and stature. But publishing isn’t a quick and easy process—nor should it be, or everyone would do it!

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Get our free definitive guide to creating a nonfiction bestseller here.

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Deptford literature festival, nature nurtures, early career bursaries, criptic x spread the word, lewisham, borough of literature, what is narrative non-fiction .

The London Writers Awards focuses on four genres of prose writing: literary fiction, commercial fiction, YA/children’s fiction and narrative non-fiction. In this blog post, we explore narrative non-fiction – what it is, who it is for and the key features of this genre…

Let’s begin by breaking down the term ‘narrative non-fiction’: the first part, ‘narrative’, essentially means ‘a story’. The second : ‘non-fiction’ is widely understood as prose writing that is informative or factual, rather than fictional. Put together, ‘narrative non-fiction’ is a true story written in the style of a fiction novel.

Literary nonfiction and creative nonfiction are also terms used instead of or in association with narrative nonfiction. They all refer to the same thing – using literary techniques and styles to tell a true story. Sometimes a writer will invert the description, Janet Galloway calls her two volumes about her childhood and young adulthood ‘true novels’. Then there is ‘life writing’ that pertains to this territory and more – an inclusive term for writing that has sprung from living the life – memoir, blogs, diary, oral testimony, letters, emails autobiography; both the raw material and the shaped work. Journalism and biography on the other hand, are not included here as this generally relies on reportage… but there will always be exceptions to the rule.

T here are some key challenges in writing narrative non-fiction which we’ll explore in more detail below .

As narrative non-fiction uses literary styles and techniques, writers sometimes employ creative license to drive the story forward. This raises a lot of interesting questions about ethics but unless you have recorded every conversation and miniscule detail, it is very difficult to recreate a completely accurate representation of what actually happened. Maintaining the balance between imagination and retelling a story is personal to each writer, but every narrative nonfiction writer has a responsibility to stick to ethical behaviour throughout and to ensure the content is truthful.

Another way of looking at this approach is to think about the reader. The reader’s expectations are to be both informed and entertained. Therefore, the writer has a responsibility to accurately research the facts and details in the story so that they are presented as happened, as far as they can. For the details that they cannot remember or do not have access to, then they can inform the reader of this or drop heavy hints within the text – often stylistically – that the details here are vague or write them as close to what had actually happened. This will enable the reader to trust in the writer, and the story that they are sharing.

Another aspect of narrative nonfiction is its focus on play . This is where the distinction between this style of literature and other types of nonfiction writing – particularly memoirs, biographies and autobiographies come in. Often the latter are written from one perspective – the writer’s . Narrative nonfiction, on the other hand can switch perspectives, tenses and timelines. As a result of this, b oundaries are reinvented with chronological order being discarded in favour of telling the story in a more intriguing way.

More recently, this emphasis on play has enabled narrative nonfiction writers to cross-over into other genres – for example infusing poetry, experimental writing and elements from stage / screen writing within the text. There are no rules as to how the story can be presented, that you may expect from more traditional forms of nonfiction, such as literary journalism and diary entries. Further, books that are normally ‘one-genre’ are being infused into narrative nonfiction narratives to give them more scope and a wider readership, particularly travel writing, food writing and true crime.

As a genre, narrative non-fiction is becoming increasingly popular, with a broader readership. There are many theories as to why this may be: perhaps it is viewed as a novel approach to writing non- fiction stories, perhaps social media platforms have enabled writers to create new readerships and interest in their stories, or maybe the gatekeepers themselves have embraced this new form of writing. Regardless of this, the ability of a skilled narrative non-fiction writer to represent true stories in new ways that educates and simultaneously, entertains.

Examples of books that fit into this genre are: Colin Grant ’s ‘ Bageye at the Wheel’, which is a delightful account of a feckless father told through his son’s childhood experience of him. Maggie Nelson ’s The Argonauts is a deeply personal account of her voyage into motherhood, queer family making and identity, where she parses the contemporary iconography of motherhood, the act of writing and the limits language. Other reads that fall into this category include Truman Capote ’s In Cold Blood, Sara Baume’s handiwork, Roxane Gay ’s Hunger, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Azar Nafisi ’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Paul Ka lanithi ’s When Breath Becomes Air . You can check out extensive reading lists and furt h er discussion on this topic here:

https://bookriot.com/2018/07/12/creative-nonfiction-books/

https://www.writersstore.com/creative-license-vs-creative-arrangement/

https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2017/08/17/writing-creative-non-fiction/

http://theeditorspov.blogspot.com/2012/05/fact-vs-artistic-license-in-creative.html

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/best-narrative-nonfiction-books-publishers-blurbs

Published 20 August 2020

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How To Write Narrative Non-Fiction With Matt Hongoltz-Hetling

posted on August 24, 2020

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04:14 — 52.2MB)

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What is narrative non-fiction and how do you write a piece so powerful it is nominated for a Pulitzer? In this interview, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling talks about his process for finding stories worth writing about and how he turns them into award-winning articles.

In the intro, I talk about Spotify (possibly) getting into audiobooks and Amazon (possibly) getting into podcasts as reported on The Hotsheet , and the New Publishing Standard . David Gaughran's How to Sell Books in 2020 ; a college student who used GPT3 to reach the top of Hacker News with an AI-generated blog post [ The Verge ]; and ALLi on Is Copyright Broken? Artificial Intelligence and Author Copyright . Plus, synchronicity in book research, and my personal podcast episode on Druids, Freemasons, and Frankenstein: The Darker Side of Bath, England (where I live!)

Matt Hongoltz-Hetling is a Pulitzer finalist and award-winning investigative journalist. He's also the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear .

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript below.

From writing for pennies an article to writing a Pulitzer – nominated article
What is narrative non-fiction?
How does narrative non-fiction differ from fiction?
Where ideas come from and how to begin forming a story idea
The necessity of being respectful of the real lives being examined and written about
Portraying interview subjects with shades of grey
Turning hours of source material into something coherent
Finding the balance between story structure and meaning
Knowing when an idea is appropriate for a book

You can find Matt Hongoltz-Hetling at matt-hongoltzhetling.com and on Twitter @hh_matt

Transcript of Interview with Matt Hongoltz-Hetling

Joanna: Matt Hongoltz-Hetling is a Pulitzer finalist and award-winning investigative journalist. He's also the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear . Welcome, Matt.

Matt: Hey, thanks for having me on, Joanna.

Joanna: It's great to have you on the show.

First up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Matt: I got into writing when I was eight years old and I wrote this amazing book. I don't want to brag, but I wrote this book about an elf that was fighting in a dungeon, and this elf had some items of a magical persuasion and used them to defeat all sorts of monsters. So, that was pretty awesome. And I've been writing stuff ever since.

I grew up knowing that I wanted to write, loving to read, all that. And then my career path never really seemed to go that way. I actually started a student newspaper when I was in college in the hopes that that would be primarily a writing occupation, but I found very quickly that it was more small business skills that were needed.

I was selling advertisements much more so than writing to fill the newspaper sadly. And so, at some point I had just got the pile of rejection slips that I think we're all familiar with. I just didn't really know how to go about getting into the industry.

I was literally writing articles for, like, 25 cents an article, these, like, ‘How do you fix an engine?' or not even an engine, nothing that complicated, but, ‘How do you clean a window?'

Joanna: Content farms.

Matt: Yes, right. Content farms. Yes. Thank you. But I was writing.

My wife encouraged me to submit an article for my local weekly newspaper in a small town in the state of Maine. And that led to me being able to write more articles, still for very small amounts, 30 bucks an article. And that led to me getting a full-time job as a journalist at a weekly newspaper in rural Maine.

And even though that was fantastically exciting for me, I always knew that I wanted to do more. And so, I was always pushing, looking for that next level that would allow me to write more of the stuff that I wanted to write. And so, that led to larger newspapers, and then magazine opportunities, and then magazine opportunities led to a book opportunity. Now, I'm happy that I am just on the cusp of publishing my first book. I'm very excited about that.

Joanna: We're going to get into that in a second, but I just wonder because this is so fascinating.

How many years was it between writing for a content farm to being a Pulitzer finalist?

Matt: That was actually the shortest journey that you can imagine. Within, let's say, two years of my first newspaper article. I wrote the article that led to my highest-profile resume point which was that Pulitzer finalist status. And that article was about substandard housing conditions in the federal Section 8 program. It's federally subsidized housing and it's meant to be kept up to a certain standard, and the article which I wrote with a writing partner demonstrated that it was not and that there were a lot of people at fault.

What really elevated that article, it was a good article and all of that, but what really got it that level of recognition was that it also turned out to be an impactful article. It happened to come at a time when other people were looking at the housing authority for various reasons. It really struck a nerve and our Senator, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, she took a very avid interest in our reporting and was motivated to encourage reforms of the national Section 8 system.

She was in a political position to do that because she held the purse strings for the housing authorities. And so, it happened to have this very disproportionate impact and because it led to a positive change for the Section 8 housing program in the United States.

I think the people in the Pulitzer committee must've loved the idea that this tiny little rural weekly newspaper where we had three reporter desks, one of which was perennially vacant, had managed to write a story that was really relevant to the national scene.

Joanna: Absolutely fascinating. And I hope that encourages people listening who might feel that they're in a place in their writing career where they're not feeling very successful and yet you bootstrapped your way up there to something really impactful, as you say.

We're going to come back to the craft of writing, but let's just define ‘narrative nonfiction.' Your book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear , which is a great title.

What is narrative nonfiction and where's the line between that and fiction or straight nonfiction?

Matt: Narrative nonfiction, the way that I think of it is i t's basically just like any other fiction book, or novel, or piece that you might pick up except for the events described in it actually happened .

When I think of the difference, it just seems, to me, to be such a small, tiny little difference between fiction and nonfiction because when you write fiction, you're starting with an infinite number of possible events to write about. And when you're writing nonfiction, you're starting with a universe of events.

You're starting with everything that ever happened in the entire universe. That's the material that you can draw on. It is so close to infinite that really, it's just a method of curation. You're going to select some of these facts and arrange them in an order that will create the same exact experience as a powerful piece of fiction writing.

A narrative piece emphasizes the same things that a fiction story would in terms of there's character arcs, there are transformations, there's setting. We want a climax, we want everything that you would want when you're writing a fiction piece.

Joanna: Interesting. And you said at the beginning that it's a tiny difference between fiction and nonfiction. And I'm like, ‘No, surely, this is the biggest separation.' So, I feel like people would have quite a different view on that, but it's interesting because you said there, ‘a method of curation,' and you select the facts, whereas with fiction, obviously, you make it up.

How can you curate truth in a way that serves your story but doesn't distort what really happened?

Matt: That's an excellent question. And I think you do have to be careful to keep things in perspective.

So, I was thinking, ‘What if I was writing about someone in the aeronautics industry or who was an astronaut or maybe someone else within the industry who is motivated by this idea that people want to,' or yeah, ‘that he would like people to colonize the stars?' That's, I think, a very common sci-fi-type theme, and it's also very apparent in the people who go into those fields.

And so, you might take a set of facts. I would ask that person, ‘What are some of the seminal moments in your career? What were the turning points? What were the important things that shaped you as a person?' And this was just an idea that I had, I would look at the amount of cosmic matter in our atmosphere. So, every time a meteor hits the atmosphere, we know it burns up, dust rains down on the earth and that dust becomes part of us. We breathe it in.

Then I would try to draw a timeline between some natural spike in the amount of cosmic dust in the air that might've gone into our subject's body, and that person's decision to get into aeronautics. So, you maybe get to describe that this fantastic spectacular event of a comet the size of a blue whale entering the atmosphere, burning up, raining dust down on, let's say, North America.

And this aeronautics person is 12 years old at the time, he's thinking about baseball, but then he goes to a museum two weeks later and he's breathing in more cosmic dust on that day than he would on an average day, and then he decides to become an astronaut.

You can paint a very poetic scene with that, but it's also very important that you're not actually suggesting or theorizing that the cosmic dust had anything to do with that person's decision.

It's a way to wax poetically about this character and to maybe access a greater idea which is that we all want to go colonize the stars to some extent. That's a very human thing. It appears in our very earliest writings on both fictional and non-fictional.

And you can talk about this amazing spectacular event, you can talk about this person's decision, and if you do it right, the audience will understand that you've just used this as a jumping-off point to explore some of these bigger concepts and cool narrative opportunities without actually saying in a false way that cosmic dust is what makes us want to go out there. So, I'm just saying that you can arrange those events in a way that gives it life, and vibrancy, and maybe some creativity.

Joanna: I like that example. And you brought up so many things that I'm thinking about there.

First of all is using the individual to highlight the universal. If you wrote a piece about how big the universe is or whatever, that's not narrative nonfiction. That might be one of your how-to articles back in the day. So, you've used someone's experience to highlight something universal.

Where do you start? Because this is a question that fiction writers think about all the time. Do you start with the theme of, say, space? Do you start with a character, say you met someone and you want to interview them, or are you starting with, in your case, I guess, a commission or are you starting with just your own curiosity and following where it goes? So, I guess, as you said, that you could write about anything in the whole world.

How do you decide what to write?

Matt: I've spent a lot of my freelance writing career trying to craft pitches that will convince editors to give me a green light and offer me compensation in exchange for a piece of writing. And so, that undergirding structure allows for all those sorts of scenarios that you posit.

I'm always keeping my eye out for things when something interests me and lights me up, then I try to think about how I can make that subject or person who has just lit me up into a pitch that is marketable. I saw a freestyle street rapper a few weeks ago and I was really into what he was doing. I just thought he was amazing because his shtick was that he would incorporate things about the world around him into his rhymes really seamlessly.

I thought, ‘Oh, this guy has got this really amazing talent.' And so then you start thinking like, ‘Is this something that I would pitch to maybe a magazine about rhyme and rhyme structure or is this something that might be more like…is this a cognitive or a neurological skill that he's developed and how might that fit into maybe more of a neuroscience type magazine or is this just a guy who's got the great American story of, he developed a skill on the streets as it were, and then launched it into a career, in which case, we have maybe more of a universal story that could appear in any major market magazine?'

I suppose usually what sparks my interest is a person but it's not at all uncommon for my interest to also be sparked by just a topic. And then I'm searching for those characters who can exemplify that topic.

Joanna: Your writing does focus very much on people and all characters, as you say, but I'm wondering where do you take it from then? How do you tease out the story? Do you interview them?

And again, when you have this material about that person, how do you highlight your story, but also respect the person because you might say that, so, you've got the pitch with the neurological aspect. So, you think, ‘Okay. I want to write about how his brain works differently to someone else, how he can do that,' but then you find out some awful thing and you think that, ‘Okay. How do I respect this person, but how do I also deliver on my pitch?'

How do we ask the right questions to make our characters real, but also be respectful, because this is real life you're writing about?

Matt: My own inclination and approach is typically to just jump in and that's often great because it allows me to maintain forward momentum and use real wishful positive thinking to just hope that everything's going to pan out.

But sometimes its failing is that I will go very confidently striding down what turns out to be a dead end. And so, maybe I pitch this thing as a neurological sciencey story, and then a magazine editor says, ‘Yes, let's do this.' And so then I go back to the subject and I say, ‘I'd like to interview you,' and tell them what's going on.

And in the course of the interview, it turns out that they are not at all representative of the category of box that I want to put them into. And then I've suddenly got this big, awkward problem where I am looking for a different subject to satisfy the magazine editor and trying to get value out of my initial subject and my interview with him by placing him into something that is more appropriate for him. But when I get to that interview phase, I typically like to already have a commission in place before I do that because it's quite a time investment.

When I do interview someone, I like to make them very lengthy, in-depth interviews. Rarely do I talk to someone for less than two or three hours. And in the course of that two or three hours, my interview style is to not necessarily focus too much on asking the right questions so much as just unlocking how they see themselves and what is important to them, and get them talking about what lights them up.

And by not having a very firm idea of where I want to lead a subject, and being flexible in what they can say, what I find is that I often wind up with a really interesting story that maybe doesn't quite fit the mold precisely for where I thought it would go, but it's close enough that I can bridge that gap and the narrative is so compelling and good that nobody cares if there's maybe a slight sidetrack, a slight departure.

And as far as what if you find out something bad about someone while you're in the course of that interview? You're interviewing a person and they suddenly put the interview on pause and speak very sharply or meanly to their spouse or child and suddenly you get the feeling like, ‘You know what, this isn't really actually a very good person.' So, what do you do there?

I think it is very important to acknowledge the bad in people. And it's almost a necessary component. If I am not writing something both bad and good about a person that I'm writing about, then I know I'm not really doing a very good job because I don't know any people who are 100% good and I don't know any people who are 100% bad.

Oftentimes, if I'm talking to someone who we might think of as the hero of a narrative, they're doing good work, we're spotlighting them because of some amazing accomplishment they've done, I think it's really important to throw in a couple of negative character traits or details that will add a note of reality to your writing.

And conversely, if I'm interviewing someone who has committed murder or if I'm interviewing them because they're a bad person, then I'm always really looking for that redeeming quality because some murderers have just had a very bad day or gone through a very bad period in their life and maybe had some disadvantages in the first place.

Even though they've done this terrible, awful thing, there's still some context that you can provide that humanizes them. I think that most of my subjects, I think, appreciate that. Certainly, I've written about some people who've been very unhappy with how they've been portrayed. But I think most people appreciate it when you portray enough facets of their character that their true personality comes through.

Joanna: I've not done this kind of writing. So, I find it fascinating. I've been doing this podcast for 12 years and I have many, many, many hours and a lot of transcripts of material and I've thought many times, ‘It'd be great if I could go through and find all these snippets and turn this into something.' Working with transcripts is really hard. You just mentioned, you have a three-hour interview. So, presumably, you're recording this and you're taking notes as well.

How do you turn all this source material into an article? What's your curation and what's that process?

Matt: I am the kind of person who hates to throw things out. My wife will tell you that that can drive her nuts. And the same is true of my writing. I like to start with everything that has been said, even in a three-hour interview, and then just slowly apply criteria that squeezed some things out.

I always wind up with more material than will fit in the space that I have allotted. And then that encourages me to try to cram more words and more facts into smaller spaces and that results in this real efficient distillation. I think that's another good thing maybe about not being too goal-oriented when you write.

What I typically do is I'll interview someone, we'll have the three-hour interview. I've got copious notes, I got an audio transcript. If I am feeling up to it, I will transcribe every word of that audio interview which is grueling. Sometimes I will use one of those online programs that will convert it and spit out a transcript for you. And that transcript is never perfect, but you can make it perfect by listening and going through. And then I just slowly go through and clean it up.

Often, it's not like writing at all. It's like just fixing things. I might go through it and just correct all the typos in my transcription. And then I might go through and remove all the garble and then I might go through and anything that seems like a cohesive thought, I might put quotation marks around and put on the, ‘he said,' or the, ‘she said.'

Then I will maybe strip out, I'll say, ‘Oh, here, this person talked for 10 minutes about their mother and they were actually quite redundant, but here, this one time they said it, it was the most striking of the eight times they said the same thing.' And so, I will move those other seven iterations down to a notes section at the bottom.

And in this way, I am slowly shrinking and squeezing the text that is there. And if there are things that they've said, points they've made that are important, but that they didn't say it particularly well, then I might write a paraphrase and put the originals down in my notes section.

And then at some point, I will create a series of categories that represent different areas of the story, and then I will sort all of their quotes into those different categories. And all of this stuff that I've just talked about is very mechanical. So, even if you're not feeling particularly inspired, you can go through this rote, brute-force process and nibble away, and nibble away, and nibble away.

What you find at the end is that you actually have the bones of a story.

Often, the story will also involve going through the same process with multiple people and other sources of information, but once you've arranged all that stuff under the subheadings, and then you start to rearrange things within those sections, you find that you are suddenly, magically two-thirds of the way there.

Joanna: That's fascinating. I want to ask about this Pulitzer thing because I know everyone's so interested. And really, this is one of those prizes that is, for many people, a life goal, and you've actually won other awards. You're a multi-award-winning writer.

What's interesting to me is you talked about a story that made an impact. Substandard housing conditions is not the most inspirational thing for most people, but it's interesting. Presumably, you're not winning these prizes for your beautiful sentence structure.

For those authors who obsess with grammar and exact sentences, where's the line between that and story and meaning?

Matt: I think it is all-important including the sentence structure. I always take the position that grammar, and grammar is not really all that important other than in the service of making points very clearly. I really tend to take these very esoteric grammar points and just chuck them out the window because I want somebody to be able to understand what I'm saying.

Oftentimes, adhering very strictly to the rules of grammar impedes the knowledge of the layperson who I want to be able to read, and digest, and appreciate my article . I don't want to poo-poo sentence structure too much. I think there are so many articles written that you're trying to break through the noise of, and stand out in some way. I think the stories that I've been awarded from various organizations and for various things, they've all gone through the same basic process as many of my stories that have not been so recognized and have not turned out necessarily all that good.

But for whatever reason, there was a perfect alignment where the person that I happened to be talking to happened to exemplify that issue just right and the setting happened to work out and the climax of their personal story… there's a lot of just happenstance, I suppose, in that once you've been commissioned to write a story, you're writing that story.

And sometimes the material will support a real cracker-jack breakout story. What's more often is that as you go through the process, you hit an obstacle that you have to smooth over in some way and you turn in a very serviceable, perfectly good story.

But the things that I think really allow it to break through and get head and shoulders above tend to be things that are out of your control. You're going to do your very best job of research, you're going to do your very best job of writing, you're going to use all the good phrases, you're going to exert full control of your mastery of time and space, you're going to jump around in the narrative if that's in the timeline rather, if that's what the narrative calls for.

If you want to focus on the beating of a fly's wings, for some reason, you will do that. If you want to jump back into prehistory, you'll do that. And after you've employed all of those tricks and techniques to craft the very best story that you possibly can from the material, sometimes the material itself will just harmonize perfectly and get you to that place to achieve that potential that you hoped that you could. It's a little bit of luck and magic, I suppose. We can't always summon it or bottle it.

Joanna: Coming to the book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear , which, again, I love the title. It's great. What was it about this idea that made you decide to turn this story into a book-length project rather than a long-form article?

How did you know, ‘Right, I'm going to write a book about this?'

Matt: I was first commissioned for an article on the same topic. The story for those who don't know, it's about a group of libertarians which is a fringe political movement within the United States and their emphasis is on personal freedoms and personal rights.

This national group of libertarians decided to come to one small town, and just take over the town, and turn it into their utopia. Soon after they tried to enact this kind of crazy heist of the town, the town started experiencing bear problems. And so, the book is about how those things are connected.

I was initially commissioned to write an article based on the unusual bear activity that was seen in that town. I was interviewing a woman for my local newspaper about her difficulties in accessing VA benefits. And she was what we stereotype as a crazy cat lady. She was a little bit of a shut-in, she had a bunch of cats milling around, and I asked her about her cats because it's a good icebreaker, and I like cats.

She said, ‘I used to let them outside, but that was before the bears came.' I was like, ‘Oh, well, that sounds really interesting. Forget about the VA. Tell me about bears.' She just started talking about how a bear had eaten two of her cats and how the bears had become very bold and aggressive and were doing weird things.

I started asking around town, asking other people if they had also had bear experiences that seemed unusual. And when I had a feeling for what was going on in that town, I pitched the magazine article and I was really excited to get this magazine article. I really wanted to do a great job on it because ‘The Atavist Magazine' is a good platform and I knew that it would help me to make the case to other magazines that I could write really good narrative stuff.

I went back to town and went through all the interview process and all of that. And when I wrote my first draft for that magazine article, it was 32,000 words. And they would have accepted 4,000 words. So, the article, which I was very happy with, was still very much of a compromise of what I wanted to say about this bizarre situation involving libertarians and bears in this town.

I got in a couple of the best anecdotes including a situation where a bear fights a llama, but there was so much left unsaid, so many colorful things. In that case, I just had this massive trove of colorful materials sitting in my pocket. I knew that there was a very large narrative there because I had already written probably half of the book-length on it. So, it just seemed very natural to write a book about it.

Joanna: Is it a comedy?

Matt: I would call it a dark comedy. There is a lot of very funny stuff, I think, and I do stray into the comedic quite a bit. But there are also some very, kind of, weighty issues. A woman gets attacked by a bear. That's not funny, but there's also just all sorts of goofy stuff.

The llama thing is great. There's one situation where there are two old women who live next door to each other on a hill, and one of them is absolutely terrified of bears. Every time she cooks steak inside, she won't go outside for a day because she's afraid that the bears will smell the steak on her. And meanwhile, her neighbor has been feeding the bears doughnuts for 20 years and has a crowd of bears sitting outside her home waiting for her to come out with doughnuts and buckets of grain twice a day.

There's just a lot of really absurd situations that I was privy to. And I milk them for all I've got.

Joanna: That's so funny. It's so funny there because, of course, the truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. And I guess that's what you're doing with narrative nonfiction is you are finding these stories.

We're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you because in your original email to me, you said, ‘I think a lot of writers start off like I started out, isolated and bereft of helpful connections and not the person who is going to schmooze at an event or something.'

How you have managed to do these things and even interview these people and get over those initial issues?

Matt: I think for most of my life, even while being very passionate about writing, I never felt like I was plugged into the writing community. I feel like everyone who went to get an advanced degree in writing, their professor could hook them up and their former colleagues would go out and join the industry and in places that would be helpful to them.

I just felt, like, really locked out of all of that. And schmoozing is definitely helpful, but, Joanna, I know that there's a certain component of your audience that is never going to schmooze because it's not their thing, and if they try really hard to force themselves to schmooze, they will sound like they're someone who's trying really hard to schmooze, right? It's just not going to be in everyone's nature and it wasn't in my nature.

I think even though the non-schmoozers have a disadvantage relative to the schmoozers, the non-schmoozers can get by on the basis of purely professional relationships which is what I did. As a journalist, I did develop a certain skill set in talking to people, but I've never been the guy at the cocktail party of other writers and editors who is like, ‘Hey, hire me for your next opportunity.'

I think for me, the key was to always I started small, I started writing for newspapers. I sent endless pitches and queries with different ideas and I slowly got better at sending those pitches . And every time a story of mine turned out that was something that I was proud of, that turned out pretty good, I added that to my portfolio.

And when one editor gives you a chance, lends you that sympathetic ear and gives you a chance to write for the next tier of publication that you're interested in, if you satisfy that editor, you may not have schmoozed them, but you have a working relationship with them. If they're happy with your work, that's all you need.

If you don't have the ability to schmooze your way into that, you still have an editor that you're working with. And perhaps you can ask that editor if they have other people in the industry who might also be willing to look favorably upon a submission from you where you're not just in the slush pile.

And you go through that process 100 or 1,000 times, and if you pay attention while you do it, you walk out of it with a group of a dozen editors that you can send a pitch to who have some idea of who you are and whether or not they like your work and your writing. And you're just always working to increase that circle of editors who look on you favorably.

Over the years, what I found and was very happy about was that those editors also bounce around from one position to another. Every time someone you know moves from one publication to the other, you want to try to maintain some contact with their initial publication and approach them in their new position and see if that might allow you to expand your horizons a little bit.

It's an iterative, slow process. It's not as easy as going to a cocktail party or a bar and palling around with the people who hold the reins to these publications, but it does get you there.

Joanna: That's great advice because I know I'm an introvert, many people listening are introverts, and knowing that the long-term professional approach is great. I think that's true if it's people submitting to short stories or if people want to get into traditional publishing, then all of that's quite true.

Where can people find you and your work and everything you do online?

Matt: Oh, thank you so much for asking. You can find me on Twitter @hh_matt . If you Google my name, you'll get to my website at matt-hongoltzhetling.com , and you can find my book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear , on Amazon, any major online retailer, and through the publisher which is PublicAffairs, a subsidiary of Hachette.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was great.

Matt: Joanna, thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

Reader Interactions

August 24, 2020 at 4:19 am

You always ask great questions Joanna but you outdid yourself this time on a topic I knew nothing about. That bear book sounds fascinating!

August 24, 2020 at 8:47 am

Thanks, Julie! Glad you found it interesting 🙂

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You have exceeded your limit for simultaneous device logins.

Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device., understanding—and teaching—the five kinds of nonfiction.

Even though some children’s nonfiction books cross categories, these five general groupings can help students make sense of the wide world of nonfiction and all it has to offer.

Traditional Nonfiction

Browsable Nonfiction

Narrative Nonfiction

Expository Literature

Active Nonfiction

A New Way of Thinking

Is the focus broad or narrow?
What kind of text features does each book include?
What kind of text structure, writing style, and craft moves does the author employ?
Does the writing have a distinct voice?
What similarities and differences do students notice across the categories?
Caswell, Linda J. and Nell K. Duke. “Non-Narrative as a Catalyst for Literacy Development.” Language Arts , 1998, p. 108-117.
Hynes, Myrna. “‘I Read for Facts’: Reading Nonfiction in a Fictional World.” Language Arts , 2000, p. 485-495.
Mohr, Kathleen A. J. “Children’s Choices for Recreational Reading: A Three-Part Investigation of Selection Preferences, Rationales, and Processes.” Journal of Literacy Research , 2006, p. 81-104.
Repanskey, Lisa L., Jeanne Schumm, and Jacqueline Johnson. “First and Fourth Grade Boys’ and Girls’ Preferences for and Perceptions about Narrative and Expository Text.” Reading Psychology , 2017, p. 1-40.

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Date: March 3, 2020
Author: Victoria Sherrow
Category: Writing for Adults Blog
Tags: Craft , Writing for Adults , writing for adults blog

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The Appeal of Narrative Nonfiction

“Just the facts, ma’am.” These oft-repeated words are associated with Sergeant Joe Friday, a character in the 1950s TV police drama “Dragnet.” Friday’s actual words were “All we want are the facts,” but the point remains: Investigators need facts. Facts are also the essence of nonfiction writing, including biography, history, science, sports, memoir, inspirational, autobiography, travel, culture, and essays. But along with facts, today’s readers expect more. They want interesting nonfiction that keeps them turning the pages as they would with a good novel, and nonfiction authors find ways to provide it. The Rise of Popular Nonfiction Factual writing has been part of American life for centuries, but nonfiction attracted wider audiences after World War II ended in 1945. In his book On Writing Well , author William Zinsser explains that Americans became more aware of “new places, issues, and events” [and] “with the advent of television [they] saw reality every evening in their living room …” In response, publishers sought nonfiction that was both informative and entertaining. The Book-of-the-Month Club featured more nonfiction selections, and magazine articles presented facts in ways that were designed to engage readers. During the 1960s, The New Yorker magazine published serialized versions of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). Both later became best-selling books. By the late 1970s, about 80 percent of all book sales were nonfiction. This balance has shifted through the years, but according to the Association of American Publishers, nonfiction book sales surpassed fiction sales between 2013 and 2018. Silent Spring and In Cold Blood were cited as early examples of narrative nonfiction, also called creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction. Narrative nonfiction remains factual but uses writing techniques and styles associated with fiction. By presenting facts in a “story-like” way, nonfiction authors aim to make their material more dramatic and meaningful so that readers connect emotionally with the people and events. This approach differs from just presenting facts in a straight informational manner. Author Lee Gutkind says that narrative nonfiction allows a writer to “employ the diligence of the reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of the poet, and the analytical modes of the essayist.” Key Elements What fictional elements do writers use in narrative (creative) nonfiction?

Characters , so central to fiction, can also enrich nonfiction as writers help readers identify with, and care about, real people. Nonfiction writers aim to show realistic, multidimensional people in situations that make the reader think, “That could be me.” As for dialogue , narrative nonfiction can contain speech in the form of verified quotations, conversations, and interviews using a Q & A format. This allows writers to add the life and variety of spoken words. Quoted passages also vary the visual patterns on the page, which can appeal to readers and catch their attention. Sensory details , another key element in fiction, enhance nonfiction as well. They add “show; don’t tell” and intensify the reader’s experience. Author Leonard Felder notes, “Most people read not only with their minds but with their senses and emotions. If you write nonfiction that makes readers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell, they’ll never be bored.” Sensory details help to create a sense of place . As with fictional settings, the places that appear in nonfiction come to life through skillful writing. Settings matter even more in certain types of writing, such as travel, but they play key roles in many nonfiction narratives. Uncovering intriguing facts, quotations, and other details that bring nonfiction to life may require extensive research. In an article for The Writer called “Preparing to Write: Research and the Art of Narrative Nonfiction,” Todd James Pierce stresses the need for “rich details to create robust scenes.” These can come from newspapers, letters, diaries, memos, meeting notes, scrapbooks, photos, film, video, site visits, and personal interviews. For example, while writing about Lucille Ball’s famous dyed red hair, I discovered a videotaped interview with the hairdresser who worked with Ball on four television series. The video, available on the Television Academy Foundation website, offered anecdotes and details that enlivened my article.

Setting Creative Limits How far can nonfiction writers go to dramatize their material? Can they invent anecdotes or dialogue? Exaggerate or embellish the facts? Experts stress the need for careful research and accuracy in all nonfiction. Some agree that authors can change names and certain other facts to protect people’s privacy as long as they inform the reader. Author Don Ranly advises, “You must not make up scenes, or telescope events, or create corporate personalities, or make up direct quotations, or tell us what people are thinking. But this does not mean that you must avoid all literary devices.” Ranly says that nonfiction writers can be creative by using language that is “concrete, specific, graphic.” Narrative Nonfiction in Action Consider these excerpts of narrative nonfiction. In the opening paragraphs of Silent Spring , Rachel Carson uses colorful language to create moods and present contrasting views of the same place:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the mornings.… So it had been from the days, many years ago, when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death. The farmers told of much illness among their families. In the town, the doctors were becoming more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness that had appeared among their patients.… Jack London used sensory details and “character” to help readers comprehend the 1906 San Francisco earthquake:

Within an hour after the earthquake shock the smoke of San Francisco’s burning was a lurid tower visible a hundred miles away. And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke. There was no opposing the flames. There was no organization, no communication. All the cunning adjustments of a twentieth century city had been smashed by the earthquake. The streets were humped into ridges and depressions, and piled with the debris of fallen walls. On Thursday morning, at a quarter past five, just twenty-four hours after the earthquake, I sat on the steps of a small residence on Nob Hill. I went inside with the owner of the house … He was cool and cheerful and hospitable. “Yesterday morning,” he said, “I was worth six hundred thousand dollars. This morning this house is all I have left. It will go in fifteen minutes.…The flames will be here in fifteen minutes.” Authors who are known for their narrative nonfiction include Joan Didion, Augusten Burroughs, Dave Eggars, and David Sedaris. A few recent examples of popular narrative nonfiction books are: Annals of the Former World (John McPhee), Hidden Figures (Margot Lee Shetterly), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt), Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer), Seabiscuit: An American Legend (Laura Hillenbrand), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot), and Wild Horses of the Summer Sun: A Memoir of Iceland (Tory Bilski). Upcoming blogs for March will further explore narrative nonfiction. In the meantime, you can learn more by visiting these websites:

Characteristics of Narrative Nonfiction What Is the Difference Between a Nonfiction Narration & Informational Text? What Is Narrative Nonfiction?

Victoria Sherrow has published short stories, articles and books (fiction and nonfiction) for readers aged preschool through adult. Her books have received starred reviews and been honored by the American Library Association, Parents Choice Gold Award, National Association for the Advancement of Science, and NYPL Best Books for the Teenage, among others. Victoria has taught at The Institute of Children’s Literature for more than 25 years and has also been an assistant editor and writing contest judge. Recently, she revised and polished a 230,000-word book for adults.

Less Filtering = More “Show, Don’t Tell”

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Revision: The Importance of a Critique

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Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold

Creative nonfiction is a genre of creative writing that approaches factual information in a literary way. This type of writing applies techniques drawn from literary fiction and poetry to material that might be at home in a magazine or textbook, combining the craftsmanship of a novel with the rigor of journalism.

Here are some popular examples of creative nonfiction:

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
Intimations by Zadie Smith
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Creative nonfiction is not limited to novel-length writing, of course. Popular radio shows and podcasts like WBEZ’s This American Life or Sarah Koenig’s Serial also explore audio essays and documentary with a narrative approach, while personal essays like Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts and Mariama Lockington’s What A Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew also present fact with fiction-esque flair.

Writing short personal essays can be a great entry point to writing creative nonfiction. Think about a topic you would like to explore, perhaps borrowing from your own life, or a universal experience. Journal freely for five to ten minutes about the subject, and see what direction your creativity takes you in. These kinds of exercises will help you begin to approach reality in a more free flowing, literary way — a muscle you can use to build up to longer pieces of creative nonfiction.

If you think you’d like to bring your writerly prowess to nonfiction, here are our top tips for creating compelling creative nonfiction that’s as readable as a novel, but as illuminating as a scholarly article.

Write a memoir focused on a singular experience

Humans love reading about other people’s lives — like first-person memoirs, which allow you to get inside another person’s mind and learn from their wisdom. Unlike autobiographies, memoirs can focus on a single experience or theme instead of chronicling the writers’ life from birth onward.

For that reason, memoirs tend to focus on one core theme and—at least the best ones—present a clear narrative arc, like you would expect from a novel. This can be achieved by selecting a singular story from your life; a formative experience, or period of time, which is self-contained and can be marked by a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When writing a memoir, you may also choose to share your experience in parallel with further research on this theme. By performing secondary research, you’re able to bring added weight to your anecdotal evidence, and demonstrate the ways your own experience is reflective (or perhaps unique from) the wider whole.

Example: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Creative Nonfiction example: Cover of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , for example, interweaves the author’s experience of widowhood with sociological research on grief. Chronicling the year after her husband’s unexpected death, and the simultaneous health struggles of their daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking is a poignant personal story, layered with universal insight into what it means to lose someone you love. The result is the definitive exploration of bereavement — and a stellar example of creative nonfiction done well.

📚 Looking for more reading recommendations? Check out our list of the best memoirs of the last century .

Tip: What you cut out is just as important as what you keep

When writing a memoir that is focused around a singular theme, it’s important to be selective in what to include, and what to leave out. While broader details of your life may be helpful to provide context, remember to resist the impulse to include too much non-pertinent backstory. By only including what is most relevant, you are able to provide a more focused reader experience, and won’t leave readers guessing what the significance of certain non-essential anecdotes will be.

💡 For more memoir-planning tips, head over to our post on outlining memoirs .

Of course, writing a memoir isn’t the only form of creative nonfiction that lets you tap into your personal life — especially if there’s something more explicit you want to say about the world at large… which brings us onto our next section.

Pen a personal essay that has something bigger to say

Personal essays condense the first-person focus and intimacy of a memoir into a tighter package — tunneling down into a specific aspect of a theme or narrative strand within the author’s personal experience.

Often involving some element of journalistic research, personal essays can provide examples or relevant information that comes from outside the writer’s own experience. This can take the form of other people’s voices quoted in the essay, or facts and stats. By combining lived experiences with external material, personal essay writers can reach toward a bigger message, telling readers something about human behavior or society instead of just letting them know the writer better.

Example: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Creative nonfiction example: Cover of Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison's widely acclaimed collection The Empathy Exams tackles big questions (Why is pain so often performed? Can empathy be “bad”?) by grounding them in the personal. While Jamison draws from her own experiences, both as a medical actor who was paid to imitate pain, and as a sufferer of her own ailments, she also reaches broader points about the world we live in within each of her essays.

Whether she’s talking about the justice system or reality TV, Jamison writes with both vulnerability and poise, using her lived experience as a jumping-off point for exploring the nature of empathy itself.

Tip: Try to show change in how you feel about something

Including external perspectives, as we’ve just discussed above, will help shape your essay, making it meaningful to other people and giving your narrative an arc.

Ultimately, you may be writing about yourself, but readers can read what they want into it. In a personal narrative, they’re looking for interesting insights or realizations they can apply to their own understanding of their lives or the world — so don’t lose sight of that. As the subject of the essay, you are not so much the topic as the vehicle for furthering a conversation.

Often, there are three clear stages in an essay:

Initial state
Encounter with something external
New, changed state, and conclusions

By bringing readers through this journey with you, you can guide them to new outlooks and demonstrate how your story is still relevant to them.

Had enough of writing about your own life? Let’s look at a form of creative nonfiction that allows you to get outside of yourself.

Tell a factual story as though it were a novel

The form of creative nonfiction that is perhaps closest to conventional nonfiction is literary journalism. Here, the stories are all fact, but they are presented with a creative flourish. While the stories being told might comfortably inhabit a newspaper or history book, they are presented with a sense of literary significance, and writers can make use of literary techniques and character-driven storytelling.

Unlike news reporters, literary journalists can make room for their own perspectives: immersing themselves in the very action they recount. Think of them as both characters and narrators — but every word they write is true.

If you think literary journalism is up your street, think about the kinds of stories that capture your imagination the most, and what those stories have in common. Are they, at their core, character studies? Parables? An invitation to a new subculture you have never before experienced? Whatever piques your interest, immerse yourself.

Example: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Creative nonfiction example: Cover of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire

If you’re looking for an example of literary journalism that tells a great story, look no further than Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World , which sits at the intersection of food writing and popular science. Though it purports to offer a “plant’s-eye view of the world,” it’s as much about human desires as it is about the natural world.

Through the history of four different plants and human’s efforts to cultivate them, Pollan uses first-hand research as well as archival facts to explore how we attempt to domesticate nature for our own pleasure, and how these efforts can even have devastating consequences. Pollan is himself a character in the story, and makes what could be a remarkably dry topic accessible and engaging in the process.

Tip: Don’t pretend that you’re perfectly objective

You may have more room for your own perspective within literary journalism, but with this power comes great responsibility. Your responsibilities toward the reader remain the same as that of a journalist: you must, whenever possible, acknowledge your own biases or conflicts of interest, as well as any limitations on your research.

Thankfully, the fact that literary journalism often involves a certain amount of immersion in the narrative — that is, the writer acknowledges their involvement in the process — you can touch on any potential biases explicitly, and make it clear that the story you’re telling, while true to what you experienced, is grounded in your own personal perspective.

Approach a famous name with a unique approach

Biographies are the chronicle of a human life, from birth to the present or, sometimes, their demise. Often, fact is stranger than fiction, and there is no shortage of fascinating figures from history to discover. As such, a biographical approach to creative nonfiction will leave you spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

Because they’re not written by the subjects themselves (as memoirs are), biographical nonfiction requires careful research. If you plan to write one, do everything in your power to verify historical facts, and interview the subject’s family, friends, and acquaintances when possible. Despite the necessity for candor, you’re still welcome to approach biography in a literary way — a great creative biography is both truthful and beautifully written.

Example: American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Creative nonfiction example: Cover of American Prometheus

Alongside the need for you to present the truth is a duty to interpret that evidence with imagination, and present it in the form of a story. Demonstrating a novelist’s skill for plot and characterization, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus is a great example of creative nonfiction that develops a character right in front of the readers’ eyes.

American Prometheus follows J. Robert Oppenheimer from his bashful childhood to his role as the father of the atomic bomb, all the way to his later attempts to reckon with his violent legacy.

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The biography tells a story that would fit comfortably in the pages of a tragic novel, but is grounded in historical research. Clocking in at a hefty 721 pages, American Prometheus distills an enormous volume of archival material, including letters, FBI files, and interviews into a remarkably readable volume.

📚 For more examples of world-widening, eye-opening biographies, check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time .

Tip: The good stuff lies in the mundane details

Biographers are expected to undertake academic-grade research before they put pen to paper. You will, of course, read any existing biographies on the person you’re writing about, and visit any archives containing relevant material. If you’re lucky, there’ll be people you can interview who knew your subject personally — but even if there aren’t, what’s going to make your biography stand out is paying attention to details, even if they seem mundane at first.

Of course, no one cares which brand of slippers a former US President wore — gossip is not what we’re talking about. But if you discover that they took a long, silent walk every single morning, that’s a granular detail you could include to give your readers a sense of the weight they carried every day. These smaller details add up to a realistic portrait of a living, breathing human being.

But creative nonfiction isn’t just writing about yourself or other people. Writing about art is also an art, as we’ll see below.

Put your favorite writers through the wringer with literary criticism

Literary criticism is often associated with dull, jargon-laden college dissertations — but it can be a wonderfully rewarding form that blurs the lines between academia and literature itself. When tackled by a deft writer, a literary critique can be just as engrossing as the books it analyzes.

Many of the sharpest literary critics are also poets, poetry editors , novelists, or short story writers, with first-hand awareness of literary techniques and the ability to express their insights with elegance and flair. Though literary criticism sounds highly theoretical, it can be profoundly intimate: you’re invited to share in someone’s experience as a reader or writer — just about the most private experience there is.

Example: The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Creative nonfiction example: Cover of The Madwoman in the Attic

Take The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, a seminal work approaching Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Written as a conversation between two friends and academics, this brilliant book reads like an intellectual brainstorming session in a casual dining venue. Highly original, accessible, and not suffering from the morose gravitas academia is often associated with, this text is a fantastic example of creative nonfiction.

Tip: Remember to make your critiques creative

Literary criticism may be a serious undertaking, but unless you’re trying to pitch an academic journal, you’ll need to be mindful of academic jargon and convoluted sentence structure. Don’t forget that the point of popular literary criticism is to make ideas accessible to readers who aren’t necessarily academics, introducing them to new ways of looking at anything they read.

If you’re not feeling confident, a professional nonfiction editor could help you confirm you’ve hit the right stylistic balance.

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Alyssa Teaches

an Upper Elementary Blog

Teaching Narrative Nonfiction

New to the narrative nonfiction unit? Grab some ideas to get started with your students and check out some awesome mentor texts!

I remember when I first saw the term “narrative nonfiction” in my state’s reading standards and honestly, I didn’t know what it meant! If you’re new to teaching literary nonfiction, I hope this post will give you a good overview to get you started!

What Is Narrative Nonfiction?

Narrative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction, is nonfiction text that uses a storytelling structure to present information about a topic, such as a real person or event. It’s different than expository text, which simply presents the facts.

Since the facts are written in a narrative format with characters, a setting, a plot, etc., it can be a more engaging and memorable way for students to learn about the world.

Literary nonfiction is a great reading unit to teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students. Let's look at the narrative nonfiction definition, some activities to teach it, and some of my favorite literary nonfiction books!

It’s kind of tricky to differentiate between narrative nonfiction and historical fiction. To me, narrative nonfiction is more about presenting facts through a story, and historical fiction is more about telling a story that is based on some facts. Clear as mud, lol.

Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs are definitely part of the narrative nonfiction genre, but it can also include texts based on historical events or other topics like animals. The good news is that there’s a huge variety of texts that will attract readers with different interests in your classroom.

Introducing Narrative Nonfiction

One way to kick off this unit is to put out a selection of nonfiction, fiction, and literary nonfiction books for students to explore. You can have them work in small groups to discuss what they notice about the formats of the books and maybe sort them into groups.

They’ll start to see that expository nonfiction books have text features and mostly stick to the facts, but narrative nonfiction books look a lot more like fiction and often contain dialogue. I like to create an anchor chart as groups share the characteristics they notice.

Another option to introduce literary nonfiction is to start with a mentor text read-aloud and ask students to identify the author’s purpose. This leads to great discussions and helps students see that it’s kind of the best of both worlds. Scroll down for some of my recommendations for books to use!

Book Pairings

Another way to teach students the difference between expository texts and narrative nonfiction texts is to pair literary nonfiction books with nonfiction books on the same topic. Students can compare and contrast the structures and details of the two books. I ask students to discuss which type is the most efficient to use if you need to find a fact quickly, and I also have them share which type they prefer. You can also try using shorter passages , which are great for reading groups.

Here are some examples of book pairings:

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind [picture book] by William Kamkwamba and Wind Power: Alternative Energy by Matthew Ziem

I, Fly: The Buzz About Flies and How Awesome They Are by Bridget Heos and Flies by Larry Dane Brimner

Similarly, you can compare narrative nonfiction books or passages with fiction by asking students to highlight the facts they find it in each. This is a great way to reinforce author’s purpose for this unit – while they’re being entertained, they are also being hit with lots of facts!

Literary Nonfiction Skills and Standards

There are tons of reading skills that you can weave into a literary nonfiction unit, including:

summarizing the events and supporting details (and sequencing, too)
drawing conclusions and making inferences
identifying the conflict and resolution
analyzing the author’s word choice (i.e., figurative language, descriptive words, vocabulary)
identifying cause and effect relationships
inferring character traits
identifying the narrator of the story
describing how the language, characters, and setting contribute to the plot
explaining the author’s purpose
synthesizing the main idea of the text (i.e., what are this person’s contributions/why is this event significant?)

My fourth graders were struggling one year with summarizing the events of a text. I read aloud Only Passing Through: The Story of Sojourner Truth by Anne Rockwell. We identified the major events in the story as a class and then I assigned partners one event to illustrate and write in their own words. We put them together to create our own timeline of the book and it made a really nice display.

This genre is a perfect one to dive deep into character analysis and have students infer character traits using evidence from the text. They can practice making conclusions about that person’s contributions or the event’s significance. I’ve also had some great conversations with my students about what might have happened to the character(s) if they’d lived in a different place or time.

My Favorite Narrative Nonfiction Books

Here are a few narrative nonfiction mentor texts that I recommend for 3rd-6th grades! Click on the titles for more info!

Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick
Pop!: The Invention of Bubble Gum by Meghan McCarthy
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson
The Boston Tea Party by Russell Freedman
One Plastic Bag: Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia by Miranda Paul
Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by Isabella Hatkoff
Mr. Ferris and His Wheel by Kathryn Gibbs Davis
Separate is Never Equal by Duncan Tonatiuh
The Marvelous Thing that Came From a Spring by Gilbert Ford
Mesmerized: How Ben Franklin Solved a Mystery That Baffled All of France by Mara Rockliff
Henry’s Freedom Box by Levine Ellen
Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine Applegate
Nya’s Long Walk: A Step at a Time by Linda Sue Park
Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet
One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies

Scholastic News and Time for Kids are some other good places to look for short narrative nonfiction articles.

I think narrative nonfiction is a really engaging and fun genre to teach. It definitely makes informational text more accessible for reluctant readers! It’s also fun to have students write their own pieces after researching a person or topic of interest to them. What tips do you have for teaching a literary nonfiction unit?

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Today I'm sharing tips for getting started teaching poetry comprehension to grade 3, 4, and 5 students.

Poetry Comprehension for Upper Elementary

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“Before, During, After” Nonfiction Reading Strategies

30 comments.

Hey there – I was wondering if you had a link to the anchor chart you used? So glad I found your site and TPT – need more VA TPT teachers 🙂

Hi Rachel, I’m glad you’re finding the content helpful! Please email me through the Contact page and I can send it to you!

I would love to have the anchor chart that you used! I’ll be using your guidance as I teach this for the first time! So great!

I was searching for additional work on narrative nonfiction. I found this very attractive and informative for fourth graders in this virtual learning era. I will definitely use the image as my introduction.

I was thinking of how to teach Nonfiction and came across your post. Thank you so much for posting it. I found it very useful.

I subscribed but I was never sent these anchor charts.

Hi April, thanks for subscribing! You should receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Please check for that in your spam folder!

I subscribed but was never sent the anchor chart.

Hi Erin, thanks for subscribing! You should receive a confirmation email asking you to confirm your subscription, and then you’ll get a second email with the download. Please reach out again if you don’t see it!

Thank you for the post. I also subscribed with the hopes of receiving the anchor chart but it hasn’t come through yet.

Hi Leslie, thanks for subscribing! If you used your work email address, it may have been blocked or gone to your spam folder. Can you please try again with a personal email?

Could you please share your anchor chart? Thanks!

Hi there! If you use the link at the bottom of the post to enter your email, it will automatically be sent to you!

Thank you for sharing!

Hello. I subscribed, but alas no anchor chart. I did check all mail including spam and did use a personal email address. Thanks for your help.

Sending you an email, Kimberly!

Hi there, I did subscribe like the others but did not receive the anchor chart. I checked my spam folder as well.

I’ll send it your way, Lisa!

Hello! I did subscribe to follow your work, though I did not a chart. How would I go about being able to get one? Thank you!

Hi Jill! Did you receive a confirmation email? Let me know if you haven’t gotten access to the PDF yet!

Hello Alyssa. Great website and resources! I just wanted to let you know that I have subscribed and checked my spam folder, but I have received no confirmation email and anchor charts. I would love the PDF if possible. Thank you so much!

Hi Euan! Did the download go through for you?

Hello! I subscribed and received the confirmation email, but did not receive the anchor chart. I would love to use the anchor chart with my students. Thannks!

Hi Sherri! Did the download go through for you?

Hi, I subscribed and did not receive the anchor chart. Are you able to email to me or send a pdf?

Hi, I’m not sure what’s going on with this download lately! Did you receive a confirmation email?

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Did you ever post the anchor chart? and yes, I would love to see the mini-lessons you taught with this unit. My 11th grade students are interviewing someone over Christmas break in anticipation of writing a 1000-word nonfiction narrative. The collection will be published by our local newspaper into a hard-bound book. I’m excited to get rolling after Christmas. We’ve been reading memoirs and collecting beautiful sentences.

What an amazing project! I did something similar in 8th grade and interviewed my grandmother! You can access the anchor chart by subscribing to my weekly newsletter at the end of the blog post!

Narrative History

Historians have always crafted narratives. War. Peace. Political battles. Feuds in the hollers. Floods on the Mississippi. Hurricanes. Strikes. Assassinations. Voyages to known and unknown places. Trials of the century. Personal quests. Leaders with uncommon touches and tragic flaws. This is the stuff of great narrative and the stuff of narrative history—stories about the past told with verve and drama but also with strong arguments and thick footnotes.

Over the years, historians—and here we’re talking largely about American, university-trained and -based scholars—have produced numerous libraries’ worth of moving tales spiced with telling details set against carefully drawn backdrops and built around scrupulously fleshed-out characters. Just like any good nonfiction instructor, Samuel Morison, one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and widely read historians, urged his Harvard graduate students to read more than academic books and journals. According to a recent article in The New Yorker, Morison told them to study the art of the novel and the grace of the essay. Without this grounding, he feared that his students would write only “dull, solid” monographs. Now Morison wasn’t a self loathing historian, just a realistic one. Each “dull, solid” book and article, he knew, added to the base of historical knowledge, but that was it. No one outside the small cohort of scholars in a subfield would ever read them. For most historians, this was OK. Tenure and promotion came through deeply researched accounts of wars, trials and political campaigns targeted at other academics—not through broadly conceived narratives aimed at large audiences.

The scope of the historical profession narrowed a bit more in the 1960s and 1970s. Borrowing techniques and approaches from social scientists, historians churned out streams of studies tightly focused on the daily lives of ordinary, often forgotten people and on long-term patterns of work, mobility and reproduction that showcased method, data sets and argument over plot, suspense and character development. Some deliberately shied away from artful storytelling, fearful that the hints of play and performance that came with narrative would take away from the veracity and seriousness of the accounts. Better in this professional climate to construct tables and long, discursive footnotes than chiseled characters and in-depth scenes.

Journalists, features writers and biographers quickly stepped into the narrative void left by the historians’ social-scientific turn. Skilled storytellers and diligent researchers like J. Anthony Lukas and Robert A. Caro told gripping tales of race and disappointment, city building and power brokers. Audiences came running. David McCullough recounted the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and John Barry traced the floodwaters of the Mississippi, and people turned the pages. Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose—Ambrose started out as a university-based historian but chafed under the academy’s narrative and political constraints, or so he said—retold sprawling national narratives of good and evil, and book-buyers swarmed. Taylor Branch and Edmund Morris buried themselves in the archives and produced gripping, authoritative accounts of the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Teddy Roosevelt, and the scribes of The New York Review of Books debated their insights.

Just as Samuel Morison had predicted, strong writers of compelling narratives had, by the 1980s, taken over the popular market for history. Unwilling to concede the past to nonprofessionals, some historians looked to strike back. But they knew that this meant rediscovering their field’s deep narrative traditions. It also meant taking on the big topics. And it meant imitating the narrative strategies deployed so well by journalist-historians like Goodwin and Caro—with, of course, fatter footnotes and longer bibliographies.

Reflecting the trend, in 1989, Princeton professor James M. McPherson crafted “Battle Cry of Freedom,” a vivid, even moving account of the military history of the Civil War. In the following decade, Joseph Ellis of Mount Holyoke College published “American Sphinx,” an elegant look at the private Thomas Jefferson. This triggered a sort of founding fathers revival, as professors—this time with the journalists following—raced to see who would get out the next book on Hamilton, Jefferson and Adams. Others who missed this bandwagon turned their attention to Lincoln and the noble grunts of World War II. As these accounts started to appear on The New York Times’ Best Sellers List, other historians hired agents and looked to capture a slice of this growing audience. But even more, the renewed interest in narrative—and royalty checks—trickled down. Graduate programs from Princeton to North Carolina to Southern California started to offer writing seminars alongside methods classes, featuring the work of Lukas and McPherson as well as of Gay Talese and Philip Roth.

But the grand narrative of the big event and the big leader wasn’t the only thing happening in the history business. The freedom movements of the 1960s rocked the academy. African-Americans, women, Native Americans, Chicanos, gays, lesbians and transgendered people demanded not just equity before the law but also a place in the nation’s past. Yet, including the “others” upset some firmly established master narratives. Things weren’t so clear anymore. Whose story was true, historians wondered? The answer depended on the perspective.

Some historians concluded—with great misgivings—that truth was subjective. It wasn’t that there wasn’t truth but that truth—the past—looked different depending on where you stood. For some historians, this insight freed them from the restrictions of the omnipresent third-person narrative—the detached and commanding position adopted by historians. Some scholars, then, began to experiment with voice and structure. With a novelist’s eye for detail and phrasing, James E. Goodman, in “Stories of Scottsboro,” retold the tragedy of the wrongly accused Scottsboro boys from a multiplicity of angles with each chapter changing perspective. In his follow-up book, “Blackout,” an account of the night the lights went out in New York City in 1977, he retells the event in a frenzy of over 50 short-story blasts. Never does he step in and say which account is true and which is not. The complexity of experience is what matters to him.

Others have injected themselves into their stories. Art historian Eunice Lipton went searching for Manet’s model in “Alias Olympia” and found herself. In “Blood Done Sign My Name,” Timothy B. Tyson recalled a racially charged murder in his southern hometown to reinterpret the Civil Rights Movement and the politics of his minister father. And John Putnam Demos—a Yale professor and highly respected colonial historian—ran into some dead ends in the archives, but rather than give up his stories, he imagined his way into the heads of his characters, writing brief fictions as history in “The Unredeemed Captive.”

Creative nonfiction writers have been slow to pick up on historians’ narrative experiments. But this—and perhaps some advice about conducting research—is perhaps the most valuable thing historians have to offer. Truth is precarious, unstable and elusive, and this—as Goodman, Demos and the others show—is the real drama of the past. The search for truth, the battle for whose truth matters and what truth gets codified into official histories, textbooks and monuments, is the stuff of stories—tense, suspenseful stories—the stuff of both creative nonfiction and narrative history.

No one knows what ‘creative nonfiction’ is. That’s what makes it great.

In the first paragraph of “ The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting ,” Lee Gutkind, the “Godfather” of the creative-nonfiction genre (a title used once to describe him in Vanity Fair in 1997 and since taken up repeatedly over the years, mostly by Gutkind himself, including in the bio on this book jacket), begins with a question he often receives: “‘What is creative nonfiction?’ Or, in some cases, ‘What the hell is creative nonfiction?’”

It’s a fitting sentiment for the genre, and for its longtime champion. This term, which others forgo in favor of “literary nonfiction” or “narrative nonfiction,” or simply “the essay,” as Gutkind writes, is a blanket that seeks to cover works from Joan Didion’s stylized journalistic chronicles of the ’60s to Mary Karr and the memoir boom of the ’90s to Annie Dillard’s nature writing, and everything in between that isn’t made up but also probably wouldn’t run in the newspaper. To practice or teach creative nonfiction (or whatever else you might want to call it) has been to operate from a defensive position. As Gutkind shows, this is a genre whose inception and growth were met with uncertainty, skepticism and in many cases disdain.

In trying to name, categorize, legitimize creative nonfiction, it’s hard not to feel that you’re being defined by what you are failing to do — it’s not creative in the eyes of fiction writers, or rigorously factual in the eyes of journalists, or properly literary in the eyes of academics. Here, Gutkind attempts to narrate the history of the genre, and that story is inevitably one of contestation and conflict — about what “creative nonfiction” even is, above all else, and just how “creative” writers can be before they’re no longer writing nonfiction. Those are familiar debates for some of us, and they haven’t stopped. I was in graduate school more than a decade ago, at one of the creative-nonfiction programs that Gutkind describes, and I was constantly getting into “Literary Fist-Fights,” though I imagine most of the people around me wanted to punch me for real.

Gutkind has been out there on those self-drawn front lines since the early ’70s. He’s a writer of numerous creative-nonfiction books (for which he immersed himself in topics ranging from the lives of those awaiting organ transplants, to the cutting-edge robotics program at Carnegie Mellon, to the ecosystem of a children’s hospital), a professor and an editor, all of these identities working toward a final form somewhere between evangelist and carnival barker. “I know that all of this scheming, all of these machinations, seem pretty crass and certainly not literary,” he writes about his efforts to get sustained funding for his seminal magazine, Creative Nonfiction. “I got a lot of heat from colleagues and other writers for being an unabashed promoter and even a self-promoter. Okay, maybe that was true — or partly true. But so what? It might work.”

It did work, and those of us who love the genre — many first drawn in by Gutkind’s magazine or his edited anthology — are grateful for it. These days, I don’t know if anyone would knock the hustle. Doomed hustling is the only literary mode left available, as so many great magazines, especially the kind that published the inventive, diverse work that we might call creative nonfiction, have fallen by the wayside — cut from shrinking university budgets, bought and gutted by venture-capital goons, scrubbed from the internet. The latest issue of Creative Nonfiction came out in 2022; there doesn’t seem to anything coming down the pike.

To look back, in these times of true literary and academic scarcity, the “fist-fighting” of grad program expansion and barbs exchanged between the tenured and endowed can seem like pretty enviable brawls. As much as anything, “The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting” is a book about academia, a version of it that’s nearly extinct. Multiple scenes take place in panels at academic conferences, or during contentious department meetings; enemies are blazered, bloviating, Faulkner scholars who pound the table and refuse to let nonfiction writers into their ivory tower.

In the midst of all this, Gutkind, in his own telling, is the perma-rebel: a former hippie motorcycle man without a graduate degree, who doesn’t belong. He’s the scrappy kid from the real world, pushing himself through every door the fancier folk might want to slam in his face. But for most of the book, he’s ensconced within the literary and academic establishment, ultimately moving comfortably through the tenure track at a major research university in the city where he was born. I don’t mean to downplay Gutkind’s enormous accomplishments; only to say, as a fellow academic, that it’s easy to get caught up in the perceived intrigue of a meeting, to frame yourself only against those in your bubble, to lose sight of the fact that the art being discussed is a far more compelling subject than the minutiae of the discussion about it.

Gutkind is at his best in this book when he grudgingly becomes the type of memoirist that he usually writes about. The moments when he stops to look back on his own evolving perspective and investment are truly compelling — reflecting the continuing intellectual curiosity of someone who cares enough about this field to allow himself to change with it. He thinks back on essays that he rejected from the magazine that he might accept now, and shows us how dogmas seem indispensable until suddenly they’re old fashioned.

Most compellingly, he reflects upon his writing career, the choices he made within the murkily defined borders of creative nonfiction. He describes a scene from his second book, in which he sits outside a motel room to eavesdrop on a fight between two White baseball umpires and their crewmate, the first Black umpire in the National League. Decades on, he delves into not only what happened in the scene but his place as eavesdropper, the context leading up to the moment, the stylistic choices in not making up but certainly emphasizing the cruel language, and most of all, whether “in the end I actually hurt the man I was trying to help.” He puts himself, and us, right back in the moment — and the results are vivid, ambiguous, emotionally resonant, fascinating.

That is the enduring thrill of creative nonfiction — tiptoeing along the border between art and fact. It requires turning a critical eye on your own ambition, your care for others, the literal truth of what happened and the style with which you might express how it felt, as well as the question of whose story is being told and who has the right to tell it. It’s one that Gutkind chronicles as a reader, too, capturing the experience that we who love the genre have all had, coming upon a work that feels epiphanic with all these tensions and intimacies, even if you didn’t have the language to call what you were reading “creative nonfiction.” He writes of what it meant to a young journalist to encounter a piece that broke the rules, as he did when he first read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” And he describes the awe he felt upon reading James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” an essay that achieved so much . He captures this experience as an editor, too, when a then-unknown writer sent him her first manuscript and, decades into his career, he discovered that he could still be surprised.

This is, I think, what so often gets buried in discussions about creative nonfiction — including many of those documented in this book. The more one zeroes in on defining and defending, the more the writing can move away from whatever it is that makes the genre meaningful to so many people. Gutkind has given his life to this genre; I wish I knew more about what it means to him.

The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting

How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction

By Lee Gutkind

Yale University Press. 292 pp. $35

No one knows what ‘creative nonfiction’ is. That’s what makes it great.

COMMENTS

Understanding Narrative Nonfiction: Definition and Examples
Narrative nonfiction, also known as creative nonfiction or literary nonfiction, is a true story written in the style of a fiction novel. The narrative nonfiction genre contains factual prose that is written in a compelling way—facts told as a story. While the emphasis is on the storytelling itself, narrative nonfiction must remain as accurate ...
Narrative Nonfiction Books: Definition and Examples
Narrative nonfiction, which is also sometimes called literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, is a subgenre of nonfiction. This subgenre includes any true story that's written in the style of a novel. It's easy to understand this term if you break it down into its component parts. The first word, narrative, means story.
What is Narrative Writing? [& How To Use It In A Nonfiction Book]
Third-person narrative writing uses "he," "she," or "they" to tell a story. In nonfiction, third-person narration is often used to illustrate a point through a short story or case study. "It was the worst setback the company had ever faced. The market for their revolutionary plastics had dried up overnight.
What is Narrative Nonfiction?
Sometimes referred to as literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction draws on the literary methods of fiction writing to present well-researched information. It's a flexible term that can be applied to various works and styles, including memoir, history, investigative journalism, current affairs, and scientific accounts.
What is Narrative Nonfiction? Meaning and Types
Narrative nonfiction is a type of nonfiction writing where a story is written based on facts, information, and true events, but it is written in the style of a fiction novel, inducing entertainment, suspense, character development, and more to make it interesting and engaging for the readers. Creative nonfiction and literary nonfiction are ...
Narrative Nonfiction
Narrative nonfiction can also be called creative nonfiction or literary nonfiction. While this type of writing is based on truth, authors can apply creative license to embellish the original story.
What is Narrative Nonfiction?
A work of narrative nonfiction is a true story that is factually written— but reads like a novel. Rather than giving a journalistic, straightforward news report, narrative nonfiction offers a more creative and entertaining account of real events. In this genre, true crime stories read like thrillers, and important historical moments feel like ...
How to Write Amazing Narrative Non-Fiction
Another cornerstone of great narrative non-fiction is the quality of the writing. Just like in fiction books, writers use dialogue and characterization to reveal character relationships and story development. Choosing to tell the story through specific scenes instead of simply summarizing the events that took place is what separates this form ...
Narrative Nonfiction: Making Facts into a Story
Narrative nonfiction is creative nonfiction yet while both are fact-based book categories, narrative nonfiction is also about storytelling, not just presenting facts in a clever way. It gives people, places and events meaning and emotional content - without making anything up. If you make up dialog or alter facts, then it becomes fiction.
How to Master Narrative Nonfiction
Narrative nonfiction is similar to memoir in that it's a true story written to convey real events, but it uses significant creative license in the telling. Stylistically, narrative nonfiction is closer to a fictional novel. Narrative nonfiction requires a lot of research as the writer needs to understand every angle of the characters ...
What is narrative non-fiction?
The second: 'non-fiction' is widely understood as prose writing that is informative or factual, rather than fictional. Put together, 'narrative non-fiction' is a true story written in the style of a fiction novel. Literary nonfiction and creative nonfiction are also terms used instead of or in association with narrative nonfiction.
How To Write Narrative Non-Fiction With Matt Hongoltz-Hetling
Transcript of Interview with Matt Hongoltz-Hetling. Joanna: Matt Hongoltz-Hetling is a Pulitzer finalist and award-winning investigative journalist. He's also the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Welcome, Matt. Matt: Hey, thanks for having me on, Joanna. Joanna: It's great to have you on the show.
Understanding—and Teaching—the Five Kinds of Nonfiction
Narrative Nonfiction. In the mid-1990s, children's authors began crafting narrative nonfiction—prose that tells a true story or conveys an experience. This style of writing appeals to fiction lovers because it includes real characters and settings; narrative scenes; and, ideally, a narrative arc with rising tension, a climax, and denouement.
Creative nonfiction
Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, literary journalism or verfabula) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain ...
Narrative Nonfiction: What is it?
What Is Narrative Nonfiction? Narrative nonfiction is a fairly new term being introduced as a genre of writing, but its individual elements are not new at all. It blends factual events with entertainment, setting it apart from academic nonfiction and journalism, which are factual but not generally entertaining, and straight fiction, which is ...
Creative Nonfiction: What It Is and How to Write It
When nonfiction writers put out creative work, they are most successful when they utilize the following elements. Narration. Just like fiction, nonfiction relies on effective narration. Telling the story with an effective plot, writing from a certain point of view, and using the narrative to flesh out the story's big idea are all key craft ...
meaning
What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call " narrative nonfiction ": writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an ...
The Appeal of Narrative Nonfiction
Nonfiction writers aim to show realistic, multidimensional people in situations that make the reader think, "That could be me.". As for dialogue, narrative nonfiction can contain speech in the form of verified quotations, conversations, and interviews using a Q & A format. This allows writers to add the life and variety of spoken words.
Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold
Creative nonfiction is not limited to novel-length writing, of course. Popular radio shows and podcasts like WBEZ's This American Life or Sarah Koenig's Serial also explore audio essays and documentary with a narrative approach, while personal essays like Nora Ephron's A Few Words About Breasts and Mariama Lockington's What A Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew also ...
What is Narrative Non-Fiction for Kids?
Narrative non-fiction is a true story that has been told in the form of a narrative. This means that the information found within the text is factual and informative, while the style is entertaining and descriptive. Literary non-fiction and creative non-fiction are also terms used to describe this kind of writing, and both explain the balance ...
Teaching Narrative Nonfiction
Introducing Narrative Nonfiction. One way to kick off this unit is to put out a selection of nonfiction, fiction, and literary nonfiction books for students to explore. You can have them work in small groups to discuss what they notice about the formats of the books and maybe sort them into groups. They'll start to see that expository ...
4 Lessons Learned Writing a Braided Narrative
The experience of writing a present-day braided narrative taught me more than the humility required when crafting a story about living individuals, though it did that well. The greater lessons contained the gymnastics required in putting the story back together and in always leaving space for a narrative that is breathing.
Narrative History
Creative nonfiction writers have been slow to pick up on historians' narrative experiments. But this—and perhaps some advice about conducting research—is perhaps the most valuable thing historians have to offer. Truth is precarious, unstable and elusive, and this—as Goodman, Demos and the others show—is the real drama of the past.
No one knows what 'creative nonfiction' is. That's what ...
This term, which others forgo in favor of "literary nonfiction" or "narrative nonfiction," or simply "the essay," as Gutkind writes, is a blanket that seeks to cover works from Joan ...

Narrative Nonfiction Books: Definition and Examples

Hannah Yang

Table of Contents

Narrative Nonfiction Definition

Narrative Nonfiction Meaning

Be confident about grammar

Which Genres Count as Narrative Nonfiction?

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (1999)

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (2017)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara (2018)

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in WWII by Daniel James Brown (2021)

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What is narrative writing?

How to improve your narrative writing

First-person versus third-person narrative in nonfiction

What is first-person narrative writing?

What is third-person narrative writing?

Which one is better?

How to get out of your own way and write

Examples of great narrative writing in nonfiction books

Tiffany Haddish: The Last Black Unicorn

Story structure: why this is great

1. The style is conversational

2. It starts with a highly relatable problem

3. It gets personal and vulnerable quickly

4. It doesn’t over-explain things

5. It offers the right sensory details

6. The reader’s interest drives the organization

David Goggins: Can’t Hurt Me

1. It starts with a personal problem

2. It presents a powerful conflict

3. It paints a picture with details

The Scribe Crew

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

What Is Narrative Nonfiction?

What Are the Origins of Narrative Nonfiction?

Are There Controversies About Narrative Nonfiction?

What Are Some Different Styles of Narrative Nonfiction?

Historical Nonfiction

Investigative Journalism

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What is Narrative Nonfiction? Meaning and Types

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

Types of Narrative Nonfiction

Modern Media

Modern Books

What Makes Narrative Nonfiction Writing Good?

Balance Between Fact and Fiction

Author Presence

High Quality

Some Narrative Nonfiction Books to Read 2024

Brief Descriptions of the Nonfiction Books

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Factual and well researched

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