Writers and editors throw the term narrative journalism around loosely, and many don’t really know how to define it. Here’s my own short definition: narrative journalism is reported nonfiction that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven the story. Those techniques might include scene-setting, character sketches, and extended dialogue (rather than quotes gathered through interviews). A work of narrative journalism requires an artful structure that gives the story an arc or some kind of dramatic progression. The writer is present as a narrator and not just as an invisible, objective witness.

Here is a sampling of some of the best works of narrative journalism that have been published in books. (Get reading!)

Collections of Narrative Journalism

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Beacon Press 1984 (original published in 1955).

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-fiction by Joan Didion. Everyman’s Library 2006

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now by Alma Guillermoprieto. Vintage 1994.

Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, with a foreword by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001.

The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling. North Point Press 2004 (original, 1956).

The John McPhee Reader by John McPhee (Edited by William L. Howarth). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1982.

Fame and Obscurity by Gay Talese. Ivy Books 1995 (original, 1970).

Anthologies of Narrative Journalism

The Best American Magazine Writing edited by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Columbia University Press annual series

Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America’s Best Writing 1979-2003 edited by David Garlock. Wiley-Blackwell 2003.

The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. Scribner 1997.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present edited by Phillip Lopate. Anchor 1997 (original, 1994).

The Princeton Anthology of Writing edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot. Princeton University Press 2001.

Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Houghton Mifflin 2000.

Best Newspaper Writing edited by the Poynter Institute. Poynter Institute Press annual series

New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine edited by Tom Wolfe and the editors of New York Magazine. Random House 2008.

Book-Length Works of Narrative Journalism

Black Man’s America by Simeon Booker. Prentice Hall, out of print (originally published in 1964).

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Vintage 1994 (first published in 1966).

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, three volumes to date (first volume originally published in 1982).

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass. Available online at www.gutenberg.org/etext/23 (original published in 1845).

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Picador 1998.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Ballantine 1993 (original, 1972).

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1996 (original, 1932).

Hiroshima by John Hersey. Vintage 1989 (originally published in 1946).

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin 1998.

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes. Vintage 1987.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Bay Back Books 2000 (original, 1981).

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian LeBlanc. Scribner 2003.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton & Co. 2003.

The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve Lopez. Putnam Adult 2008.

Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail by Ruben Martinez. Picador USA 2001.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989 (original, 1966).

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Ballantine Books 1999.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. Penguin 1993 (original, 1986).

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Simon & Schuster 1995 (original, 1986).

Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2007 (full version originally published in 1989).

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin, with foreword by John Gregory Dunne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 (original, 1993).

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Presidio Press 2004 (original, 1962).

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Penguin Classics 2007 (original, 1941).

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Picador 2008 (original, 1979).

Having trouble remembering when to use who and whom? Confused by which and that? Want to bone up on the parts of a sentence? Well, hie thee to a bookstore and buy Sin and Syntax, which will also tell you how deploy these grammatical fine points to write “wicked good prose.” If you hunger for more, here are my favorite grammar guides—from the geeky to the goofy.

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, edited by Randolph Quirk. (Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1985). The dean of British grammarians, led the team that produced this behemoth, which will tell you everything—I mean everything—about grammar. Let the buyer beware: this book is expensive, but worth it.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. This masterpiece of Gothic humor and racy sentences might be called “grammar for grownups,” or, as Gordon suggests, for “the innocent, the eager, and the doomed.”

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, by Ben Yagoda. (New York: Broadway, 2007). Yagoda’s tweak on Mark Twain’s famous admonition gives a hint to his treatment of grammar: witty. His table of contents shows what he focuses on: the parts of speech, period.

Woe Is I, by Patricia T. O’Conner. (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1996) Less comprehensive than the books listed above, O’Conner nevertheless takes the reader on a clear-headed stroll through the labyrinth that is English. She manages to amuse, too, in chapters with names like “Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation” and “The Compleat Dangler: A Fish out of Water.”

I’m excited to announce that I just sold a proposal for a new book to W. W. Norton. This one will do for verbs what Sin and Syntax does for sentences. Here’s how I described it in the proposal:

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Caesar got ‘em. Matthew got ‘em. Bellow got ‘em. Even E. B. Farnum and my dog got ‘em.

Got what?

Verbs.

Vital, vibrant, voluptuous, and, yes, sometimes vexing verbs.

Caesar proclaimed “veni, vidi, vinci.” Matthew reminded, “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” Bellow saw in every face in New York “the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Deadwood’s mayor E. B. Farnum, when he saw the Widow Garret, said, “She enters,” rather than the “There she is” of lesser mortals. And my dog? Well, you’d better believe that Homer understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” “heel,” and “fetch.” (He wasn’t so good on “lie down.”)

Verbs have been called everything from “action words” to “the heartbeat of a sentence.” They have even been called The Almighty—by Buckminster Fuller:  “God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.” Verbs make the fulcrum of every sentence, the essence of any story. They put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots.

Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a dynamic one, the passive voice and the active one, means knowing how to write purposefully and powerfully. In fact, understanding the verb means understanding English itself, for in English more than in other tongues, verbs enjoy a kind of primacy. Think about it: The word itself comes from the Latin verbum, for “word.” We can’t verbalize without verbs, nor can we boast of verbal dexterity!

Yet, for all their primacy and vibrancy, verbs are mostly misunderstood and often misused. Vex, Hex, Smash, and Smooch aims to change the way we think about verbs—and about language itself.

Beginning writers often ask me: “What is the one thing that will improve my work?” Aside from the obvious answer—read more, write more—I tell them to bone up on verbs.

Vex, Hex will take writers from the basics (static and dynamic verbs) to the esoteric (the indicative, the imperative, and the oh so subjunctive). It will set writers straight on objects and why it’s easy to use who and whom correctly. It upends conventional notions of verbs, sentences, and literature itself, marching from Caesar to Sorenson, from Woolf to The Wolfman, from Dickens to Didion, from Hemingway to JFK. And we won’t forget rappers like Dr. Dre, or TV writers like David Milch (Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire).

Vex, Hex also helps writers reinterpret the old rules for the new media landscape. The books show how verbs figure into the 140-character messages of Twitter and how they can elevate blogs into literature. (Or at least something worth reading.) This is a book for every writer trying to figure out how to rise above the digital din by crafting prose that is lean, powerful, and punchy.

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Doesn’t it sound like fun? Look for it in fall 2011. In the meantime, I’ll be creating a page here and inviting you to send in your favorite examples of writers who get verbs and how to use them to perk up their prose.

I am! Well, maybe not afraid. Perhaps cowed.

I’ve just started reading To the Lighthouse for the first time in about 12 years. (I’m reading it for  the class “Consciousness from Austen to Virginia Woolf,” with literary critic James Wood; we are tracking the way nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers enter the consciousness of characters). In previous reads, I’ve marveled at the giant leap Woolf takes into stream-of-consciousness writing. I love wallowing in Woolf’s metaphors and Mrs. Ramsey’s full-blown inner monologues.

Separately, this week I’ve been thinking about what I call “melody”—the use of sound in sentences, whether alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, or rhyme. (See my lessons for writers for ideas on this.) I have suggested that writers sit near a window when it’s raining, or near the ocean, or near a fountain, and listen to the water, finding words that in some way echo the flow.

Then I read this passage in To the Lighthouse:

The monotonous fall of waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you, and am your support,” but at other times, suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.”

Notice how Woolf uses “monotonous,” “soothing tattoo,” “repeat over and over again,” and “murmured” when she’s referring to the “kindly meaning” of waves on the beach (and, in turn, to calm or calming thoughts) and then “ghostly roll,” “remorselessly beat,” “thundered hollow,” and “impulse of terror” when she’s referring to more ominous forces of nature and of consciousness. The first set of words murmur with soft syllables, soft consonants, soft vowels. The second set gives us an “uh-oh” with ghostly roll,” followed by the syllables that register like the warning beats of a tympanum.

Subtle, but masterful.

Some chewy bits and pieces to offer you this week. First, kudos to David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers was just named the recipient of the Anthony Lukas prize. I’ve long been an admirer of Finkel’s narrative journalism, which came to my attention when I edited the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest. The Good Soldiers offers an interesting counterpoint to The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins.

Both books are examples of masterful war reporting, but they also make a study in contrasts about the role of the narrator in nonfiction storytelling. Finkel choses the third person, zooming on his soldier protagonists. (See this Washington Post excerpt.) Filkins, on the other hand, uses his book to write in a way that is impossible in his New York Times stories, as he explains in “Up Close and Personal in Iraq,” an article by Ankush Khardori in The American Prospect. Just read the first few pages of each, and you’ll notice the difference in point of view.

How will books like these fare in the future, as traditional publishing adapts to new technology? You may have seen the host of recent news articles about e-books, and you may even be considering buying a brand-new iPad. In the Sin and Syntax Salon, Sarah Baker gives you the lowdown on what she calls the “chaotic bazaar” of book publishing.

Motoko Rich also had an interesting (if oddly written—did anyone else think it went in circles?) article about how e-readers kill the fun of looking at what others are reading. Is the Kindle a conversation killer? I once sat next to a handsome guy on a plane who was reading The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. My asking how he liked the book kicked off a conversation that took us to Frankfurt. And it gave me a cool connection in Washington, D.C. (He was a staffer for Congressman John Conyers.)

OK, now back to our conversation about writing. I wanted to share some suggestions from my California colleague Nora Isaacs, who is a terrific journalist as well as a freelance editor.

Nora is good on tips. I appreciated the ones in her book Women in Overdrive. And taking some of those tips to heart, I will stop writing and start assembling some literal bits and pieces for a dinner party tonight.

Electronic rights are the chaotic bazaar of book publishing. Here authors barter with agents, agents haggle with publishers, and publishers brawl with e-retailers. Everyone is vying for his or her claim on the best pomegranate.

This frenzy, and a barrage of media attention, has left most people involved feeling confused. Agent Laurie Liss, vice president of Sterling Lord Literistic, says, “I have never felt such a divide between publishers and agents as there is now about electronic rights.” And Mark Gompertz, executive vice president of digital publishing at Simon and Schuster, acknowledges an “anxiety on the publishing side, too. We’re on the threshold of something new.”

So what should a writer know in a labyrinth of twisting alleys and ad-hoc product stands? Here are some key terms and general guidelines to the unstable warren of the U.S. market.

E-book

According to PC Magazine Encyclopedia, an e-book is “the electronic counterpart of a printed book, which can be viewed on a desktop computer or a portable device such as a laptop, PDA or e-book reader.”

E-reader

The Free Dictionary states that an e-reader, or e-book reader, is “a small, portable device onto which the contents of a book in electronic format can be downloaded and read.” Although there are more then two-dozen different brands of e-reader available, the most popular are Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook. Then there’s Apple’s iPad Tablet, which will be available April 3, 2010.

Enhanced e-books

These are e-books with bells and whistles. Think of a DVD—you get the movie plus the option to watch cuts or interviews with the director. An enhanced e-book could include audio, a video interview with the author, passages cut from the final text, slide-shows, or illustrations. You might even be able to click on a recipe, or a footnote, that takes you to a full citation. Enhanced e-books are interactive e-books.

How big is the e-book market?

Publisher’s Weekly recently reported that “e-book sales from the 13 publishers that report figures to the Association of American Publishers soared 176.6 percent in 2009, to $169.5 million.” The jump in sales increased the e-book’s share of trade sales from 1.2 percent in 2008 to 3.3 percent in 2009. And, five million e-readers sold worldwide in 2009 and an estimated twelve million will be sold in 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Who is the market?

“Most e-book devices were bought by baby boomers (or older) and, mostly, women,” says Gompertz. At $259 a pop for a Kindle, or around $500 for the iPad, it’s understandable that they are selling to a more mature market. Peter Miller, director of publicity at Bloomsbury Books says that these readers are devouring “genre fiction.” In other words, the e-book market so far is most popular for “people who read for guilty pleasure.”

What should I be aware of in my contract?

Get an agent or have a publishing lawyer check over your contract. “You wouldn’t have your spouse pull your tooth for you,” says agent Wendy Strothman. That isn’t just a plug for her industry; contracts are confusing and if a professional looks at them, you’ll sleep better. Some things to look for in particular:

1. If you have been previously published, now is the time to check your contract to see if you control e-rights, says Liss. In other words, be on top of it.
2. For new contracts, “publishers will demand e-book rights. “No book publisher will allow e-book rights to be retained by the author,” adds Strothman.
3. Double-check the reversion of rights clause and insert a minimum number of annual sales for a work to be deemed “in print,” suggests The Author’s Guild.
4. Agents and publishers are in battle mode over enhanced e-books and there is no standard yet. A big question is whether they will be classified separately from regular e-books. Many publishers want these rights, but most agents are trying to retain them.
5. Read the fine print regarding the format of book. If the publisher is considering publishing straight to e-book, you want to be aware of that.

Don’t rush into anything. The e-book market is uncertain and changing.

What royalties should I expect?

Most publishers (“about 90 percent” according to Liss) are offering rates of 25 percent of net receipts for e-books. The Author’s Guild thinks these are low and suggests ways to protect you if industry standards change: First, because the market is changing so quickly, don’t lock yourself into a rate. Try to obtain the unconditional right to renegotiate after a period of, say, two years. Second, negotiate for a royalty floor. Insist that your royalty amount for e-books will never fall below the royalty amount for the hardcover edition of your work.

Do books ever go straight to e-book?

You can self-publish straight to an e-book. The advantages are obvious: no rejection letters from editors, no distribution costs, no royalties to an agent. Plus, you’ll get marketing for you or your business. The disadvantages are that—unless you are a jack-of-all-trades—you must now pay someone to copyedit, proofread, design your cover, market, advertise, and publicize. And you don’t have the advice and expertise of editors and designers. There are many sites on-line that offer self-publishing services including Amazon.com and Lulu.com. Or you can set up PayPal on your own Web site. Publishers have started publishing a few books straight to e-book. According to Gompertz, this is still experimental. Simon & Schuster published a book straight to e-book because it was topical, but then published it as a regular book.

Are there any pitfalls to e-books?

Piracy. It happens. If you are self-publishing and want to make sure that nobody steals your content, copyright every page or install PDF security features. If you are working with a publisher, check with them about protecting your content.

The other pitfall? Things can go wrong, Orwellian wrong, like in 2009 when Amazon removed 1984 from people’s Kindles.

What’s the lowdown on the pricing of e-books?

There’s been a lot of press about e-books, but a little history might help. It all started with Amazon and its Kindle and an e-book price of $9.99.  Amazon and the publishers used a wholesale model, whereby publishers would sell the books to Amazon at about half the list price and then Amazon would set the Kindle price. So, if a book was priced at $24.95, Amazon would pay the publisher $12.50. But since the online giant was charging $9.99, it was actually losing money ($2.50) on the e-book. It didn’t matter to Amazon because it was making up for it in Kindle sales. In the process, however, consumers got used to paying that lower price.

This price started a dispute between Amazon and publishers because, as Mark Gompertz points out, “publishers are against devaluing content.” Two years of disagreement led to Amazon temporarily removing the “buy” button from Macmillan books in January, although they were still offered on the site by third parties. Eventually a resolution was reached; soon an e-book on Amazon will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99.

Then publishers came to a pricing agreement with Apple, known as an agency model, for the downloading of e-books on the iPad.  Apple will give publishers 70 percent of the consumer price, which the publishers set. But Apple wants a guarantee from the publishers that no other retailer will sell e-books for less then their iBookstore price. Consequently publishers and Amazon are back at the negotiating table. Now, according to The New York Times, Amazon is insisting that publishers sign a three-year contract guaranteeing that no other competitor will get lower prices or better terms.  Mark Gompertz says, “We felt like we were losing ground, but now we have possibility because of competition.”

Next up, Google. Publishers are currently in discussion with the Internet giant over its plans to enter the e-book world. Because of the Amazon and Apple discussions, Google is now open to talking about an agency model and to paying publishers 70 percent of each sale, according to Mokoto Rich of The New York Times.

For the moment, publishers and e-retailers have devised a formula that works. But if e-book sales outpace hardcover sales—or if bookstores can’t compete—the equation might not work. This would mean that publishers aren’t making the money they need to acquire, edit, design, support, and promote books. And, as Jonathan Galassi wrote in The New York Times, “An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.”

So, check regularly. The offerings at this bazaar change daily–new vendors, new products, new prices, and new customers. I’ll do without enhanced pomegranates, though. I like them just the way they are.

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent producer for Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.}

Sources:

Motoko Rich, The New York Times, “Amazon Threatens Publishers as Apple Looms”

Douglas MacMillan, Business Week, “E-Readers Everywhere: The Inevitable Shakeout”

Motoko Rich, The New York Times, “Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book”

Jim Milliot, Publisher’s Weekly E-Book Sales Jump 176 % in Flat Trade Year”

Louisa Ermelino, Publisher’s Weekly PW’s Panel on Going from Book to e-Book

Nicholson Baker, The New Yorker, “A New Page”

Jonathan Galassi, The New York Times, “There’s More to Publishing than Meets the Screen”

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Wall Street Journal, “More Makers Jump into the E-Reader Market”

Ina Fried, CNET News, “Amazon recalls (and embodies) Orwell’s ‘1984′“

Steven Pearlstein, The Washington Post, “The Amazon-Macmillan book saga heralds publishing’s progress”

Sarah Weinman, Daily Finance, “Enhanced e-books”

Kevin Kelly, The New York Times Magazine, “Scan This Book!“