I’ve taught narrative journalism at Harvard, organized conferences on the subject, written criticism about it, and practiced it for more than 20 years.

Yet the term “narrative journalism” makes me cringe.

It’s the word narrative that bugs me, because the term represents everything that this form of writing is not supposed to be. For starters, narrative smacks of academia. It’s abstract. No one knows what it means! It’s an example of people choosing a high-falutin word when a more straightforward one exists (storytelling).

But we seem to need a some name for articles and books that tell true stories. Other critics have come up with literary journalism, immersion journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and the literature of fact.

Does the name matter? I think it does. For starters, when we label a work “journalism,” we acknowledge that the writers are reporting on people and events outside themselves, and that they subscribe to certain ethical ideas (not making up quotes, being present at a scene they are sketching, confirming facts with multiple sources). Journalism suggests a paramount concern with factual truth.

Nonfiction is a broader category. It includes memoir and first-person essays and think pieces and arts reviews and Op-Eds and travelogues. The experience or opinion of the narrator is central. The pieces are as concerned with emotional truth as they are with factual truth.

Both narrative journalism and literary nonfiction borrow liberally from the traditions of poetry and fiction. In fact, that’s a good starting point for a definition: narrative journalism takes the techniques of fiction and applies them to reportage.

What does that mean? For starters, it means conceiving an article as a story, not as an inverted pyramid. (The classic structure of news journalism tells the reader in the first paragraph who, what, when, where, and maybe why, and then organizes the evidence in descending order of importance). A story is a graceful line rather than an inverted pyramid, it has an arc, a beginning-middle-end, a spine with limbs attached in just the right places.

Without a central storyline, there is no story. But many other literary techniques are involved in narrative journalism:

• precisely painted scenes, to put the reader into the story;
• fleshed-out characters to make the reader care about the story;
• plot, or a series of actions that unfold over time and lead the reader toward an endpoint or realization;
• paradox, to give the story twists and turns;
• suspense, or techniques to keep the story taut and thrilling;
• dramatic conflict (between characters, cultural forces, or communities);
• artful language—shapely sentences to pull the reader through paragraphs and inventive metaphors to surprise him or her;
• the presence of a narrator, what many call voice;
• some sense of relationship to the reader, viewer, or listener, so that there is a connection between storyteller and audience.

But there’s more to narrative journalism than just these devices. From the get-go, it requires extensive reporting so that the writer can pull from many different sources and anecdotes to develop the various layers of a story. It requires a kind of authorial confidence (born of that reporting) that comes across as an assured voice. And it requires time—time to dig deep and time to think deep and time to rewrite and time to deliberate with an editor over choices. It also requires the alacrity that comes with experience, because all of this must be done on deadline.

More and more, literary journalism also involves thinking creatively about medium. Is this a story best told in plain text or in elegant type? Is it best told in print, where a reader can enter the current of the story and be swept along, or online, where the words can be married with graphics in thoughtful ways? Is it best told accompanied by sound and moving images?

Here are some recent works of literary journalism that impressed me:

“Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility,” published in the Washington Post on February 18, 2007. Dana Priest and Anne Hull paint a vivid picture of the neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center starting in the very first paragraph.

“The Peekaboo Paradox,” Washington Post, January 22, 2006.  Gene Weingarten is a character sketcher par excellence;  his story spirals ever deeper into one person’s story.

“In a City Under Strain, Ladling Out Fortification,” New York Times, April 26, 2009. Dan Barry finds in the making of soup a clever way to let action unfold over time, and to give the full flavor of a mill town in decline.

“Trial by Fire,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. David Grann brings the thrill of pulp fiction to investigative journalism.

“After Life,” New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2005. The mistress of style, Joan Didion, shows how carefully chosen language and carefully crafted sentences enhance the power of a story. (This is an excerpt from Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.)

“Waiting for Death, Alone and Unafraid,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2009. Thomas Curwen artfully lets his print story be complemented by an audio slideshow. When the subject’s voice can be broadcast on the Web, the need for direct quotations diminishes, freeing the writer to craft an elegy.

“Killer Blue—Baptized by Fire,” the Associated Press, 2008. Produced by Evan Vucci, this joint effort by reporters, photographers, and videographers shows multimedia at its best.

If you’re interested in sampling some longer work, try any one of the great reads listed in Online & On the Shelf.

—Constance Hale

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1. Best of narrative journalism (books)
2. Best of narrative journalism (articles)
3. Where to find narrative journalism online

susanorlean BTW, my animal sitter at home reports that Laura has become a total raging maniac rooster madman, complete with rooster rage. Oy. – November 11, 2009

In a grassy upstate-New York yard fit for farming, Susan Orlean gives a camera crew for The New Yorker a tour of her utility shed. Half of the shed is occupied by seven chickens. Outside the shed is a fenced-in area, resembling a petting zoo. Chickens zoom past the cameras as Orlean squats down just inside the yard. Three birds rush over to snack on the tomato half in their dutiful owner’s hands.

Orlean points to a black-feathered bird with white specks and a scarlet crest. “This chicken was a sweet little chicken,” she says. “The guy I bought her from had named her Laura, after the character in The Glass Menagerie, and she’s turned out to be a rooster. A big shock to everybody.”

Almost every day, Orlean writes one-liners just like that about her chickens on Twitter. It started with her just tweeting her life, discussing her family and career. Then something clicked. Her fans fixated on the birds. They followed her chicken tweets, re-tweeted them to friends, and tweeted her back. It became a chicken-tweet movement, inquiries about chickens flying fast at Orlean. All the while her following proliferated, growing to six thousand by last June:

susanorlean Do I get a toaster or something when I hit 6000 followers? – June 19, 2009

susanorlean Whoa! Send toaster immediately! –June 21, 2009

Eight thousand in July:

susanorlean Hey, thank you all for pushing me into the toaster-and-a-blender category (8000 followers—but I know you just love me for my chickens). – July 10, 2009

And double that today (and growing).

With all of this notice, the natural next step for a staff writer at The New Yorker was to pitch a piece to her editor.

susanorlean Got a thumbs-up on my chicken story, so I’ll let you all know when it’s running. My editor’s comment? “Buk buk”. – September 8, 2009

On September 28, 2009, The New Yorker published the anticipated Orlean chicken tale, “The It Bird: The return of the back-yard chicken.” The story chronicles her impulse to purchase egg-laying hens and her discovery that she is a part of growing trend. The article is characteristically provocative, a survey on the suburban life of the egg-laying fowl intermixed with the dry wit of Orlean’s Twitter feed.

“Chickens seem to be the perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes. “I do detect a little overripening on the edges—I’ve noticed some late-stage phenomena such as chicken diapers, for people who want their chickens as house pets.”

Orlean argues that chickens will endure, and have endured, through all manner of fads, whether as farm animals, pets, as food producers in hard times, or as designer-bred show-chickens. Today, they are poster chicks for the organic and local-food movements. But it is Orlean’s sentiments as a pet-chicken owner that brought thousands to her feed. These readers engage with Orlean in a way impossible even five years ago. Orlean involves them in her creative process through tweets, which in turn motivates her audience to read her print stories.

The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.”  Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.

“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”

Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.

susanorlean One benefit of writing a story about chickens: Every time you write the word “chicken,” it’s amusing.  – August 17, 2009

—Shelly Runyon

{Shelly Runyon lives and writes in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently enrolled as a MLA Journalism degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School.}

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I would recommend the essay to anyone practicing fiction, nonfiction, or memoir, with some caveats.

Quart launches her column by discussing The Hurt Locker, a fictional action-movie whose “forensic, formalist style” she writes, aligns it with documentaries or biopics. (The film is rooted in a deeply reported article originally published in Playboy, and its author worked hand-in-glove with the film’s director.) Then Quart mentions books whose authors do the deep reporting, then depart from strict facts in their books—for example, A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, What Is the What, by Dave Eggers, and Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls. The latter calls her recent book about her grandmother a “true life novel.”

So far, I’m with Quart. The list of writers who report or conduct historical research and then write fiction based on real-life stories is long and broad: in addition to the trio Quart mentions (Orwell, Capote, Mailer), there are Mark Twain (whose reporting set up his satire), John Steinbeck (whose journalism informed The Grapes of Wrath), and contemporary novelists whose deep historical research makes their fiction come alive, like David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), and Ian McEwan (Atonement). And let’s not forget Shakespeare, whose history plays were based on the lives of English kings and used events like The Wars of the Roses as departure points.

It’s when Quart starts talking about nonfiction that I begin to quibble. Or, in certain cases, quake. She makes the surprising assertion that “the category ‘nonfiction’ no longer has the frisson it once did or the assurance that a book or film will sell.” Tell that to Dexter Filkins, whose balancing of journalistic restraint and downright eloquence found expression in The Forever War. Or to Anne Hull, whose reporting on Walter Reed won her the Pulitzer, among other awards. Or to Adam Hochschild, whose King Leopold’s Ghost hardly disappeared into remainder bins.

(And when has there ever been “assurance” that an important work of nonfiction would find a commercial audience?)

Quart, who is a fellow this year at the Nieman Foundation, where I teach narrative journalism, quotes another colleague, Andrea Pitzer, the editor of the Narrative Digest: “The newshole for narrative nonfiction is shrinking,” Pitzer says. “You have to have a lot of dazzle to get it published at all. Letting the work go over a little to fiction lets it be more salable.”

The newshole may indeed be shrinking, but no editor I know would prefer a piece, however dazzling, that departed from fact over one with startling news or insight. There is a big difference between letting work “go over a little to fiction” and borrowing the techniques of fiction, which is, I suspect, what Pitzer meant. (Full discloser: I was the editor of the Digest for two years; Pitzer succeeded me.)

But since when are those techniques—plotting a drama, crafting character, describing scenes, capturing dialogue, parceling out details to heighten suspense, finding a narrative voice—the province of fiction anyway? Most of us consider them just elements of great writing, any great writing.

Quart says hipster online editor Larry Smith suggests that the graphic novel A.D. is just journalism in a new guise, and she quotes John D’Agata, the editor of the new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, who asks “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Perhaps the problem is the word nonfiction, which may be so broad as to blur some important lines. I would argue that we indeed read journalism—news stories, whether told in a straight news style or in an artful narrative style—for information, and we want that information to be credible and fair. We read narrative journalism—factual stories told using writerly (not fictional) techniques like plot, suspense, description, and artful language—for information, too; it tells us something important about our world. And we read essays and even blogs for the ideas of their writers. Art—and certainly artfulness—can surface into any of these forms, but the primary reason to read nonfiction is to learn factual truths about our world.

Memoir, one the other hand, is a form that does slide away from reported facts and toward remembered impressions. That, indeed, we read for its emotional rather than factual truths.

In the end, perhaps we blur lines by lumping a variety of genres writing into the binary categories of “fiction” and “nonfiction.”

—Constance Hale

Related posts:

1. What the heck is narrative journalism?
2. Try a Little Frisson with Your Nonfiction

These will usually be works of literary nonfiction, but I couldn’t resist launching with this shortie from the May 4 New Yorker. Titled “Buzzed,” it’s a hilarious fantasy by Noah Baumbach about what happens when scientists, curious about the biochemistry of addiction, dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs.

No related posts.

In the meantime, if you want to read great examples of narrative journalism, the Nieman Storyboard offers notable stories, interviews with writers, commentary and various resources. The site is published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The precursor to this site was the Narrative Digest, which still exists as a valuable archive of “notable narratives,” commentary, and essays on craft. (I edited the Digest when I was director of the program in narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation.)

The Open Notebook is modeled on the Nieman Storyboard, but focuses on science journalism. You can read great pieces there, as well as get some behind-the-page detail.

The production of a group of ambitious and talented reporters in Florida, Gangrey has been called “a well-kept candy shop open to anyone who appreciates good writing.” It features mainly news stories from around the country, as well as spirited discussion of them, as well as of the changing platforms of journalism.

Speaking of changing platforms, make sure not to miss Interactive Narratives, produced by the Online News Association. The site’s tagline reads “the best in multimedia storytelling,” and the focus here is truly on the merging of text, audio, video, and graphics.

Related posts:

1. What the heck is narrative journalism?
2. Best of narrative journalism (books)
3. Best of narrative journalism (articles)