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8 January 2024

How to Write Amazing Narrative Non-Fiction

Narrative non-fiction brings to life true stories like historic events and personal experiences. It uses the techniques usually associated with fiction writing, such as plot , character , and detailed scene-setting .

This very popular genre informs the reader with facts and detailed accounts of real-life events, but is written in an engaging and dramatic way designed to grip the reader’s attention and make the reading experience enjoyable. Narrative non-fiction is sometimes referred to as literary non-fiction or creative non-fiction.  

Why should you write narrative non-fiction?

What is interesting and exciting about narrative non-fiction is that it can cover just about any topic. You might see it shelved in almost any section of physical and online bookstores. For example, narrative non-fiction can explore an unknown perspective on a historical event based on research that’s only just been discovered. It can tell the story of an individual or a company’s dramatic demise or it can paint an eye-opening picture of a particular political or social current affair. 

What makes good narrative non-fiction?

Often written by investigative journalists, historians, and sometimes biographers, works of narrative non-fiction are informative but they are also entertaining to read because the storytelling element is so important. 

Conducting original and thorough research is a cornerstone of good narrative non-fiction writing. When researching their subjects, writers will often conduct interviews with key people, obtain access to private diaries, read old newspaper articles, and search historical records in order to get the most accurate information about a series of events. 

High-quality narrative

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 of writing from other types of non-fiction like history, reports, news stories, and biographies.

The structure a writer chooses to tell the story in goes a long way to creating drama and suspense for readers. While straight histories or news reporting tend to tell events in chronological order, with narrative non-fiction you can be more playful. You can switch perspectives and timelines meaning that the story can be told in a more exciting and intriguing way.

For example, a lot of books open with a scene set in the present day to show the reader where the story is now, and then they will go back in time to show where the story began. Other books may start with a scene in the middle of all the action and then go back in time to tell the story from the beginning, catching up with the events the opening started with before going beyond them to finish the story.

The right balance between fact and fiction   

As this form of writing uses literary styles and techniques, writers sometimes use creative license to drive their story forward and make it more interesting. It’s hard to create a completely accurate representation of something that happened a long time ago unless you have ample records of the event, like a recorded conversation or eye-witness account. Often, writers might elaborate on some details, using conjecture to fill in the blanks in the narrative.

Finding the right balance between accuracy and creative license is important – you want to create a book that has integrity and is true to real life, but you also want to help the reader paint a picture of how something might have happened in the absence of concrete information. This should happen in an informed and subtle way, always noting where you’re using conjecture, rather than writing it as truth. 

A defined author presence

When using conjecture to drive the narrative, the perspective of the writer becomes an important element. In narrative non-fiction writing, there isn’t always a strong authorial voice driving the narrative, but it is still present.

The authorial presence and voice is especially important when there has been a lot of original research and witness interviews. Investigative reporters will often comment on characters who they have tried to speak with, who they might even be writing about, and will often have a personal connection to the story. As an example, they might explain how they received an anonymous tip from someone and will therefore include their own involvement in the story. They become part of the narrative.

Publication and audience

Narrative non-fiction is a very popular genre. Walk into most bookshops and you’ll see it represented on shelves and on feature tables. Typically this space has been dominated by male writers but it’s promising to see there are more and more female writers emerging in this space.

Narrative non-fiction tends to be published in a Hardback format because of its literary qualities and often very topical subjects. It’s a genre that is often very well reviewed in traditional media outlets like national papers. A year after the Hardback publication a Paperback format will typically be released. This new format will aim to reach more mass-market readers. Audio editions of narrative non-fiction tend to sell very strongly too, as readers who are interested in these kinds of narratives are usually big podcast listeners. 

Tips for writing narrative non-fiction 

If you’re developing a book proposal that classifies as narrative non-fiction, it’s helpful to ask yourself the following questions: 

• What is the best way to structure my book so that the story is dramatic and interesting?
• Am I describing scenes, events, and people in enough detail? If your reader didn’t know this story was true, might they almost mistake it for fiction? (It would be a good sign if they did –  often the highest praise for narrative non-fiction is ‘reads like a thriller’ or ‘a page turner I couldn’t put down’)
• Have you done enough research on the subject? How unique is your research? Is there more you could find out about the events of your subject from archival documents, contemporary diaries, or by interviewing characters or their families? 
• How can I prove that I am qualified to write this book? If you’re not an investigative journalist, historian, or professional writer by trade, how can you reassure the publisher and reader that you are qualified to write this book? It’s important to show how much research you’ve done on the subject and to use sample writing to show off the quality of your writing. 

Remember, this genre is all about research and storytelling. Your book should be well-researched and should account for real-life events as accurately as possible. It should be written in an engaging way that holds the reader’s attention. You should aim to tell your story in as dramatic and interesting a way as you can, while staying faithful to the truth. 

Bestselling books to read 

If you’re thinking about writing a narrative non-fiction book it’s a good idea to read some of the top-selling books in this area to help you get a flavour of the writing style and reading experience. Reading some of these books should also give you helpful insights into different ways you can hook your reader in, how to approach the narrative arc and structure of your book, and give you ideas on pacing. 

Agent Sonya by Ben MacIntyre 

This is the remarkable story of the greatest female spy in history, from one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife, and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise British domesticity. But far from an obedient homemaker, Sonya Burton was a dedicated communist, a decorated colonel, and a veteran spy who risked her life to keep the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race.

In Agent Sonya , Ben Macintyre has created a page-turning work of non-fiction that has you hooked at every twist and turn, so much so that it almost reads like a thriller . Macintyre writes with the diligence and accuracy of the very best of journalists but the flair of a master storyteller .

He adds colour and incredible details to deeply researched reporting. Every sentence is rich with description and imagination but never at the cost of the truth. He is also wonderfully skilled at leading the reader down a rabbit hole about some seemingly insignificant event or detail that one might usually lose the thread of, only to weave it back into the main action with sophistication.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou 

This is the inside story of the breathtaking rise and jaw-dropping collapse of Theranos, a multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, that promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Holmes was a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup, ‘unicorn,’ was backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and valued at more than $9 billion. There was just one problem: the technology didn’t work.

In Bad Blood , Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of one of the most shocking tales of corporate fraud ever, a story of ambition and hubris in Silicon Valley. Carreyrou unveils the many dark secrets of Theranos with nuanced and compelling reporting , presenting the scientific, human, legal, and social sides of the story with remarkable skill.

Carreyrou’s brilliance is in his ability to explain complicated science that would ordinarily be difficult to follow in a remarkably digestible way. Not many writers can make a very specialist subject feel universal and accessible to all , but Carrreyou achieves it. The level of research he has undertaken to get to the truth of this deeply secretive company is unparalleled. He also paints fantastic character portraits and has a way of building intrigue around people shrouded in mystery that leaves you on the edge of your seat.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold 

An astonishing feat of historical detective work, The Five is the story of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane, five women who never met but are famous for the same thing – being victims of Jack the Ripper. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that ‘the Ripper’ preyed on prostitutes.

Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has also prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, telling the untold stories of five women who wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, breathed ink-dust from printing presses, and escaped people-traffickers. This is an incredible new perspective on a well-known story.

What is so exciting and different about this book is that Rubenhold casts an entirely new light on a well-known story and in doing so makes a political statement about the treatment of women both then and now. The author’s rage is palpable in the writing. It’s a blistering counter-narrative that has all the ingredients of a fantastic narrative non-fiction book – original and surprising research , gripping plot, clever structure , rich description  – but also a strong political and social undercurrent that acts as the beating heart of the book.

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe 

This is the gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium and Oxycontin, by a prize-winning American investigative journalist. 

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many-storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis-an an international epidemic of drug addiction that has killed nearly half a million people.

What makes Empire of Pain so exceptional is how Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents jaw-dropping events over a long period of time to tell the story of a dynasty but also: a parable of 21st-century greed. It is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, that draws conclusions no one had ever thought to make before and takes you from dodgy GP practices to the misfortunate hangouts of opioid victims, to glamorous fund-raisers to the inner echelons of power in modern-day America. 

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly 

Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, Hidden Figures is the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program—and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.

It tells the story of a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these “colored computers,” as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines and pencil and paper to support America’s fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Drawing on the oral histories, scores of personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America’s greatest adventure and NASA’s groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women.

One of the things you can’t help but admire in this book is how Shetterly manages to weave so many moving parts and themes to tell a cohesive story – moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures tells a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation but also manages to recount the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world.

Like Rubenhold, Shatterly is revisiting a moment or event in history – but rather than humanizing victims whose identities and stories were overlooked, Shatterly gives power back to the women who were actively written out of history books and who deserve credit for their enormous achievements, and in doing so helps to reframe how women are currently perceived in science and technology.

Note: All purchase links in this post are affiliate links through BookShop.org, and Novlr may earn a small commission – every purchase supports independent bookstores.

If you’re interested in writing non-fiction and want to get your work in front of a publisher, visit our  free non-fiction book proposal course   written by Lydia Yadi, Senior Commission Editor for Non-Fiction at Penguin Random House.

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The Creative Penn

Writing, self-publishing, book marketing, making a living with your writing

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 🙂

August 9, 2024 at 8:26 am

Very interesting and insightful. Makes me want to go around, look for stories, inteview people and start writing an article or a book.

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The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays

Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium

• Linguistics

Authors like , , , , , and epitomise this way of writing.

I'm not a Writer , but I write to explore other things – anthropology, weird cultural quirks in the web development community, interaction design, and the rising field of " tools for thought ". These things are all factual and grounded in reality, but have interesting stories twisted around them. Ones I'm trying to tell in my little notes and essays.

Perhaps you're the same kind of non- Writer writer. The playful amateur kind who uses it to explore and communicate ideas, rather than making the medium part of your identity. But even amateurs want to be good. I certainly want to get good.

Knowing what you like is half the battle in liking what you create. In that spirit, I collect narrative non-fiction essays that I think are exceptional. They're worth looking at closely – their opening moves, sentence structure, turns of phrase, and narrative arcs.

The only sensible way to improve your writing is by echoing the work of other writers. Good artists copy and great artists steal quotes from Picasso.

You may want to start your own collection of lovely essays like this. There will certainly be some Real Writers who find my list trite and full of basic, mainstream twaddle. It probably is. I've done plenty of self-acceptance work and I'm okay with it.

Twaddle aside, the essays below are worth your attention.

by Paul Ford

Paul Ford explains code in 38,000 words and somehow makes it all accessible, technically accurate, narratively compelling, and most of all, culturally insightful and humanistic.

I have unreasonable feelings about this essay. It is, to me, perfect. Few essays take the interactive medium of the web seriously, and this one takes the cake. There is a small blue cube character, logic diagrams, live code snippets to run, GIFs, tangential footnotes, and a certificate of completion at the end.

by David Foster Wallace – Published under the title 'Shipping Out'

Forgive me for being a David Foster Wallace admirer. The guy had issues, but this account of his 7-day trip on a luxury cruiseliner expresses an inner monologue that is clarifying, rare and often side-splittingly hilarious.

He taught me it is 100% okay to write an entire side-novel in your footnotes if you need to.

by David Graeber

Graeber explores play and work from an anthropological perspective. He's a master of moving between the specific and the general. Between academic theory and personal storytelling. He's always ready with armfuls of evidence and citations but doesn't drown you in them.

by Malcolm Gladwell

This piece uses a typical Gladwellian style. He takes a fairly dull question – Why had ketchup stayed the same, while mustard comes in dozens of varieties? – and presents the case in a way that makes it reasonably intriguing. He's great at starting with specific characters, times and places to draw you in. There are always rich scenes, details, personal profiles, and a grand narrative tying it all together.

Some people find the classic New Yorker essay format overdone, but it relies on storytelling techniques that consistently work.

by Mark Slouka

by Joan Didion

1 Backlinks

On opening essays, conference talks, and jam jars.

“Our present-tense human experience is like a living tree growing by a river. The current in the river is the passing of time. Our individual pasts are like the same tree fallen in the river, drowned now, and disintegrating with surprising speed. We resist time’s flow with our memories and language, with our stories ”   

~ David James Duncan

Jul 10, 2024

Featuring the writing of Sean Enfield, Robert W. Fieseler, Melody Glenn, Hannibal Hamlin, Jenna Hammerich, Timothy J. Hillegonds, Sarah Minor, Ali Saperstein.

River Teeth is a biannual journal combining the best of creative nonfiction, including narrative reportage, essays, and memoir, with critical essays that explore the impact of nonfiction narrative on the lives of its writers, subjects, and readers.

Beautiful Things

River Teeth ‘s weekly online magazine, Beautiful Things, features micro-essays (of 250 words or fewer) that look closely to find beauty and meaning in the everyday.

River Teeth is on

River Teeth Revisited

Here at River Teeth, we love essays. We love reading essays, choosing essays, and writing essays. We love essays that feel urgent, essays we can’t put down, and essays that don’t turn away when the truth gets difficult or slippery.

We also like to think about how the best essays work— and that’s why we have created the online feature: River Teeth Revisited .

Share your essays with River Teeth

River Teeth accepts submissions of creative nonfiction through Submittable from September 1 to December 1 and January 1 to April 1.

The Book Prize

River Teeth ‘s editors conduct a yearly national contest for a book-length manuscript of literary nonfiction in English. All manuscripts are screened by the co-editors of River Teeth.  The contest winner receives $1,000 and publication by The University of New Mexico Press.

Marriage, Death Row

By Jodie English The line goes dead two minutes into the month’s only phone call, his face flat against concrete, ankles raw from shackle sores, his hand cuffed to a metal plate high on the wall, fingers swollen, saying hello, hello as if she could hear him, as if the struck match of her voice was still there...

 Sep 23, 2024 |  2 min read

Mother Prayer

By Sanobar Sabah Passionate red and sensuous saffron were my mother’s favorite colors. Inspired by the Bollywood queen of yesteryear, Rekha, my mother’s wardrobe was laden with glamorous chiffon sarees and handmade embroidered blouses from all over India...

 Sep 16, 2024 |  2 min read

A Child’s Work

By Carol Moody She’s elbow-deep inside the dryer, searching for that old Halloween costume—as though everything depends on wearing a frayed polyester police officer jacket. Her parents have separated for good, and the three-year-old little brother wants to play “hopspital”—announcing himself as “Dr. Butter"...

 Sep 9, 2024 |  2 min read

Latest News …

Brooke Champagne Joins the River Teeth Team

Hello from the confluence of River Teeth here at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, on the kind of gorgeous fall day that makes a person want to leash up the dog and head out into the fields and woods–but not so fast because submissions opened on September 1st and we’ve got a lot of reading to do. Happily, we love to read. 

 Sep 11, 2024  8 min read

Beth Nguyen Announced As River Teeth’s 2024 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize Judge

by Ethan Rice "We are thrilled to announce the final judge for the 2024 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Beth Nguyen is an author and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing..."

 May 2, 2024  2 min read

Meet River Teeth’s Spring 2024 Interns

Hello! We are excited to shine light on some of the creative minds and passionate spirits that have been working with us this past spring semester: our interns! From painting the beautiful rocks you might’ve seen at AWP to writing captions for Instagram posts to moving book reviews from our old website to our new website - our interns have been with us through it all and we couldn’t have done it without them. Each intern brings a unique blend of enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication to our team. They had so much fun interviewing each other for this article, so we hope you enjoy getting a glimpse of them as much as we have loved working with them.

 Apr 26, 2024  12 min read

50 Great Narrative Nonfiction Books

Expand your TBR with these 50 great narrative nonfiction books, from essays to creative nonfiction to literary journalism.

Kim Ukura is a book lover, recovering journalist, library advocate, cat mom, and lover of a good gin cocktail. In addition to co-hosting Book Riot’s nonfiction podcast, For Real, and co-editing Book Riot’s nonfiction newsletter, True Story, Kim spends her days working in communications at a county library system in the Twin Cities area. Kim has a BA in English and journalism from a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, and a master’s in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When not getting to bed before 10 p.m., Kim loves to read nonfiction, do needlework projects, drink tea, and watch the Great British Baking Show. Instagram: @kimthedork Twitter: @kimthedork

View All posts by Kim Ukura

This list is a collection of 50 great narrative nonfiction books, although it easily could have been much longer. A few caveats: I tried not to include straight autobiographies or memoirs because I wanted to keep this list focused on books that highlight strong research/reporting along with narrative voice. I also included just one book from any given author. If you’ve already read the book I’ve listed, most of these writers have an extensive backlist to explore. And, of course, this list of narrative nonfiction isn’t nearly comprehensive—that’d be basically impossible.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee—An in-depth biography of cancer.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande—Medicine, life, and choices about how we die.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot—History of the most prolific cells in science.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly—African American female mathematicians and the race to space.

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach—The strange science used to get astronauts ready for space.

Leaving Orbit by Margaret Lazarus Dean—“Notes from the last days of American spaceflight”

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee—Four books collected into one giant work on the geological history of North America.

The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson—“How fishermen and scientists are unraveling the mysteries of our favorite crustacean.”

Global Issues

Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid—A portrait of Iraqi citizens “weathering the unexpected impact of America’s invasion and occupation.”

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo—Life in a Mumbai slum.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder—One doctor’s work bringing medical care to those most in need.

Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim—A reporter goes inside a school for the sons of North Korea’s elite.

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick—North Korean defectors tell what it’s like inside the country.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi—Reading American classics in revolutionary Iran.

The Secretary by Kim Ghattas—An inside account of Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State by a traveling journalist.

The Lonely War by Nazila Fathi—An Iranian journalist’s account of the struggle for reform in modern Iran.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson—The great migration of African Americans to northern cities and the impact it has today.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand—World War II tale of survival after being shot down over the Pacific Ocean.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown—Olympic rowing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (this book is amazing!).

Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott—Stories from America’s favorite Victorian-era brothel and the culture war it inspired.

Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman—Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland race around the world in 1889.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson—America’s ambassador to Germany, and his headstrong daughter, in the lead-up to World War II.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann—A conspiracy against the Osage tribe and the birth of the FBI.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell—The Puritans and their strange journey to found America

Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel—A look at the relationship between Galileo and his oldest daughter, a nun named Maria Celeste.

The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport—A look at the fall of the Romanov family, focusing specifically on the lives of Nicholas and Alexandra’s four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker—An account of Paris’s first police chief and a poisonous murder epidemic in the late 1600s.

Narrative Nonfiction Classics

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote—The original true crime nonfiction novel.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean—Obsession and rare flowers in the Florida Everglades.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer—The story of a harrowing, deadly climb on Mount Everest.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc—“Love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx.”

Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger—The big business of high school football in Texas.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion—Essays on a feminist journalist’s experiences in California in the 1960s.

Newjack by Ted Conover—A journalist goes undercover as a prison officer in Sing Sing to better understand the penal system.

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi—Historical true crime on Italy’s Jack the Ripper, who killed between 1968 and 1985.

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis—A sports biography on one man’s journey to the NFL and the evolution of the game.

Social Issues

Does Jesus Really Love Me?  by Jeffrey Chu—A gay Christian looks for God in America.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman—Cultural barriers in life and medicine (so good!).

Evicted by Matthew Desmond—Poverty, profits, and the eviction crisis in America.

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh—A sociologist spends a decade in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes to better understand the lives of the urban poor.

Homicide by David Simon—A look at one year spent with homicide detectives in Baltimore.

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge—A journalist puts a human face on gun violence by writing about the 10 teenagers killed by guns on a single day in America.

Methland by Nick Reding—A look at the impact of meth on small towns, based on four years of reporting in an agricultural town in Iowa.

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts—The first and perhaps most comprehensive look at the AIDS crisis.

Contemporary Reporting

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett—“The true story of a thief, a detective, and a world of literary obsession.”

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer—A group of librarians banded together to pull of a literary heist to save precious Arabic texts from Al Qaeda.

Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn—“The true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea and of the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists and fools, including the author, who went in search of them.”

Columbine by Dave Cullen—The definitive account of the Columbine shooting.

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink—Life and death and medical malpractice at a hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger—Learning about loyalty and belonging from tribal societies.

If you enjoyed this list and want more narrative nonfiction content, check out our True Story newsletter. Sign up here!

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Narrative Nonfiction Books: Definition and Examples

By Hannah Yang

Table of Contents

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 Yang

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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Last updated on Feb 20, 2023

Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery". 

About Rebecca van Laer

Rebecca van Laer is a writer, editor, and the author of two books, including the novella How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work has been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, Breadcrumbs, and TriQuarterly.

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

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

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

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

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

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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Is creative nonfiction looking a little bit clearer now? You can try your hand at the genre , or head to the next post in this guide and discover online classes where you can hone your skills at creative writing.

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Alyssa Teaches

an Upper Elementary Blog

Teaching Narrative Nonfiction

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.

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?

This post contains affiliate links; I earn a small commission from products purchased through these links.

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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?

I subscribed and didn’t get the narrative nonfiction anchor chart.

Hi there! Did you confirm your subscription in the initial email? Let me know if you still don’t see it!

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!

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Creative Nonfiction: An Overview

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The Creative Nonfiction (CNF) genre can be rather elusive. It is focused on story, meaning it has a narrative plot with an inciting moment, rising action, climax and denoument, just like fiction. However, nonfiction only works if the story is based in truth, an accurate retelling of the author’s life experiences. The pieces can vary greatly in length, just as fiction can; anything from a book-length autobiography to a 500-word food blog post can fall within the genre.

Additionally, the genre borrows some aspects, in terms of voice, from poetry; poets generally look for truth and write about the realities they see. While there are many exceptions to this, such as the persona poem, the nonfiction genre depends on the writer’s ability to render their voice in a realistic fashion, just as poetry so often does. Writer Richard Terrill, in comparing the two forms, writes that the voice in creative nonfiction aims “to engage the empathy” of the reader; that, much like a poet, the writer uses “personal candor” to draw the reader in.

Creative Nonfiction encompasses many different forms of prose. As an emerging form, CNF is closely entwined with fiction. Many fiction writers make the cross-over to nonfiction occasionally, if only to write essays on the craft of fiction. This can be done fairly easily, since the ability to write good prose—beautiful description, realistic characters, musical sentences—is required in both genres.

So what, then, makes the literary nonfiction genre unique?

The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF writer will certainly use imagination and craft to relay what has happened and tell a story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that “truth is stranger than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories, stories of loss—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life .

A writer of Creative Nonfiction should always be on the lookout for material that can yield an essay; the world at-large is their subject matter. Additionally, because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on research to render events as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research their subjects (especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be scrupulous in their attention to detail. Their work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the umbrella of CNF as well. Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly, such research uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of the writer” (93). In addition to traditional research methods, such as interviewing subjects or conducting database searches, he relays Kate Bernheimer’s claim that “A lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is read, can become material for the writer.

The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection. A person could have lived the most interesting life and had experiences completely unique to them, but without context—without reflection on how this life of experiences affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer hasn’t learned anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown because a large part of nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for ways of living: that the writer can survive a difficult or strange experience and learn from it. Sean Ironman writes that while “[r]eflection, or the second ‘I,’ is taught in every nonfiction course” (43), writers often find it incredibly hard to actually include reflection in their work. He expresses his frustration that “Students are stuck on the idea—an idea that’s not entirely wrong—that readers need to think” (43), that reflecting in their work would over-explain the ideas to the reader. Not so. Instead, reflection offers “the crucial scene of the writer writing the memoir” (44), of the present-day writer who is looking back on and retelling the past. In a moment of reflection, the author steps out of the story to show a different kind of scene, in which they are sitting at their computer or with their notebook in some quiet place, looking at where they are now, versus where they were then; thinking critically about what they’ve learned. This should ideally happen in small moments, maybe single sentences, interspersed throughout the piece. Without reflection, you have a collection of scenes open for interpretation—though they might add up to nothing.

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The New Outliers: How Creative Nonfiction Became a Legitimate, Serious Genre

Lee gutkind on the birth and surprising history of a different type of narrative form.

Many of my students, and even some younger colleagues, think—assume—that creative nonfiction is just part of the literary ecosystem; it’s always been around, like fiction or poetry. In many ways, of course, they are right: the kind of writing that is now considered to be under the creative nonfiction umbrella has a long and rich history. Many, of course, look to Michel de Montaigne as the father of the modern essay, but, to my mind, the more authentic roots of creative nonfiction are in the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe’s historical narratives, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, and Samuel Johnson’s essays built a foundation for later writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

That is to say, even if the line between fact and fiction was perhaps a little fuzzy in the early days, it’s not hard to find rich nonfiction narratives that predate the use of the word “nonfiction” (1867, according to the Oxford English Dictionary ) and were around long before the first recorded use of the phrase “creative nonfiction” (1943, according to research William Bradley did for Creative Nonfiction some years ago).

But in a lot of important ways, creative nonfiction is still very new, at least as a form of literature with its own identity. Unfortunately, it took a long time—longer than it should have, if you ask me—for the genre to be acknowledged in that ecosystem. And, of course, you’ll still encounter people who are unfamiliar with the term or want to make that dumb joke, “Creative nonfiction: isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Be that as it may, there’s no real doubt at this point that creative nonfiction is a serious genre, a real thing. You probably won’t find a “creative nonfiction” bookshelf at your local bookstore, and maybe it’s not on the menu at Amazon the way “fiction” is, but nonfiction narratives are everywhere. Newspapers, formerly the realm of straight journalism, with its inverted-pyramid, who-what-where-when-why requirements, have welcomed personal essays not only on their op-ed pages but in many different sections. Memoir, labeled a “craze” in the 1990s, is a mainstay of the publishing industry. Twenty or so years ago, almost no one was publishing essay collections, and even the word “essay” was the kiss of death if you wanted a trade publisher to consider your work, but now essay collections are routinely on best-seller lists. And, increasingly, even non-narrative creative nonfiction like lyric essays and hybrid forms have gained legitimacy and commercial viability.

So, you might ask, what happened? How did we get to this era of acceptance and legitimacy? The genre’s success, I believe, a gradual process over almost a half-century, emerged in many important ways from an unlikely and dominant source. I am not at all sure I would be writing this today, or that you would be reading this in an almost thirty-year-old magazine devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction, if not for the academy, and specifically departments of English.

Now, if you’ve been following my writing over the past thirty or so years, you may be surprised to hear me say this. After all, I’ve written a great deal about the power struggles that went on in the early 1970s, when I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and to a lesser degree at other universities and trying to expand the curriculum to include what was then called, mostly because of Tom Wolfe, “new journalism.”

I find that many of my students today aren’t very familiar with the New Journalists—Wolfe, Gay Talese, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Barbara Goldsmith, and Jane Kramer, among others—and it’s probably also true that some of the work from that time hasn’t aged terribly well. Sure, sometimes some of these writers went a little overboard, like Tom Wolfe, for example, interrupting his sentences with varoom-varooms and other stylistic flourishes. He was being playful and maybe a bit silly and arrogant, or it might seem so today, but he was also trying to loosen things up, to not be as predictable and sometimes downright boring as journalists then could be, and in that regard, he was quite successful.

You have to realize that the New Journalists were doing some very exciting stuff, seemingly groundbreaking. They were writing in scenes, recreating dialogue, manipulating timelines, and including themselves—their voices and ideas—in the stories they were writing. Stuff we pretty much take for granted now, but back then, with journalists especially hampered and handcuffed by rules and guidelines, so liberating.

Remember this was all happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rule breaking, change, and defying the establishment were in the air everywhere, and the idea of the “new” in journalism captured the tone and spirit of the times. But I am not just talking here about journalism. Other writers, recognized for their literary achievements, were also taking chances, pushing boundaries. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , his “nonfiction novel,” stunned and obsessed the literary world when it was published first in the New Yorker in 1965 and then, the following year, as a book. In 1969, another novelist, Norman Mailer, was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters for The Armies of the Night , about the Washington, DC, peace demonstrations . Mailer was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1980 for his intense, thousand-plus-page deep-dive into murder, obsession, and punishment, The Executioner’s Song , which became a centerpiece of a national conversation about the death penalty. Mailer’s award for his self-described “true-life novel” was for fiction, but all three books, if published today, would be considered creative nonfiction.

I couldn’t see why this kind of work—which was as exciting to students as it was to me—didn’t belong in the classroom. In an English department. Not just as a one-off work, to be taught once in a while, but as part of the curriculum. Why wasn’t there a category for writing that wasn’t poetry or fiction or essay or journalism but that could bring the various literary and journalistic techniques used in all of those forms together into one unique work of art and craft? Why didn’t this amalgam of literary and journalistic richness belong . . . somewhere?

Thinking back, I didn’t really belong either. I had pushed my way into the English department first as a part-time lecturer and then as tenure-track faculty by campaigning for this new or different way of writing nonfiction. And to be honest, I think I began to succeed, to make inroads, because, for one thing, most faculty at the time did not want to teach this stuff—nonfiction—especially if it was called or related to journalism. It’s also true I was a bit of an interloper—I was a published author in what might be described as a more commercial vein (books about motorcycles, baseball, backwoods America, targeted to general audiences), a rarity in English departments. And worse, I was a lowly BA. No advanced degrees.

But in many ways, I was also fortunate; during this time, with student protests confronting the old guard on campuses, I got by as a token of change, tolerated but not yet completely accepted. I felt like a misbehaving adolescent, rough around the edges and not yet ready to grow up, learn the rules, and pay my dues. I didn’t even know how to pay my dues. There were few options. Creative-writing programs, ubiquitous today, were rare and in many ways faced resistance in English departments.

Of course, part of the resistance to creative-writing courses, generally, was just the kind of turf defending that goes on in any academic department, where resources can be unfortunately scarce. Giving a tenure slot to a novelist or a poet, after all, can mean losing a tenure slot and resources for research and travel for a literature PhD.

But I think the resistance to creative nonfiction as being part of creative writing went even deeper and had something to do with how we define literature. I remember one particularly contentious debate back in the early 1970s, after one of my students had made a presentation arguing for an entire course devoted to new journalism. (I’d been incorporating pieces into my classes, but there was no entire course devoted to the stuff.) One of the English professors slammed a pile of books—classics—down on the table; his argument, I think, was that my student should have to prove he’d read those works before he was remotely qualified to weigh in on the curriculum. Anyway, perhaps predictably, it turned into a heated debate about which particular works were classics, a debate the department chair ended by observing, “After all, gentlemen, we are interested in literature here—not writing .”

(Were there women in the room? Of course there were.)

Now, what was going on here? Why didn’t these professors think of this writing as literary? And I mean not just contemporary works like In Cold Blood but the work that came before it, too—the nonfiction written by H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain, James Baldwin and Jack London, not to forget the father of English journalism, Daniel Defoe. And what about pioneering narrative journalists like Nellie Bly and Ida Tarbell? I guess I have a few theories.

First, the lack of a unifying name—what to call it—was definitely a complicating factor. “New journalism” wasn’t great because (the argument went, in English departments, at least) journalism was a trade, not a literary pursuit. There were other names floated—“the literature of fact,” “literary nonfiction,” “belles lettres” (which is what the National Endowment for the Arts was using at that time). But using the word “literary” to describe contemporary writing, meaning that a person would have to say “I write literary nonfiction” … well, that felt sort of presumptuous, didn’t it? “Creative” sort of had the same problem; who was to say what that meant, and it also sort of implied that other kinds of writing weren’t creative, and that didn’t feel good, especially to the scholars. And to the journalists, “creative” sounded like it meant you were making stuff up. As for “belles lettres,” well . . . it just sounded pretentious.

Even more than that, I think there was something about the writing itself—and the writers—that felt threatening. Not just because of the rule breaking. So much of this new nonfiction was about real people and events and was often quite revelatory. We were really a no-holds-barred crew. Wherever there was a story we were there, boots on the ground, bringing it to life—and often revealing the darkest side of things, of war, of poverty, of inherent societal racism. And revealing our own foibles and flaws along the way. And it wasn’t just Mailer and Capote and Baldwin who were writing this stuff, but real people capturing their own lives and struggles in dramatic detail. The “new” whatever you wanted to call it was truly an awakening.

Students, undergrads mostly, at first, especially recognized and were energized by the appeal. Suddenly the doors were open to other options far more interesting than the inverted pyramid or the five-paragraph essay, and considering these new possibilities for what to write about and, more important, how to write their stories was liberating, challenging, and downright enjoyable. Student interest and subsequent demand invariably led to more courses, and more courses led to more writers and scholars who would agree to teaching what had once seemed so controversial.

I should also point out that as the dialogue and debate about nonfiction began to grow, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was traveling widely. I got invitations from not just universities, but also book clubs and local conferences, from Wyoming to Birmingham to Boston, and met not only with students but also with many of these “real” people who wanted to write. Some were professionals—doctors, teachers, scientists—but there were also firefighters, ambulance drivers, and what we then called homemakers, all with stories to write. They, too, saw the appeal of this nonfiction form that let you tell stories and incorporate your experiences along with other information and ideas and personal opinions.

These folks cared much less than the academics did about what it was called. But—after the dust had settled to a certain extent in academia; after the English department at Pitt had agreed, first, to a course called “The New Nonfiction” and then, nearly two decades later, to a whole master’s program concentrating on creative nonfiction writing (the first in the country, I believe), which later became an MFA program; and after the NEA, in 1989 or so, also adopted the term “creative nonfiction,” a tipping point for sure—well, it mattered tremendously to those folks that it had a name, this kind of writing they wanted to do. It brought a validation to their work, to know that there was a place or a category where their work belonged. The writing itself wasn’t necessarily anything new—people had been doing it forever, if you knew where to look for it—but now people were paying attention to it, and they had something to call it.

And then, a little later, when this journal (now, this magazine) started publishing, in 1993, that added another form of legitimacy. And, in fact, work from many of those writers I met during those years on the road was published in the first few issues of Creative Nonfiction . In the early issues of the journal, we attracted all kinds of writers who were, perhaps, tired of being locked in or limited. We published journalists and essayists and poets, all of them exploring and reaching.

All of this did not happen overnight. English departments did not jump right in and embrace nonfiction; it was, as I have said, a much more gradual and often reluctant acceptance, but clearly an inevitable—and eventually gracious—one, maybe mostly for practical reasons. Creative writing programs were becoming quite profitable, especially at a time when literature and liberal arts majors were waning. Adding nonfiction brought in an entirely new breed of students, not just literary types, but those interested in science and economics or those students who were just interested in finding a job after graduation. Learning to write true stories in a compelling way could only enhance future opportunities.

It may well be that English departments resisted change for various reasons at the beginning, but they also opened the doors and provided a place—a destination—for all of us creative nonfictionists to come together, dialogue and share our work, and earn a certain legitimacy that had been denied to us at the very beginning. I had no idea at the time I started teaching that creative nonfiction would become such a mainstay, not just in the academy, but as a force and influence in literature and in publishing. That was not my intent, and I was certainly not the only “warrior” who took up the fight. But I don’t think this fight could have taken place anywhere else but in the academy, where intellectual discourse and opportunities for new ideas can so richly flourish and be recognized. I have no idea whether an outsider like me, beating the bushes for support of a genre or an idea that did not seem to exist, could survive in an English department or anywhere else in the academy today; the atmosphere, the politics, the financial pressures, the tone of the times is so very different.

Even then, it was very much a minor miracle that I, uncredentialled and tainted, as some thought, by commercialism, was accorded such an opportunity. And that all of my campaigning and annoying persistence were tolerated. It would have been easy to eliminate me. But as much of an interloper as I was, I was rarely shut down; I could always speak my mind. And even though many of my colleagues were pretty damn unhappy about the new journalism and, later, creative nonfiction, they eventually came to recognize the popularity and potential of this new genre and, I think, to respect and appreciate the dedication and excitement displayed by our nonfiction students.

As the program grew and other universities followed suit, we outliers not only began to fit in, but also began to thrive. We added depth and substance not just to writing programs, but to the entire department. And as our students published, won awards, became popular teachers in their own right, we added more than a little bit of prestige.

What happened at Pitt and later at other English departments isn’t so very different than what happened as our genre evolved. Fifty years ago, we were hardly a blip on the radar, an add-on or an afterthought, a necessary annoyance at best. Today, we are not just a part of the literary ecosystem, we are its most active and impactful contributors—leaders and change makers and motivators where we once did not belong.

__________________________________

This essay originally appeared in Issue #76 of  Creative Nonfiction under the title “ I’d Like to Thank the Academy .”

Lee Gutkind

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• How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved September 29, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/narrative-essay/

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What is creative nonfiction? Despite its slightly enigmatic name, no literary genre has grown quite as quickly as creative nonfiction in recent decades. Literary nonfiction is now well-established as a powerful means of storytelling, and bookstores now reserve large amounts of space for nonfiction, when it often used to occupy a single bookshelf.

Like any literary genre, creative nonfiction has a long history; also like other genres, defining contemporary CNF for the modern writer can be nuanced. If you’re interested in writing true-to-life stories but you’re not sure where to begin, let’s start by dissecting the creative nonfiction genre and what it means to write a modern literary essay.

What Creative Nonfiction Is

Creative nonfiction employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story.

How do we define creative nonfiction? What makes it “creative,” as opposed to just “factual writing”? These are great questions to ask when entering the genre, and they require answers which could become literary essays themselves.

In short, creative nonfiction (CNF) is a form of storytelling that employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don’t just share pithy anecdotes, they use craft and technique to situate the reader into their own personal lives. Fictional elements, such as character development and narrative arcs, are employed to create a cohesive story, but so are poetic elements like conceit and juxtaposition.

The CNF genre is wildly experimental, and contemporary nonfiction writers are pushing the bounds of literature by finding new ways to tell their stories. While a CNF writer might retell a personal narrative, they might also focus their gaze on history, politics, or they might use creative writing elements to write an expository essay. There are very few limits to what creative nonfiction can be, which is what makes defining the genre so difficult—but writing it so exciting.

Different Forms of Creative Nonfiction

From the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benvenuto Cellini, to the more experimental styles of modern writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, creative nonfiction has a long history and takes a wide variety of forms. Common iterations of the creative nonfiction genre include the following:

Also known as biography or autobiography, the memoir form is probably the most recognizable form of creative nonfiction. Memoirs are collections of memories, either surrounding a single narrative thread or multiple interrelated ideas. The memoir is usually published as a book or extended piece of fiction, and many memoirs take years to write and perfect. Memoirs often take on a similar writing style as the personal essay does, though it must be personable and interesting enough to encourage the reader through the entire book.

Personal Essay

Personal essays are stories about personal experiences told using literary techniques.

When someone hears the word “essay,” they instinctively think about those five paragraph book essays everyone wrote in high school. In creative nonfiction, the personal essay is much more vibrant and dynamic. Personal essays are stories about personal experiences, and while some personal essays can be standalone stories about a single event, many essays braid true stories with extended metaphors and other narratives.

Personal essays are often intimate, emotionally charged spaces. Consider the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” which means “to try” or “attempt.” The personal essay is more than just an autobiographical narrative—it’s an attempt to tell your own history with literary techniques.

Lyric Essay

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, but is much more experimental in form.

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, with one key distinction: lyric essays are much more experimental in form. Poetry and creative nonfiction merge in the lyric essay, challenging the conventional prose format of paragraphs and linear sentences.

The lyric essay stands out for its unique writing style and sentence structure. Consider these lines from “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.

What we get is language driven by emotion, choosing an internal logic rather than a universally accepted one.

Lyric essays are amazing spaces to break barriers in language. For example, the lyricist might write a few paragraphs about their story, then examine a key emotion in the form of a villanelle or a ghazal . They might decide to write their entire essay in a string of couplets or a series of sonnets, then interrupt those stanzas with moments of insight or analysis. In the lyric essay, language dictates form. The successful lyricist lets the words arrange themselves in whatever format best tells the story, allowing for experimental new forms of storytelling.

Literary Journalism

Much more ambiguously defined is the idea of literary journalism. The idea is simple: report on real life events using literary conventions and styles. But how do you do this effectively, in a way that the audience pays attention and takes the story seriously?

You can best find examples of literary journalism in more “prestigious” news journals, such as The New Yorker , The Atlantic , Salon , and occasionally The New York Times . Think pieces about real world events, as well as expository journalism, might use braiding and extended metaphors to make readers feel more connected to the story. Other forms of nonfiction, such as the academic essay or more technical writing, might also fall under literary journalism, provided those pieces still use the elements of creative nonfiction.

Consider this recently published article from The Atlantic : The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar by Lawrence Weschler. It employs a style that’s breezy yet personable—including its opening line.

So I first heard about Shimmel Zohar from Gravity Goldberg—yeah, I know, but she insists it’s her real name (explaining that her father was a physicist)—who is the director of public programs and visitor experience at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Common Elements and Techniques

What separates a general news update from a well-written piece of literary journalism? What’s the difference between essay writing in high school and the personal essay? When nonfiction writers put out creative work, they are most successful when they utilize the following elements.

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 elements. How you structure your story can have a huge impact on how the reader perceives the work, as well as the insights you draw from the story itself.

Consider the first lines of the story “ To the Miami University Payroll Lady ” by Frenci Nguyen:

You might not remember me, but I’m the dark-haired, Texas-born, Asian-American graduate student who visited the Payroll Office the other day to complete direct deposit and tax forms.

Because the story is written in second person, with the reader experiencing the story as the payroll lady, the story’s narration feels much more personal and important, forcing the reader to evaluate their own personal biases and beliefs.

Observation

Telling the story involves more than just simple plot elements, it also involves situating the reader in the key details. Setting the scene requires attention to all five senses, and interpersonal dialogue is much more effective when the narrator observes changes in vocal pitch, certain facial expressions, and movements in body language. Essentially, let the reader experience the tiny details – we access each other best through minutiae.

The story “ In Transit ” by Erica Plouffe Lazure is a perfect example of storytelling through observation. Every detail of this flash piece is carefully noted to tell a story without direct action, using observations about group behavior to find hope in a crisis. We get observation when the narrator notes the following:

Here at the St. Thomas airport in mid-March, we feel the urgency of the transition, the awareness of how we position our bodies, where we place our luggage, how we consider for the first time the numbers of people whose belongings are placed on the same steel table, the same conveyor belt, the same glowing radioactive scan, whose IDs are touched by the same gloved hand[.]

What’s especially powerful about this story is that it is written in a single sentence, allowing the reader to be just as overwhelmed by observation and context as the narrator is.

We’ve used this word a lot, but what is braiding? Braiding is a technique most often used in creative nonfiction where the writer intertwines multiple narratives, or “threads.” Not all essays use braiding, but the longer a story is, the more it benefits the writer to intertwine their story with an extended metaphor or another idea to draw insight from.

“ The Crush ” by Zsofia McMullin demonstrates braiding wonderfully. Some paragraphs are written in first person, while others are written in second person.

The following example from “The Crush” demonstrates braiding:

Your hair is still wet when you slip into the booth across from me and throw your wallet and glasses and phone on the table, and I marvel at how everything about you is streamlined, compact, organized. I am always overflowing — flesh and wants and a purse stuffed with snacks and toy soldiers and tissues.

The author threads these narratives together by having both people interact in a diner, yet the reader still perceives a distance between the two threads because of the separation of “I” and “you” pronouns. When these threads meet, briefly, we know they will never meet again.

Speaking of insight, creative nonfiction writers must draw novel conclusions from the stories they write. When the narrator pauses in the story to delve into their emotions, explain complex ideas, or draw strength and meaning from tough situations, they’re finding insight in the essay.

Often, creative writers experience insight as they write it, drawing conclusions they hadn’t yet considered as they tell their story, which makes creative nonfiction much more genuine and raw.

The story “ Me Llamo Theresa ” by Theresa Okokun does a fantastic job of finding insight. The story is about the history of our own names and the generations that stand before them, and as the writer explores her disconnect with her own name, she recognizes a similar disconnect in her mother, as well as the need to connect with her name because of her father.

The narrator offers insight when she remarks:

I began to experience a particular type of identity crisis that so many immigrants and children of immigrants go through — where we are called one name at school or at work, but another name at home, and in our hearts.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: the 5 R’s

CNF pioneer Lee Gutkind developed a very system called the “5 R’s” of creative nonfiction writing. Together, the 5 R’s form a general framework for any creative writing project. They are:

• Write about r eal life: Creative nonfiction tackles real people, events, and places—things that actually happened or are happening.
• Conduct extensive r esearch: Learn as much as you can about your subject matter, to deepen and enrich your ability to relay the subject matter. (Are you writing about your tenth birthday? What were the newspaper headlines that day?)
• (W) r ite a narrative: Use storytelling elements originally from fiction, such as Freytag’s Pyramid , to structure your CNF piece’s narrative as a story with literary impact rather than just a recounting.
• Include personal r eflection: Share your unique voice and perspective on the narrative you are retelling.
• Learn by r eading: The best way to learn to write creative nonfiction well is to read it being written well. Read as much CNF as you can, and observe closely how the author’s choices impact you as a reader.

You can read more about the 5 R’s in this helpful summary article .

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Give it a Try!

Whatever form you choose, whatever story you tell, and whatever techniques you write with, the more important aspect of creative nonfiction is this: be honest. That may seem redundant, but often, writers mistakenly create narratives that aren’t true, or they use details and symbols that didn’t exist in the story. Trust us – real life is best read when it’s honest, and readers can tell when details in the story feel fabricated or inflated. Write with honesty, and the right words will follow!

Ready to start writing your creative nonfiction piece? If you need extra guidance or want to write alongside our community, take a look at the upcoming nonfiction classes at Writers.com. Now, go and write the next bestselling memoir!

Sean Glatch

Thank you so much for including these samples from Hippocampus Magazine essays/contributors; it was so wonderful to see these pieces reflected on from the craft perspective! – Donna from Hippocampus

The Real Person!

Absolutely, Donna! I’m a longtime fan of Hippocampus and am always astounded by the writing you publish. We’re always happy to showcase stunning work 🙂

I like how it is written about him”…When he’s not writing, which is often, he thinks he should be writing.”

[…] Source: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/a-complete-guide-to-writing-creative-nonfiction#5-creative-nonfiction-writing-promptshttps://writers.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction […]

So impressive

Thank you. I’ve been researching a number of figures from the 1800’s and have come across a large number of ‘biographies’ of figures. These include quoted conversations which I knew to be figments of the author and yet some works are lauded as ‘histories’.

excellent guidelines inspiring me to write CNF thank you

[…] writing a “Spring” scene today. I’ve mentioned before that my memoir is a work of creative non-fiction. Since much of the story takes place 2-5 decades ago, I don’t remember a lot of the […]

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Story Craft

September 20, 2024, 5 shared lessons from some masters of narrative nonfiction, a journalist starting her career turned to the older generation of "new journalists" to learn the skills and ethics of narrative.

By Grace Kenyon

Tagged with

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this piece is co-posted with our friends at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

During my senior year of college, as I made the decision to apply to journalism master’s programs, I took a creative nonfiction class with Drew Bratcher . He introduced us to one piece of writing that has stayed with me ever since, “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” written by Michael Paterniti and originally published in 2000 in Esquire.

This piece is about a 1998 plane crash that left no survivors. It is a bizarre, horrifying yet beautiful account of the effort to identify victims and of the grief of the victims’ family members. It is bookmarked with what is essentially a prose poem about the night of the crash.

I can’t do it justice here, but it taught me that journalism can be beautiful. Perhaps more importantly, journalism about tragedy and pain can be beautiful. So turning from music to writing journalism never seemed like too big a leap.

Nonfiction built with characters and scenes

Narrative journalism, or what some call literary journalism, is not new. It was popularized by the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, but it has continued in various iterations across mediums and publications. Literary journalism has, at times, raised ethical questions. The nature of narrative means that journalists often need to become intimately familiar with their sources and the personal, stylized approach to writing can sometimes seem less objective.

However, I chose to research narrative journalism because I wanted to understand what it does well. Why do journalists gravitate towards this type of journalism? Many of the answers are embedded in the very way they go about their work. As part of my master’s study at the Missouri School of Journalism, I reached out to several. They talked about crafting nonfiction narratives by thinking about characters and scenes. They talked about how lucky they feel to be able to tell compelling stories in a way that helps the reader understand issues at a deeper and more personal level. They spoke to me about doing the kind of work that made me fall in love with journalism in the first place.

Here are some key things I learned:

• Your writing is only as good as your material.

If you want to write a scene, you need enough details to make the reader feel like they are there with you. If you want to write a narrative, or if you want to write a news story that engages the reader, the only details you will be able to choose from are the details you collect while reporting. Collect as much information as you can, way more than you think you need.

Collecting the maximum amount of material can happen differently depending on the story and the type of information available. It can mean spending extra time with your sources, having a follow-up conversation (or two, or three) or finding ways to observe them in action. It can mean asking people to walk you through past experiences, recreating scenes or even visiting places that are important to the story. In some cases, there might be videos or recordings of events. Gather it all.

• Pay attention to (your) emotions.

The traditional view is of the reporter as an impartial observer. Although we must be vigilant about how our personal beliefs might affect our perceptions, there also is also a place for being attuned to our emotions and tapping them for better reporting. Thomas Lake , a senior writer at CNN, told me about a story he wrote about a man who had been the longest wrongfully-imprisoned person in the country. Richard Phillips had endured his 46-year imprisonment by writing poetry and painting. Lake told me about a moment where he stood in Phillips’ apartment and was struck by one of his paintings: “If I’m out there, doing an interview or watching something happen, and I really feel something, I get that tingly feeling or suddenly feel a little choked up. That’s a pretty good indicator that if I do it right, the reader might feel something similar.”

• What is the story really about?

This is a question journalists ask every day, whether because they need to get to the core of an issue or figure out what is most newsworthy to put in the lede. Many of the narrative journalists I talked to, however, went deeper. For them, the question was used to identify universal experiences that readers will relate to, even if they haven’t experienced the exact situation recounted in a story.

Lane DeGregory , longtime enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing , says she is always looking for universal themes in her stories: “Even if (readers) can’t relate to the person I’m writing about, they can relate to revenge or love, or hope or heartbreak.” These themes give stories staying power beyond the immediate news cycle and also give journalists a way to focus their writing.

• Collapse the distance between reader and source.

Narratives are often characterized by rich details. Readers are immersed in the world they are reading about, including the thoughts and feelings of the people in the story. Obtaining these details for journalistic narratives requires long interviews and detailed questions, but the journalists I spoke with felt the time and effort is worthwhile.

“You bring the reader inside their thought process, so that the distance between the reader and the subject collapses and for a brief instance, the reader is sort of there with the subject as they’re doing, what they’re doing, thinking about their thinking,” said Jenna Russell , a New York Times journalist who also wrote for the Boston Globe for many years. “To me, that’s where you create empathy, when that distance collapses.”

• Give of yourself, too.

All of the journalists I spoke with, each in their own way, emphasized the importance of spending time — a lot of time — with sources. Some spoke about the privilege it is to be allowed into people’s lives, often becoming intimately familiar with difficult circumstances and situations. Robert Sanchez , a staff writer for the Denver-based 5280 Magazine, thinks it’s unfair to conduct an interview where he asks all the questions and his sources carry all of the vulnerability of sharing their lives. Instead, he approaches sources with his notebook in his back pocket, only taking it out once he has made a personal connection. He also shares parts of his life, as appropriate, and prefers to approach reporting as conversations with characters as opposed to interviews with sources .

“When I sit down and have a conversation with a character , I’m trying to understand the full humanity of that human being, right?” Sanchez said. “I’m trying to learn the absolute most about that human being, and the only way I’m going to be able to do that is to also be able to talk about myself.”

Putting the lessons to work

The other day, I was covering an event and I hung around to interview the guest performer. The event organizer pulled me aside and thanked me for staying so long — not just dropping in and out. Covering a small community for a small newspaper, I am lucky to be thanked often for my work. But when I am, this is my favorite thing to be thanked for. Journalists have hectic schedules, but the thing we have in short supply is also the best thing we have to give: time.

I’m reminded of the hours I spent as a music major in a windowless practice room, working through the minuscule details at a pace that made any improvement in my playing indetectable in the moment. Musicians spend hours doing the same thing over and over until they emerge onto the stage with a polished product.

If any journalist aspires to achieve a sort of art with their work — and I certainly do — we need to work with equal persistence and attention to detail. In many ways, our craft is spending time with people. I hope and pray that I continue to learn to do that well.

Grace Kenyon covers Lake Placid for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in upstate New York. She interviewed eight narrative journalists as part of her research at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she received her master’s degree.