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Rebecca
Allen
Special to the Digest
A narrative is a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It engages the reader's mind and heart. It shows actors moving across its stage, revealing their characters through their actions and their speech. At its heart, a narrative contains a mystery or a question—something that compels the reader to keep reading and find out what happens. Newspaper narratives are also entirely true and factual in every detail.
- Tags:
- Narrative Arc,
- Writing
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Roy Peter
Clark
Creative Nonfiction
Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, film makers and painters. Artists, after all, build things that imitate the world. So do nonfiction writers.
- Tags:
- Ethics,
- Quoting Sources,
- Writing
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Roy Peter
Clark
Special to the Digest
We call lots of things "stories" in American journalism, but very few of them are true narrative storytelling. Most journalistic accounts are reports, whose primary purpose is to pass along information to readers. Reports require certain writing strategies to help readers figure things out: the telling quote, the revealing statistic, the deep explanation, a piece of jargon translated for the general reader. Readers use the information in their roles as citizens, consumers, residents and parents.
- Tags:
- Finding the Narrator,
- Writing,
- Quoting Sources
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Jack
Hart
Second Takes Newsletter
We've heard it to the point of numbness: "Get people into your stories. Tell it in human terms."
Who's to argue? Yup, human beings are more interesting than paper creeping through a bureaucracy. Yup, real human experiences bring abstractions to life. Yup, readers are endlessly fascinated with the peccadilloes of their fellows.
So we all agree. So what? We still don't have many people in our stories.
- Tags:
- Capturing Character,
- Quoting Sources,
- Writing
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Michael
Pollan
Special to the Digest
Book by book, project by project, it's usually hard to say who you are as a writer or what your long-term subject is. But with hindsight you start to see threads. By my third book I realized that I was always gravitating back to nature.
- Tags:
- Finding the Story,
- Writing,
- Research