GUIDE TO WRITING

NARRATIVE NONFICTION
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE PRACTICALITIES

4 KNOWING WHERE TO BEGIN WHEN

WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Danelle Morton

6 NONFICTION BY WOMEN IS NOT TAKEN

SERIOUSLY ENOUGH
Sarah Menkedick

8 WHAT MILLION-DOLLAR ENTREPRENEURS

TAUGHT ME ABOUT FREELANCE WRITING
Elaine Pofeldt

10 AN ESSAY PRIMER FOR ADULTS:

SIX ESSAY TYPES YOU SHOULD KNOW
Lorraine Berry

WRITING HISTORY

14 TWO IMPORTANT TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR

NONFICTION WRITING
Robert Kurson

16 WHY I WRITE GRAPHIC NONFICTION:

TEACHING HISTORY THROUGH COMICS
Jonathan Hennessey

21 APPROACHING A LOADED TOPIC AS A

NONFICTION WRITER
Gilbert King

23 MARK TWAIN’S NONFICTION Richard Russo

WRITING SOMEONE ELSE’S HISTORY

27 DAVID BOWIE’S BIOGRAPHER ON

HOW TO COVER AN ICON
Dylan Jones

30 BECOMING A BIOGRAPHER: HOW

TO TELL SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE STORY
James Atlas

32 MAKING HISTORY: CHARACTERS IN

NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Gary Krist

34 MISSING PIECES: HOW TO TELL SOMEONE

ELSE’S STORY WHEN MEMORY FAILS
Michael D. Lemonick

2 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION

THE
PRACTICALITIES

GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 3

KNOWING WHERE TO
BEGIN WHEN WRITING
NARRATIVE NONFICTION
by Danelle Morton
Many people have trouble
knowing where to start their
stories. The book I wrote with
my writing partner Cary Ten-
nis, Finishing School, is about
finishing your writing project, but
to get across that finish line, we
often start by coaching people on
how to begin.
In my experience as a journal-
ist and author, a good begin-
ning contains two elements that
draw the reader in: the physical
description that immerses the
reader in a world of your creation,
but also a moment of high emo-
tion, of loss or gain, of the sense
of something ending or the begin-
ning of a quest for an answer.
I wrote a magazine story about
eight young people who died in
a squat fire. I started inside the
burning building and followed
the investigator as he discovered
4 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
more about the dead. In a real
estate story, I described the
LIST THE
property: where it was and MOMENTS IN
what made it so valuable that it
was worth fighting about. I’m
YOUR STORY
working now on a story about THAT HAVE
a man who went on a crime
spree who was undetected for
THE BIGGEST
thirty years. I am starting at the EMOTIONAL
moment of his arrest, the modest
end of his wild life, and looking
AND
backward from there to recon- DRAMATIC
struct his crimes.
IMPACT.
As you sit at your desk trying to
figure out where to start, list
the moments in your story that
have the biggest emotional and
dramatic impact. Look for
incidents that transform the life of
the central character, or a turning
point that alters the course of the
story, and describe the world that
surrounds that event.
Gathering all these moments,
what screenwriters call the
beats of the story, can help you
determine where to begin. When
you review the list, you can decide
the action that inspired the quest,
or defined the question that the
main character must answer.
A magazine profile often begins
with the subject in the midst of
taking action in a crisis, or in a
familiar setting where he or she
can reflect on what has brought
them to this point. A beginning like
this allows the writer to describe
the atmosphere, the elements
that make this moment dramatic,
and establish the subject’s point
of view. These same criteria that perfect beginning that creates
apply when you are writing about the world of your story and sets
yourself. the emotional tone for what is to
come.
After you have made your list
of the beats of the story, play
with them to understand which Danelle Morton is the coauthor of
seems to be the most comfortable Finishing School.
place to start. If you think some-
thing is the ending, try it as the
beginning and tell the story in
flashback to see if that frees you
up as a writer. With an open and
playful approach, you become
the master of your story, not one
who feels hopeless and confused
by this big question. Experiment L E A R N M OR E 
with the sequence until you find
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 5
NONFICTION BY
WOMEN IS NOT TAKEN
SERIOUSLY ENOUGH
by Sarah Menkedick
At the Ohioana Book Festival in
Columbus, Ohio, I was treated to
the rare experience of watching
readers interact with my book. I
sat at a small table in a conference
room at the Sheraton and observed
the audience of Midwestern book
nerds and bored, leisure-seeking
families meander by. I began to
detect patterns: Almost all men,
and certain women, would glance
down at my book’s vibrant yellow-
and-orange cover and then, upon
noticing the word “motherhood,”
immediately move on, sometimes
offering a conciliatory smile.
IT FEELS DICEY TO STATE
“I WANT TO WRITE FOR WOMEN”
AS AN EXPLICIT GOAL.
6 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
This reaction to the topic of moth-
erhood is nothing new; I’ve come
to learn following the publication
of my first book that motherhood
is not seen as sufficiently serious,
sufficiently heady for literature.
I’ve tried to tackle this myth in var-
ious ways, but I’ve also learned to
shrug it off, and to love the women
who come up to me after read-
ings and say with gratitude, “I’ve
never read anything like this.” But
at the Ohioana Festival I also had
to reckon for the first time, in the
flesh, with the fact that men see
my book as utterly irrelevant. On
the one hand, of course men don’t
want to read about motherhood,
seeing as it’s a bodily experience
they’ll never have. On the other
hand, many are thrilled to read
about trekking into the Alaskan
wild or running ultramarathons
or engaging in heroic combat mis-
sions, even though these are bodily
experiences they will never have.
The bigger issue, I recognize
now as I work on my second
book, is not so much motherhood
itself, but the nature and tone
of the writing. The Great Male
Literary Work that is accepted and
venerated as serious has much
in common with the lectures
students hear in universities, the
voiceovers on documentaries, the
speeches of politicians: Even if the
rhetoric is different, more finely
tuned, or outright rebellious, the
male authority is there. It bleeds
through the page like a dye. More
and more, as I did research for my
second book, reading bestselling
works by male authors on mental
illness, I found myself recognizing
and then rejecting this authority.
This is not to say I don’t appreciate
these books, their complex ideas,
and their authors, but rather that
I started to feel a bit excluded by
them; I longed for a type of voice,
a vision, that wasn’t in them and
that in fact I could hardly even
articulate. An alchemical mix of
Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Ra-
chel Carson, Leslie Jamison, Sallie
Tisdale. A voice unafraid to speak
to women and also to claim great
universal truths.
It feels dicey to state “I want to
write for women” as an explicit
goal, potentially self-sabotaging
on both artistic and political lev-
els, and yet at the same time there’s
something revolutionary about
it, a new maxim. Women are so and their greats — might engen-
often punished for talking about der new, groundbreaking pos-
or focusing on the “feminine,” or sibilities, not just for women
even suggesting that women are writers but for everyone tired of the
different from men. Women old paradigms.
writers are amply rewarded for
dealing with “serious” (read:
male) themes in serious, or Sarah Menkedick is the author of
appropriately sardonic, tones. It Homing Instincts.
may be antithetical to the goal
of the equal treatment of male
and female writers to state that
I’m aiming for a female audi-
ence, but then again, it may be
revolutionary: It may free women
up to write in ways that aren’t
defined by that Great Male Voice.
Ways that speak to particular LEARN MORE 
fears, struggles, desires, experi-
ences that they have had as women,
among women, in the world. Part
of my goal with this book is to open
myself up to the possibility that
writing for women — as opposed
to the established male elite
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 7
WHAT MILLION-DOLLAR
ENTREPRENEURS
TAUGHT ME ABOUT
FREELANCE WRITING
by Elaine Pofeldt
When I first went into business
for myself as a freelance writer
in the fall of 2007, I didn’t really
know what I was getting into.
At the time, I had four-year-old
twins and a one-year old. My main
motivation for starting a business
was to create more freedom to
control my schedule than even a
very flexible full-time career as a
magazine editor would allow.
Winning that freedom, however,
meant taking on some new chal-
lenges. I needed to replace the
income and benefits from my
full-time corporate job at Fortune
Small Business magazine right
away. When you have a family and
live near New York City, the cost of
living is pretty unforgiving.
Not long after I went into business,
the economy started to tank, and
the global financial meltdown took
8 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
hold. With many of my customers
paying me late, my husband and I
found ourselves in extended de-
bates about decisions like whether
we could afford to buy the giant
economy size pack of diapers. It
was scary at times but eventually
the economy started healing and
my business grew.
In October 2017, I passed the
ten-year mark in business. And
although I think of myself as a
writer first and a business owner
second, I learned some valuable
lessons about entrepreneurship
along the way.
One is about the importance
of cash flow. We live in a soci-
ety where bills tend to be due
monthly. You can’t just pay them
when you have money coming in.
That makes the erratic payment
cycles most freelancers live with
a little inconvenient. After my
first year in business, I realized
my life would be a lot easier with
some income that came in steadily
every month and took on my first
retainer client, then another.
I also realized I should specialize.
There are a lot of things that inter-
est me in life but I focus my writ-
ing business on a few key areas,
such as entrepreneurship, careers,
and healthcare. It’s easier to come
up with fresh ideas for clients if
you know a subject well.
Within that focus, I broadened
the type of writing I did, branch-
ing out from journalism to ghost-
writing essays and books, as well.
I really enjoy working with my
ghostwriting clients, who are very
smart, successful people who lack
the time to write. Even better,
the work generally comes from
clients outside of the media
industry, which gives me some
insulation from the financial
turbulence there.
It was ultimately my journal-
ism work that led me to write
The Million-Dollar, One-Person
Business. The book looks at the
strategies used by entrepreneurs
in solo businesses and part-
nerships to get to $1 million in
revenue.
more time to do other things they
love.
As a freelance writer, I’ve realized
there’s a lot I can learn from entre-
preneurs who think like this. Last
year, in a push to outsource, I hired
a bookkeeper to tackle work that
was bogging me down. I recently
began working with my wonderful
coach, Doug Wick, who is helping
me to run a better business and
“scale up” my thinking.

The U.S. Census Bureau found
that 35,584 “nonemployer firms”—
those with no employees except
the owners — hit $1 million to
$2.49 million a year in sales. When
I first came across these statistics
as a reporter, I was very curious
about what the owners were ac-
tually doing. I found there were
people hitting this level of revenue
in businesses as varied as selling
organic honey, marketing day-
books on Amazon, training peo-
ple how to cook healthier food
in video courses, doing business
consulting, and investing in small
residential rental properties, to
name a few.
Writing will always be what truly
inspires me at work. However,
running my freelance business
more efficiently frees time I’d
rather protect for things that mat-
ter to me — like spending an extra
hour in the sun on a warm spring
day with my kids.
Elaine Pofeldt is the author of
The Million-Dollar, One-Person
Business.

What was different about them

from the average business was
how they think. Instead of
getting lost in the minutia that LEARN MORE 
eat up many solo business
owners’ time, they look for ways
to extend what one person can do
in the most efficient way possible.
They do this by hiring contrac-
tors, outsourcing, and automating
routine work. That gives them

GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 9

AN ESSAY PRIMER FOR
ADULTS: SIX ESSAY TYPES
YOU SHOULD KNOW
by Lorraine Berry
Perhaps you hear the word
“essay” and you flash back
to your school days. Most
Americans learned something
called the “five-paragraph es-
say” in school. It comprises an
introduction, a conclusion, and
three paragraphs in-between of
exposition and analysis. Essay-
writing assignments were dry as
dust, with the emphasis seem-
ingly on making certain that the
points laid out in the introduction
had been proven by the time of the
conclusion, which was a means of
reminding the reader of what they
had just read.
But the essay is one of the most
protean of our ways of writing,
and, in literature, the essay can
be a container for some of our
greatest writers’ greatest work.
Most literary scholars credit
10 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Frenchman Michel de Montaigne
(1533-1592) with the invention of
the essai, the name he gave to the
pieces he wrote. “Essay” is drawn
from the French verb essayer (to
try, to attempt), and referred to the
short pieces that Montaigne wrote
on various subjects. Rather than
declare himself such an expert
that he could write treatises or
books on certain subjects, he wrote
these shorter pieces in which he
attempted to create meaning.
Since then, essays have become
ways for exploring any number of
subjects. In our current age, many
people associate the essay with
the “personal essay,” which are
pieces that expose some aspect of
self, whether a confessional about
a fault or a story about a relation-
ship. In the past year or so, a de-
bate among writers has centered
on whether the personal essay
has reached its end point. That is,
have people shared every last as-
pect of their lives? Jia Tolentino’s
essay drew a number of responses.
I found an essay written by Vir-
ginia Woolf in 1905 where she
complained that too many people
were writing essays for the mul-
titude of magazines of her day.
This need for content by today’s
plethora of websites has made
writers feel that they are expected
to reveal secrets to slake the
demand.
But, just as readers have had
literary book choices ranging
from “penny dreadfuls” to Nobel
Prize-winning prose, so too are
there a range of levels of literary
essays out there. And literary es-
says bear as much resemblance
to the five-paragraph essay as
simple arithmetic bears to calcu-
lus. But literary essays have some
recognizable structures, which
describe their framework but not
necessarily their content. I would
argue that just about anything can
become content for an essay, and
because of that, writers have un-
limited writing opportunities still
available. Here are some of those
structures along with some
examples of essays. All together,
these types of essays are known as
“lyric” essays.
THE LINEAR NARRATIVE ESSAY
This essay structure is self-
explanatory. The story is told in
a straightforward narrative, and
is usually told in chronological
order. Sometimes, the essay con-
tains flashbacks, but that doesn’t
disrupt the forward motion of the
narrative. One essay that was of
interest around the time of the
2017 “Great American Eclipse”
was Annie Dillard’s “Total
Eclipse,” which is published in
her collection, Teaching a Stone to
Talk.
THE TRIPTYCH ESSAY
Just as a triptych painting features
three panels, so too does a trip-
tych essay feature three separate
sections that are not continuous
with each other, but that may shed
light on the other two parts. See
“Triptych” by Samina Najmi,
which was published in World
Literature Today.
THE COLLAGE ESSAY
This type of essay features bits
and pieces — vignettes — of prose
that are collected together to form
an essay. They often resemble
poetry, as the writing for a collage
essay tends to be lyrical. One of
my favorite collage essays is Sher-
man Alexie’s “Captivity,” which
appeared in First Indian on the
Moon.
THE EXPERIMENTAL ESSAY
These essays seem to buck all
known structures. One of the most
unusual of these essays is “The
Body” by Jenny Boully. The pages
of the essay are blank — except for
the footnotes, which are extensive.
It turns out that the footnotes are
the entire essay. “The Body” is
characterized as a lyrical essay.
The last two forms of essay that
I wish to discuss are the “her-
mit crab” essay and the “braided”
essay, and here I’d like to offer
more exploration of two particular
essays that serve as examples of
each.
THE HERMIT CRAB ESSAY
In 1972, John McPhee wrote “The
Search for Marvin Gardens,” and it
was published in the New Yorker.
He used the original game of
“Monopoly” — the original
American version that was based
on the streets of Atlantic City, New
Jersey — and he used going around
the board as the frame for the es-
say, making this a perfect example
of a “hermit crab” essay.
In the essay, McPhee plays a game
of Monopoly, but he also recounts
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
walking the streets of Atlantic
City. The game takes place at an
international singles champion-
ship of Monopoly play, where it is
possible for two skilled players to
play an entire game in fewer than
fifteen minutes.
McPhee intersperses the his-
tory of America in the details, but
also of how Atlantic City was the
planned “invention” as a railroad
terminus that would be a “bathing
village.” In preliminary sketches,
the village was labeled an “Atlan-
tic city,” and the name stuck. In
the early 1930s, Charles B. Darrow
took those early sketches of the
city and based a game board on it.
So, as McPhee lands on each
property or group of properties,
he tells the story of each part
of town. When McPhee’s piece
lands him in jail, he uses it as an
opportunity to visit the city jail,
which in 1972 seemed to be chock-
full of drug offenders. He also
documents the “facade” aspect
shared by resort towns. Once you
travel off the beach-side main drag,
you are in “the bulk of the city, and
it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne
in 1944. Nothing has actually
exploded. It is not bomb damage. It
is deep and complex decay. Roofs
are off. Bricks are scattered in the
street.”
He walks these streets and sees
long lines of people standing in
line at the unemployment office.
Newspapers today tell us that we
have an “opioid crisis,” but a multi-
11
plicity of signs urging addicts to get
help are present in Atlantic City in
1973 (perhaps another reminder
that something doesn’t become a
crisis until middle class white kids
in the suburbs are dying).
McPhee walks through these
neighborhoods looking for the
one Monopoly property he can’t
find: Marvin Gardens. No one with
whom he speaks, those living in
their bombed-out neighborhoods,
has heard of it. It turns out that
Marvin Gardens, “the ultimate out
wash of Monopoly, is a citadel and
sanctuary of the middle class.” It
is a suburb within a suburb, what
we might now refer to as a “gated
community,” separated from the
rest of Atlantic City and patrolled
with a heavy police presence to
keep the rest of the city out.
If you’ve been paying attention
while reading, you realize that
McPhee has used his hermit
crab essay to write a critique of
capitalism.
tine she experiences as
she cares for her aged,
incontinent dog, the reader is
braced in anticipation that the dog
will die.
But Beard plaits in three additional
stories: the scurry of squirrels that
have taken over a room upstairs
in her house after finding entry
through a loose board; the sepa-
ration from her husband who has
left her but who calls Beard a num-
ber of times to ask her whether he
has done the right thing in leaving
her; and the men she works with
in the physics department, their
disparate personalities, and her
friendship with them.
In the third paragraph of the
essay, she provides a description
of the night sky that contains clues
of what is to come: “In the porch-
light the trees shiver, the squirrels
turn over in their sleep. The Milky
Way is a long smear on the sky,
like something erased on a chalk-
board.”
of matter is still sneaks up on
readers, and that knowledge
devastates.
I think it a shame that the essay’s
versatility is hidden from most
of us throughout our primary
education. It’s only in special-
ized writing classes that the
kaleidoscopic nature of the essay
is taught, and after years of being
told that the five-paragraph model
is the only acceptable way to write
nonfiction, some students find it
hard to work with all those choices.
But if you’ve ignored collections of
essays because you can’t imagine
that they contain interesting work,
now is the time to give them an
essai.
Lorraine Berry writes for
The Guardian, LitHub, and other
outlets.

THE BRAIDED ESSAY The fourth state of matter is a

“The Fourth State of Matter,” by
Jo Ann Beard is, I must confess,
my favorite essay. It, too, was
originally published in the New
Yorker in 1996. Beard offers a
braided essay — in which she tells
a number of stories that are all re-
lated to the time she spent on the
editorial staff of a physics journal
at the University of Iowa. Over
the course of the essay, which
begins with Beard’s poignant
description of the daily rou-
physics term that refers to plasma,
“the plasmapause, a place of
equilibrium, where the forces of
the Earth meet the forces of the
LEARN MORE 
sun,” and Beard demonstrates how
her marriage and the dying dog
are metaphorical representations
of plasma. The reader will also be
reminded of plasma’s more im-
mediate meaning. Even though
Beard lays down clues like bread-
crumbs throughout the essay, the
revelation of what the fourth state

12 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION

WRITING HISTORY

GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 13

TWO IMPORTANT TIPS
TO IMPROVE YOUR
NONFICTION WRITING
by Robert Kurson
Ever since writing my first book,
Shadow Divers, I’ve used two
strange tricks to improve my
writing.
First, I almost never pay others
to transcribe the interviews I do
during my research, but rather do
them myself, painstakingly. It’s
not that I’m cheap (I’ll buy you a
beer if I meet you), it’s that typing
out the interview slows me down
and allows me to hear everything
a subject is saying. And that’s
important. While conducting
interviews, part of my focus is on
formulating follow-up questions,
or shifting gears based on the
subject’s answer, or processing
new information, any of which
might divert my attention and
cause me to miss something
important. At home, transcrib-
ing slowly by myself, I can truly
hear what my interview subject is
14 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
telling me, and I can stop the tape rhythms — especially its rhythms.
at any moment to contemplate This causes me to catch mistakes I
the information. Often, I hear might otherwise drift past.
things for the first time when I’m
For years, these tricks served
hearing them for the second time.
me reliably. But they were never
It’s a wonderful way to learn.
better utilized than when I set out
The second trick is that I always to write my new nonfiction book,
read aloud what I’ve written.
Doing so makes me sound strange
to passersby (including my family, OFTEN, I HEAR
and don’t get me started on what
this looks like in a coffee shop),
THINGS FOR
but it confers a similar benefit to THE FIRST TIME
transcribing my own interviews —
it slows me down. This is critical
WHEN I’M
to catching bad writing. If I read HEARING
to myself silently, I find that my
brain sometimes skips over words,
THEM FOR THE
likely because I’m already familiar SECOND TIME.
with what I wrote. By forcing my-
self to read aloud, I cannot jump
over words or phrases, and I’m
compelled to hear how the entirety
of the writing sounds, including its
Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey
of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who
Made Man’s First Journey to the
Moon.
The story of Apollo 8 has it all: an
existential enemy (the Soviets);
a race against time; epic dan-
ger; close calls; a stunning and
unexpected broadcast heard by
nearly one-third of the world’s
population; a single photograph,
Earthrise, that remains perhaps
the most famous ever taken; and an
ending powerful enough to unite a
divided nation at the end of one of
its most terrible years. It’s even a
Christmas story.
From the moment I began
transcribing my interviews with
the three astronauts who flew
on Apollo 8 — Frank Borman,
Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders — I
struggled to sit still. Each of them
was a first-rate storyteller with
excellent recall and an instinct
for the tiny details that make a
story great. Often, as I played back
their descriptions, I found myself
thinking, “I’m listening to the
first three humans who ever left
Earth, and the first three humans
who ever arrived at the Moon, de-
scribe in their own words what it
was like to travel to another world,
to a place mankind has dreamed
of reaching for millennia.” Had I
not been forced to type out every
word they told me, I’m certain I
would have missed the nuance and
pauses and second thoughts that
occur between stories, between
memories. Being an ordinary typ-
ist made these stories extraordi-
nary.
The same happened after I began
writing. Reading paragraphs and
chapters aloud helped me make
certain I didn’t rush my descrip-
tions in order to keep pace with
the action, a danger when lifting
off in the first Saturn V rocket with
160 million horsepower beneath
you, as you travel aboard a space-
craft moving at 25,000 miles per
hour, while you’re seeing Earth
for the first time as a whole planet,
when you hear what these astro-
nauts chose to say to the world on
Christmas Eve (a decision NASA
left entirely to them), as you dis-
cover how this journey changed
America, and the world.
In the end, my two tricks helped
me more than ever. Now, if you’ll
excuse me, I must read this essay
aloud, and I don’t care who in this
coffee shop looks at me weird for
doing it.
Robert Kurson is the author of
Rocket Men.
LEARN MORE 
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 15
WHY I WRITE GRAPHIC
NONFICTION: TEACHING
HISTORY THROUGH COMICS
by Jonathan Hennessey
No one told me I had signed up to
compete in a “bake-off.”
It was the early 2000s. Sid
Jacobson, a gentleman who way
back when had co-created “Richie
Rich” and “Casper the Friendly
Ghost” for Harvey Comics (a
kiddie imprint at Marvel) was,
like many longtime New York-
ers, still processing what his city
had been made to live through on
September 11th, 2001.
Jacobson’s impulse was to respond
to the atrocity professionally. That
is, he felt driven to employ his
creativity — specifically his gift for
creating comics — to help make
sense of the attack.
He came around to the idea he
should adapt the findings of the
National Commission on Terror-
ist Attacks in the United States,
The 9/11 Commission Report, into
16 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
a work of graphic nonfiction.
Jacobson, like me, can’t draw his
way out of a wet paper bag. But
he had long collaborated with
illustrator Ernie Colón. Together,
they made sure their innovative
work would silence any umbrage-
taking stokers of outrage who
would inevitably pop up to cry
foul about their adaptation. For
nothing could be more predictable
than that sanctimonious droves
would raise hell about anyone
daring to apply the juvenile form
of comics to one of America’s
darkest days.
But Jacobson knew what knee-
jerk critics of the comics medium
did not. That is, comics have the
ability to elevate reading to a
manifold, multi-layered experi-
ence; and to communicate with
visuals that which is ungainly, or
even impossible, to express with
words alone.
So in adapting The 9/11
Commission Report, Jacobson
and Colón adhered closely to
these two peculiar advantages the
form offers.
The opening sequence of their re-
sulting The 9/11 Report, published
in 2006 by Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux imprint Hill and Wang, is
an arrestingly elegant, side-by-
side timeline of the four hijacked
planes. The timeline depicts how
long after takeoff each of the flight
crews was violently overpowered;
how and to where the aircraft
changed course; and where each
was harrowingly made to crash.
This finely achieved use of words
and pictures in combination is a
perfect example of what I mean
when I call the comics reading ex-
perience multi-layered. In a comic
or graphic novel, our very reading
faculties become twain.
When looking over The 9/11 Re-
port’s timeline pages, we process
the embedded caption text boxes
in the same forward sequence
as we do in a standard book. But
still, the eye-brain connection
jumps ahead and forms a parallel
sense of how the page as a whole is
designed — and what information
that design imparts.
By illustrating a schematic of the
hijacked planes, Jacobson and
Colón’s comics timeline em-
phasizes the simultaneity of
the events on 9/11. That very
simultaneity was challenging for
the public mind to apprehend, and
the media to report, on the day in
question.
JACOBSON AND COLÓN’S USE
OF COLOR AND EMPTY SPACE
CUES OUR OWN MEMORIES
OF SHOCK, GRIEF, AND
DISBELIEF.
Comics’ ability to bring the reader
both specific and general informa-
tion at the same time is somewhat
akin to watching a split-screen
television. But because com-
ics images are static, and sound
and motion are merely implied,
the experience transmits a more
comfortable, more cognitively
attainable rate of information.
Unlike a split screen television, well-
designed comics are never muddling
or overpowering. (Unless, for artistic
and storytelling purposes, they are
meant to be).
Think about how a writer might
proceed with a text-only account
of the hijacked planes’ progress.
Focusing on and interpreting text
demands much of our attention.
It is not in us, really, to read more
than one word at a time. And it’s
certainly beyond the ability of
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
any human being I’ve met to delve
meaningfully into the content of
two side-by-side paragraphs at
once.
How, then, would an author
represent the simultaneity of
9/11’s hijacked planes using only
prose?
Even a table or a timeline — with a
few graphic elements like arrows
or lines or simple maps thrown in
— cannot quite rise to the occasion.
And indeed, in the print edition of
The 9/11 Commission Report, the
authors have no recourse but to
switch back and forth from detail-
ing one flight, then another. This
is not like a split screen television.
It’s like a single screen television
broadcast switching between foot-
age from multiple cameras.
So that’s one way comics, at their
best, can do what text alone can-
not. While retaining all the other
advantages of a book over other
forms of media (allowing the
reader to move at her own pace; to
put down the book and return to it
later; to more easily jump around
in chronology than one can in a
film or stage play), they can deliver
to the brain more than one “feed”
at the same time. One general, one
specific.
Then there is the matter of comics,
like other visual mediums, being
able to express feelings and ideas
that words cannot, or cannot as
effectively.
Let’s return to Jacobson and
17
Colón’s The 9/11 Report time-
line. In its faithful representation
of the events of that day, some
planes meet their fatal, murderous
impacts sooner than others. On the
comics page, this leaves stretches
of dark emptiness — stretches
of dark emptiness that flank the
continuing accounts of the flights
still airborne.
What does this device accom-
plish? For one thing, it brings in
color as an added tool with which
to express art and information.
(Text alone almost always lacks
this, of course).
The graphical void of black ink
that follows each crashed plane
chillingly represents the finality of
death, the inexplicable absence of
a further reality. One can imagine
this trope imparts a wisp of what
it might have been like to be an
air traffic controller that morning,
watching radarscope blips disap-
pear without an explanation.
Jacobson and Colón’s use of color
and empty space cues our own
memories of shock, grief, and dis-
belief. This may serve as some
slight metaphorical gateway
to what the survivors of 9/11’s
thousands of victims felt that day,
and must surely have felt ever
since.
Great prose and poetry can,
naturally, attempt such depth
of communication as well. But
exceedingly few writers, using
only text, could ever hope to cap-
18 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
ture the same emotional state with In 2006, graphic nonfiction of this
such sophisticated simplicity. type wasn’t exactly new. In the
1930s and 1940s heyday of com-
With their The 9/11 Report,
ics, editors and creators had tried
Jacobson and Colón took a
almost everything, including
somewhat impenetrable bureau-
mostly stenographical history
cratic document and made it
features, “true war,” and “true
accessible to tens of thousands
crime” stories. Joe Sacco’s
who, otherwise, would not have
incisive Palestine memoir in com-
read it at all. Their much shorter
ics had come out in 1996. And
and, by necessity, streamlined ad-
no one who’s read it can forget I
aptation didn’t recklessly slash
Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of
away at the information in the 592-
Hiroshima, A Survivor’s True
page print edition that the federal
Story, Keiji Nakazawa’s manga
government panel issued. Instead,
from the early 1970s (which, in
Jacobson and Colón respectfully
translation, reached American
distilled the information. And
shores a decade on).
they did so in such a way that,
depending on the intent of the But what most interested
reader, The 9/11 Report can either American book publishers about
stand on its own or serve as a finding The 9/11 Report? It kept rising,
aid for more granular details in the week after autumn week, on the
original document. New York Times list of paperback
I HAD STUDIED FILM AND TV
PRODUCTION AS AN
UNDERGRADUATE, AND HAD
ALSO BEEN WORKING IN
HOLLYWOOD FOR CLOSE
TO A DECADE.
nonfiction. Enterprising edi-
tors began wondering if graphic
nonfiction could work at their
imprints.
Like multitudes with a love of
storytelling, I had been writing
all my life. I had studied film and
TV production as an undergradu-
ate, and had also been working in
Hollywood for close to a decade.
(Not in any creative capacity,
unless you count directing the
extras in live action movie scenes
— or as they’re more respectfully
known in the industry, “back-
ground artists” — as “creative.”) I
was growing ever more obsessed
with the idea of telling stories
visually.
All this was bringing me back to
comics.
All the most interesting and
talented illustrators I had known
growing up in New England had
gravitated to the Rhode Island
School of Design. It was through
RISD that I finally found a
comics artist who “got” me and
whom I “got.” We were work-
ing on a dark twist on the idea of
time travel. The representation
of different historical people and
historical periods led to the idea
of adapting the United States
Constitution into a graphic novel.
This speaks to the bake-off
competition I alluded to at the top.
Hill and Wang’s success with one
public domain government docu-
ment left them highly open to
the idea of returning to the well
with another. Unlike The 9/11
Report, a Constitution graphic
adaptation stood to be a perennial.
The Constitution, after all, affects
the reading public and the body
politic even more than the findings
on international terrorism.
Neither Aaron nor I had been
published. And maybe we were a
bit naïve not to have realized at the
time that other writer-illustrator
teams (or just those damnably en-
viable writer-illustrators) were
also being invited to try their hand
at proving they could create an
adaptation of the Constitution.
Had we known how low we were
seeded in the competition, had we
any idea how low the expectations
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
were, we might have been too dis-
couraged to take a shot.
At least I was savvy enough to
dive in to the book proposal — a
handful of completed comics
pages that would serve as an “audi-
tion tape” — bent on using the pre-
viously outlined advantages of the
comics medium for all they were
worth.
The dryness of the Constitution,
its sometimes anachronistic lan-
guage (who’s up for “emoluments”
here? Anyone? “Entail”? “Marque”
and “reprisal,” perhaps?), and
abstract concepts like federal-
ism, popular sovereignty, and the
doctrine of incorporation pose
high hurdles for any would-be
adapter to jump. Inspiration was
kind to me, though.
I went ahead depicting the
Constitution’s infamous Three-
Fifths Compromise by, in book
proposal, positing slavery-era
African Americans drawn as
dehumanized walking abstrac-
tions — their bodies vertically
vivisected just past the spines.
Three-fifths of a person.
19
Similarly, Aaron and I drama-
tized another injustice by doing
something with comics that would
be, with text alone, inelegant at
best. We wanted to address the
perversion of drafting young
people into the military and send-
ing them off to battle in foreign
lands when, at home, those same
young people stood disenfran-
chised: unable to vote for the very
individuals in high federal office
who were exercising power over
both international relations and
their very bodies (an injustice cor-
rected by the 26th Amendment).
So we showed a young man head-
ing behind the curtain of a voting
booth only to find himself in Viet-
nam, staring down the barrel of a
deadly NVA rocket attack.
I’m not trying to say I possess
some singular genius for using the
comics form to elucidate nonfic-
tional subjects. (As just one exam-
ple, Nate Powell and John Lewis’s
achievement with the March se-
ries speaks for itself.) But these
samples of using the medium for
maximal visual interest and com-
municative efficacy were what
sold the book. It is my continuing
awareness of what’s possible to do
within the medium that keeps me
coming back to it.
I love how nonfiction graphic
novels can bring difficult — yet
critical — subjects to a wide
audience. And more than any-
thing, I am beside-myself-gratified
whenever a reader or critic writes
or tells me how stunned they were
20 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
that they could learn so much on a the rest simply because they are
topic with such emotional engage- dead old white men in the canon of
ment, ease, and with so fair, broad, a powerful patriarchy do so at their
and inclusive an approach. peril. The preponderance of origi-
nalist judges on state and federal
We now live in a time where in-
benches means that the laws gov-
formation, especially information
erning your most cherished and
about American history — and
taken-for-granted freedoms de-
what this nation and the broader
pend intimately on what the lives
civilization around it are supposed
of those men, the Constitution,
to stand for — is increasingly
and true American values really
weaponized. Political activists
mean.
are working every day to distort
and pervert the American history I am hopeful that readers will find
narrative in their own interests. that my latest book, Alexander
And with the latest global rise of Hamilton: The Graphic History
authoritarian states, “We the Peo- of an American Founding Father
ple” have much to lose. Thumb- (which could never exist in the
nail sketches about who the absence of the current craze),
Founding Fathers were and what works hard to match illuminating
they believed — and upon what research with the best that the
specific ideology and philosophy comics form can alone do.
the United States Constitution
was framed — can no longer cut it.
It’s wonderful that the smash Jonathan Hennessey is the author of
Broadway musical Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton.
other examples of what some have
stylized as “Founder chic” have
provoked so many Americans to
learn more about U.S. history, es-
pecially the Revolutionary War,
the Early Republic periods, and
the too-often overlooked Critical
Period in between.
But we should be careful about LEARN MORE 
reducing history to entertainment,
and allowing ourselves to inter-
act with television miniseries and
other forms of historical fiction
uncritically. And those who dis-
miss learning more about Wash-
ington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and
APPROACHING A
LOADED TOPIC AS A
NONFICTION WRITER
by Gilbert King
Like many authors whose books
have been published this year,
I’d been doing my best to meet
my deadline in the midst of the
jaw-dropping 2016 presiden-
tial contest that put Donald J.
Trump in the White House. In
the immediate aftermath of the
election, television pundits and
newspaper correspondents strug-
gled to make sense of things.
Some, like Nate Cohn of the New
York Times, mined the polling
data for answers and took to Twit-
ter to proclaim, “[Hillary] Clin-
ton suffered her biggest losses in
places where Obama was stron-
gest among white voters. It’s not a
simple racism story.”
In response to Cohn, author Ta-
Nehisi Coates tweeted, “Racism
has never been a ‘simple’ story.
Ever.”
Having spent the previous five
years of my life researching and
writing a story about racism that
is anything but simple, I found
reassurance in Coates’s words.
They stayed with me, and ulti-
mately became an epigraph of my
book, Beneath a Ruthless Sun.
In December 1957, Blanche
Bosanquet Knowles, a thirty-
one-year-old mother of three
and wife of one of the most
powerful citrus growers in Lake
County Florida, was raped in her
Okahumpka home by a man she
described to law enforcement as
a Negro “with bushy hair.” Within
hours, the racist sheriff Willis Mc-
Call had his deputies round up two
dozen young black men as sus-
pects.
But days later, something strange
happened in Lake County — some-
thing strange, that is, for Lake
County. Joe Knowles, Blanche’s
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
husband, returned home from
Tampa, where he’d been having a
tryst with a young Congressional
aide from Washington, DC, on the
night his wife was raped. Joe hast-
ily met with five of the most pow-
erful men in the county, and within
hours, McCall released the black
suspects. Arrested in their place
was a nineteen-year-old mentally
disabled youth named Jesse
Daniels, who bore one striking
difference from the other two
dozen men picked up by deputies
days earlier.
Jesse Daniels was white.
With a flourish from a judge’s pen,
Jesse Daniels was railroaded to
Chattahoochee — Florida’s most
notorious mental asylum — with-
out a trial. There, he would spend
the next fourteen years of his life.
Jesse’s claims of innocence fell
21
largely on deaf ears, with the
exception of Mabel Norris Reese,
a reporter with the Mount Dora
Topic, a weekly newspaper she
owned and ran with her husband,
Paul. Mabel puzzled over the case.
“Why Daniels?” she wrote. “Why
did a white man suffer so, when it
is the Negro that McCall hates?”
Relentlessly reporting on the case
over more than a decade, Mabel
uncovered a criminal conspiracy
by elected officials in Lake County
that would leave state and federal
investigators astonished. White
Jesse Daniels, she eventually sur-
mised, had been framed for the
rape of Blanche Knowles to spare
Joe Knowles the indignity of hav-
ing a wife who’d been “defiled” by
a black man.
The story I told in Beneath a
Ruthless Sun is further compli-
cated by events that would have
been deemed too far-fetched if
you tried to introduce them in a
work of fiction. Nevertheless, I
was led through this process by an
overabundance of primary sources
and supporting materials. Numer-
ous civil rights investigations
over the course of Sheriff Willis
McCall’s twenty-eight-year reign
in Lake County had resulted in
thousands of pages in reports
from the FBI, the Department of
Justice, the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement, and the Florida
legislature’s investigation into the
Jesse Daniels case added many
more. Everything I uncovered,
years after Mabel Norris Reese’s
22 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
death in 1995, indicated that al-
though she was not able to prove
the conspiracy to frame Jesse
Daniels in her lifetime, her repor-
torial instincts in this anything-
but-simple story of racism and
injustice had been correct.
One puzzle that arose from
the abundance of investigative
sources from this case was that the
evidence led to a shocking
revelation that I was never
able to unsnarl. Sam Wiley
Odom, just twenty years old and
struggling with his conscience, as
well as his impending execution
for a similar rape in Lake County
just weeks after the Knowles
attack, made a startling last-ditch
effort to exonerate Jesse Daniels.
Odom told investigators that he
was at the Knowles house on the
night of the rape, and that a man
had paid $5,000 to have Blanche
killed. Odom’s claims were
ultimately dismissed as a last-
minute “hoax” to save his own
life, and he was quickly sent to the
electric chair. But years later,
investigators discovered the
“missing” transcript of a detailed
statement Blanche had given to
the state attorney shortly after the
rape. In it, Blanche revealed that
her attacker had indeed told her
that he’d been paid $5,000 to kill
her.
The FBI investigated, but with
Odom long dead, agents were
unable to uncover any evi-
dence supporting his allegation
of a murder-for-hire plot. Yet
because Odom was able to recount
for authorities a nearly identical
version of the conversation
Blanche Knowles recounted in her
statement, investigators became
convinced that it was Odom, and
not Jesse Daniels, who had raped
Blanche on that cool December
night in 1957.
This revelation pointed toward a
darker, more complicated and lay-
ered story about race than anything
I could have invented. In order to
railroad Jesse Daniels, the Lake
County Sheriff’s Department had
to release Sam Wiley Odom, the
young black man they believed to
be guilty of raping an “important”
white woman. This unfathomable
act on the part of law enforcement
in Jim Crow Florida set up an un-
seemly race between the sheriff’s
department, the Ku Klux Klan, and
ultimately the State of Florida’s
electric chair, “Old Sparky,” to dis-
pose of Odom before his involve-
ment in the Knowles rape could be
revealed.
Racism has never been a ‘simple’
story. Ever.
Gilbert King is the author of
Beneath a Ruthless Sun.
LEARN MORE 
MARK TWAIN’S NONFICTION
by Richard Russo
The novelist William Dean
Howells once famously remarked
that his friend Mark Twain was
not a writer who performed
so much as a performer who
wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, this
astute observation also holds
true in Twain’s nonfiction, a
form that would seem to put less
of a premium on both invention
and performance. To read the
passages from The Innocents
Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp
Abroad, and Life on the Missis-
sippi collected in this volume is
to understand that Twain didn’t
lose much sleep over the idiosyn-
cratic demands of fiction versus
nonfiction. Both offered numer-
ous and varied opportunities to
an inspired, indeed unparalleled,
bullshitter. To be sure, many of the
set pieces that are included in the
Everyman’s Library volume of The
Complete Short Stories — “Buck
Fanshaw’s Funeral,” “The Story of So, are the events chronicled
the Old Ram”—turn up in this vol- in Roughing It — which details
ume as well. Classifying Twain’s Twain’s journey by stagecoach
work into fiction or nonfiction to the Nevada territory, his stint
there as a silver miner, and his
ONCE ASKED apprenticeship to the newspa-
per trade — true? Once asked
THAT SAME that same question about one of
QUESTION his own stories, David Sedaris
replied, “They’re true enough,”
ABOUT ONE and it’s easy to imagine Twain
OF HIS OWN saying the same thing about
his youthful adventures in the
STORIES, American West. We know he
DAVID SEDARIS traveled to Europe and the Holy
Land as a correspondent, so it’s
REPLIED, not unreasonable to suppose that
“THEY’RE TRUE at least some of what he reports
in The Innocents Abroad actually
ENOUGH.” happened. I suspect, however, that
the literally true parts are those he
wasn’t able to improve on through
is something we do for our own embellishment or outright
convenience; his convenience was invention. For Twain, “truth”
to ignore ours. was not just elastic but indeed
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 23
designed to be stretched. He
learned this lesson early on,
writing for western newspapers.
He explains the job to great comic
effect in Roughing It, where, as
a cub reporter, he wrote a story
about a wagon full of immigrants
attacked by Indians. At first,
fearing that other reporters might
recount the same story, he sticks
pretty close to the facts, despite
his conviction that the story could
be improved upon by straying
from them. Later, though, when he
learns that the owner of the wagon
meant to continue his journey the
following morning (leaving no one
to contradict Twain’s account),
all bets are off. His next draft de-
scribes an Indian fight that “to this
day has no parallel in history.” This
is Twain we’re talking about, so it’s
likely that he also exaggerated the
extent of his exaggerations, but
still. Buoyed by praise from the
paper’s editor, he expresses a
willingness to murder every
WRITERS, BY CONTRAST, ARE USED TO SILENCE.
THEIR APPLAUSE, IF THEY’RE LUCKY ENOUGH
TO GET ANY, COMES LONG AFTER THEIR
“PERFORMANCE” HAS CONCLUDED, IN THE
FORM OF REVIEWS.
24 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
immigrant on the plains with his
pen if “the interests of the paper
demanded it.” Thus the low bar of
truth is established: true enough.
For him. For his editor. For the
paper’s readership.
His approach to fiction was
basically the same. At the
beginning of the Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Huck says that
readers may have heard of him
if they’ve read The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, which “was made by
Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the
truth, mainly. There were things
which he stretched, but mainly
he told the truth.” That first
assertion, it’s worth remember-
ing, was both the truth and a lie.
The book was actually “made” by
Samuel Clemens, and the parts
Mr. Clemens “stretched” were
the parts that needed stretch-
ing, beginning with his own iden-
tity as Mark Twain. Again, Twain
is not so much a writer, at least
as the term is used today, as a
storyteller whose primary du-
ties are to the narrative and its
audience. No story is likely to be
instructive if it isn’t entertaining,
and the best way to gauge whether
it’s working or not is to watch it
land with an actual audience, a
lesson Twain learned long before
he gave his first public lecture.
In A Tramp Abroad he recounts his
first ride on a Mississippi steam-
boat as a ten-year-old boy. Falling
asleep, he has a terrifying dream
that the boat is ablaze, and he
rushes into the ladies’ salon, still
under the nightmare’s influence,
screaming “Fire!” The ladies there
knew better, of course, and they
advised him to return to his cabin
and dress, lest he catch cold. It’s a
revealing memory. The humilia-
tion of his story playing so badly,
his audience rejecting both the
tale and the teller, is still fresh in
Twain’s mind twenty-five years
later as he’s writing Tramp. Just as
telling is the reason he recalls the
episode in the first place. He’s in
Germany watching a production of
King Lear, where the actor playing
the title role “raged and wept and
howled” across the stage. Twain
admires the performance but feels
sorry for the actor, who has to
wait until the end of the act for his
applause.
Writers, by contrast, are used to
silence. Their applause, if they’re
lucky enough to get any, comes
long after their “performance” has
concluded, in the form of reviews.
True, authors who publish seri-
ally may to some degree interact
with their audience. When readers
loved Sam Weller in an early in-
stallment of The Pickwick Papers,
Dickens was happy to expand his
role as the novel progressed, but
that’s hardly akin to telling the
same stories on stage night after
night, as Twain did on his public
speaking tours. Each audience
provided him with valuable in-
sight into what worked and why,
allowing him to revise the material
accordingly. His first public lecture
triumph near the end of Roughing
It is described almost completely
in terms of the crowd’s appre-
ciation. The audience is with him
from the start, he tells us, even the
jokes he’d judged to be inferior far-
ing “royally.” Near the end, though,
the material grows more somber
and serious, and Twain tells us
that the “absorbed hush” that fell
over the audience “gratified me
more than any applause.” Indeed, would’ve understood that people
he’s so pleased by the reaction that who get conned are often complicit
he can’t help but smile, which the in their own deception. Just as im-
crowd took as a cue to laugh, thus portant, he would have recognized
ruining the moment. the paradox inherent in labeling
some stories “made up” (fiction)
Later in life, Twain’s relationship
and others “true” (nonfiction).
with his audience would grow
Interestingly, audience often
more complex. In Life on the Mis-
plays a role here, too. When you
sissippi, he admits that being a
claim that a story is invented —
river pilot was the best job he ever
especially one as elaborate as
had, because the steamboat pilot
Twain’s were — people will natu-
has no master, whereas writers
rally suspect you of telling the
were “manacled servants of the
truth (Come on! You couldn’t have
public.” That said, no writer ever
made that up!). Conversely, when
courted his audience more assidu-
you claim to be telling the truth,
ously nor drew more confidence
those same folks shift gears and
and pleasure from public adulation
suspect you of lying (Surely you
(Twain courted honorary degrees,
embellished this!). Storytelling
too, and shamelessly.) Indeed, one
thrives in this fundamental para-
suspects that it was from his audi-
dox and often resists any attempts
ence, as much as the work itself,
at clarification.
that Twain derived his sense of
accomplishment and well-being. “Mark Twain’s Nonfiction” first ap-
peared as the introduction to Mark
It’s worth pointing out that the
Twain’s Collected Nonfiction: Vol-
world has changed since Twain
ume 2 (Everyman’s Library, 2016)
left it, and our attitudes towards
“truth” and “fiction” have become
more rigorous and stern. Misla-
Richard Russo is the author of The
bel your novel as a memoir (or al-
Destiny Thief.
low your publisher to do so) and
you’ll likely find yourself in a world
of hurt. Twain was no great fan
of fraud and deception, but like
Melville he understood that the
world was steeped in both, and
moreover he harbored more than
a little admiration and affection
for its charlatans. Reading
Huckleberry Finn I often wonder L E A R N M OR E 
if I judge the King and the Duke
more harshly than their creator
intended. At the very least Twain
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 25
WRITING SOMEONE
ELSE’S STORY

26 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION

DAVID BOWIE’S
BIOGRAPHER ON HOW
TO COVER AN ICON
by Dylan Jones
In setting out to write a book
about David Bowie, I faced one
predominant issue: coming up
with different reasons for the
reader to read the book. If one is a
Bowie aficionado, then one knows
how high the bar is, one knows
where the bodies are buried. So
why should someone read another
Bowie book? In order to involve
the reader, I had to widen the net.
Which is exactly what I did.
There are too many Bowie books
out there written by people who
simply have an opinion about
him; what was lacking was a book
that was the result of many, many
voices.
I figured that a Bowie book of this
size and ambition needed to have
at least 150 voices in it. The first
fifty are those people you include
in order to be taken seriously as a
Bowie biographer; see: Nile Rod-
gers, Mick Rock, Terry O’Neill,
Rick Wakeman, etc. The next fifty
are the people who think they just
have as much right as anyone else
to bestow on the reader the pearls
of wisdom they learnt at Bowie’s
knee. See: Tracey Emin, Blondie,
Bono, a Streatham mini cab driver.
The final fifty are the other people,
the unknowns. These were the
ones called Kevin, or Keith, the
ones who were almost mentioned
in passing. “Have you spoken to
Kevin?” “Kevin? No. Should I?” In
the end I spoke to people all over
the world, in London, Paris, Milan,
Miami, Los Angeles, New York,
Chicago, Arizona, Cardiff, Sussex,
Montreal, Essex, Sydney, Brixton,
Bromley, Beckenham, Cambridge,
Hay-on-Wye, Ipswich, even in
parts of darkest Detroit.
Since his enforced retirement
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
midway through the Noughties,
the books started to come out
on an almost six-monthly basis;
since his death there has been a
tsunami of Bowie books. Many of
the books written about Bowie are
biographies of the metaphor that
we have come to know as “Bowie”;
I wanted to write about the man,
the person himself. For this book,
I focused on the many tall poppies
who knew and worked with David
over the years. I also spoke to the
raft of people who perhaps previ-
ously hadn’t had the opportunity
to tell their stories with as much
encouragement or fanfare, people
who had been involved with him
before he was a star, in his pomp,
and during the long stretches of
post-imperial fame. I’d like to
thank them all — the musicians
who worked with Bowie, the fam-
ily friends, professional friends,
childhood acquaintances, lovers,
27
actors, producers, directors, styl- Years. After his death, Bowie’s decade to make it in an indus-
ists, artists, curators, journalists, interviews started to take on a new try that he often thought was
photographers, promoters, art poignancy, something I started collectively conspiring against
directors, publishers, publicists, to see myself when I looked back him, little was left to chance, and
authors, designers, comedians, through my own interviews with the ruthlessness with which he
fans, bold face names, everyone. him. Things I’d skipped over, or assaulted his audience when he
took for granted at the time, now finally did become successful was
As a form of history, the oral
seemed strangely loaded, heavy only matched by the extraordi-
biography has the capacity to be
with meaning. They certainly nary quality of the material — and
more honest than others, and the
helped me frame this book. the stagecraft — that he used as
lack of subjectivity employed by
ammunition. Whereas in the ’60s
the editor should enable the truth David Bowie never forgot to con-
Bowie was always slightly behind
to shine though. But then who nect. Having struggled for a
the curve, as the ’70s clicked in,
ever remembers an event in pre-
cisely the same way? As Bertrand
Russell said, “When a man tells AS A FORM OF HISTORY, THE
you that he knows the exact truth
about anything you are safe in in-
ORAL BIOGRAPHY HAS THE
ferring that he is an inexact man.” CAPACITY TO BE MORE
Yet the recollections contained
here, many of which include minor
HONEST THAN OTHERS
contradictions, have produced a
fascinating prism of whatever the
truth actually is.

I was also adamant that I use only

firsthand quotes. All of the quotes
included are from David Bowie
himself, taken from the seven
formal interviews I conducted
with him over the years, along
with some quotes from an in-
terview commissioned for i-D
back in 1987 when I was still the
editor (and for which I wrote many
of the questions), used with the
kind permission of Tricia Jones
(who conducted the interview).
I also included one quote from a
BBC radio series, Bowie Verbatim,
another from a speech Bowie gave
to the Berklee College of Music in
1999, and one from Hugh Thom-
son’s interview with him for Five
28 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
he inched ahead of it, peering at
the future through a Manichean
viewfinder. He showed that what
he was doing was not a trend, but
rather a direction, one that would
change on a whim, or indeed with
the wind. He excelled at the art
of individualism, rarely tacking
toward the center, and relentlessly
moving forward.
In this age when there is in-
discriminate access to almost
everything, it would have been
difficult for Bowie to operate so
successfully, but back in the ’70s
he was a divining rod, his own
as well as ours. His immense
talent was often bewildering. But
then, he’d learned how to use what
“little” talent (his term) he had
to its fullest effect. Bowie often
said that God’s cruelest gift was
bestowing only a modicum of
talent on a person. He exploited
what he had in a way that was all
consuming. He was a fascinat-
ing fusion of ambition and craft,
coupled with an innate charm, personae and his records like a
and — after that first unsuccessful bomb-squad technician, deciding
decade — an often unerring sense which color wire to snip, petri-
of timing. fied that a mistake would end his
seemingly inexorable righteous
Bowie also deployed his curiosity
passage. In reality, he just mixed
as an analytical torch, repurposing
things up as he went, using bits
in completely original ways, rarely
and pieces he’d collected along the
embarrassed to claim something
way. I hope this book goes some
as his own. In that first, forma-
way to describing exactly how he
tive decade of his career, Bowie’s
did this, with his art, his music,
work bore a relation to many fore-
and with the people he collected
bears, and it was only with “Space
around him, some of whom he kept
Oddity” that he showed that he
for life.
had a mind of his own, and genuine
human purpose. (Having said that,
at the time, “Space Oddity” was Dylan Jones is the author of
considered to be something of a David Bowie.
novelty record, and it could have
simply been regarded in the years
afterward as nothing more impor-
tant than “Rock Me Amadeus” by
Falco, for instance, a novelty tie-in
from a different era.)
There are many who think
that Bowie was unrelentingly
LEARN MORE 
calculating, carefully building his
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 29
BECOMING A BIOGRAPHER:
HOW TO TELL SOMEONE
ELSE’S LIFE STORY
by James Atlas
A crabby novelist who’d got-
ten a bad review once quipped,
“Whoever grew up wanting to be a
literary critic?” The same could be
said, I suppose, of wanting to be a
biographer. When you’re fourteen,
if you’ve thought about the future
at all, the odds are more likely that
you have your heart set on being
a pole vaulter, a fireman, maybe
these days an entrepreneur, even
— should you be so unfortunate as
to have literary inclinations — a
poet. But how many adolescents
even know what a biography is?
I certainly didn’t, though I knew
I wanted to be a writer, and —
being a strange boy who read
Partisan Review for fun — I was
already considering literary critic
as a possible vocation. It wasn’t
until I was in my early twenties
and had the good fortune to study
with Richard Ellmann, the great
30 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
biographer of James Joyce, that
it occurred to me that this might
be the genre for me. His massive
700-page book had everything: a
(nonfictional) protagonist, vivid
ancillary characters, a moving
story line, terrific writing, liter-
ary criticism, and more. It also
had facts. I found this reassur-
ing. I loved reading novels, but
there was something disconcert-
ing about them — they were made
up. (Of course, that was the whole
point.) I couldn’t trust them to de-
liver the goods on reality. “Why
not say what really happened?”
wrote Robert Lowell. Exactly.
I had been fascinated by the work
— and by what I knew about the life
— of the poet Delmore Schwartz
ever since I was in high school.
I’d read a few of his lyric poems
in anthologies, and knew from a
tribute in the New York Times
Book Review that he had been
considered the most promising
poet of his generation, only to burn
himself out with amphetamines
and alcohol, dying of a heart
attack in the corridor of a crummy
midtown Manhattan hotel at the
age of fifty-two. What a precau-
tionary tale about the dangers of
the creative life.
I persuaded the American Poetry
Review to let me write an essay
about Schwartz, and from that
managed to get a contract from the
publishing house Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux (for three thousand
dollars) to write his biography
… whatever that was. I would
have to read a few to find out. My
apprenticeship was served un-
der the strict, lovingly oppres-
sive critic Dwight Macdonald,
who was Delmore’s literary editor
and had taken an interest in my
project; but I also read closely
Leon Edel’s five-volume biography
of Henry James, George Painter’s
Proust, and Michael Holroyd’s epic
Lytton Strachey. They were very
different books, inflected by their
authors’ distinctive voices, but
they clearly revealed a mania
for detail; they were drawn to
the challenge of reproducing
events and scenes, reconstructing
historical and sociological back-
ground, animating character
through the assemblage of facts
— not just to accumulate them,
but to make them work in concert,
producing an illusion of reality (or
was it reality itself ?): a story that
had the narrative sweep of fiction
but was true.
interviewing people. They combed
through old periodicals and
newspapers. They were diggers.
And they were avid about the
past, hungry for knowledge about
vanished worlds. And they had
discipline, what the Germans
call sitzfleisch — literally, sitting-
down flesh, the capacity to sit at
your desk for long hours over a
period of years that could some-
times stretch beyond a decade.
(My biography of Saul Bellow took
eleven years, with interruptions
of various kinds.) So you needed
patience, too; you needed to take
the long view, to postpone grati-
fication — to see the writing of a
biography as the project of a
lifetime.
empathy. You are going to spend
more time in the company of this
person, whether dead or alive, than
with your children or your spouse:
Your subject will exasperate
you, bore you, wear you out with
unreasonable demands. Yet
through all these trials, you must
understand and forgive. What
is harder in life than that? Ask a
biographer. Nothing.
James Aatlas is the author of
The Shadow in the Garden.

Biographers, then, were obsessive But spending so much time in

researchers; they collected docu- the company of someone else re-
ments and letters, ransacked li- quires the most important quality
LEARN MORE 
brary archives, traveled the world that a biographer must possess:

GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 31

MAKING HISTORY:
CHARACTERS IN
NARRATIVE NONFICTION
by Gary Krist
History that downplays individual
experience — that focuses exclu-
sively on movements, economic
forces, social developments, and
the like — can be worthwhile and
enlightening, but it’s never going
to make very compelling reading
for non-specialists. People are in-
terested in people, so they like to
see how the larger forces of his-
tory shape — and are shaped by —
recognizable, specific persons with
stories all their own. As a narrative
historian, I therefore face a lot of
the same challenges that a novel-
ist does. I’ve got to find characters
whose life histories will allow me
to express what needs expressing,
and who are in and of themselves
fascinating to read about.
As a former fiction writer (or,
as Walter Isaacson teasingly
called me in the New York Times
a few years ago, a “lapsed novel-
32 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
ist”), I’ve seen the task from both
perspectives, and I can tell you
that the narrative historian has,
in some ways, the harder job. Yes,
we don’t face the yawning terror of
PEOPLE ARE
INTERESTED
IN PEOPLE
the totally blank page every morn-
ing (that daily existential crisis),
but we also don’t have the luxury
of creating elements from whole
cloth to add dimension to a dull-
ish character or enliven a flagging
plot. We can only draw on the raw
material offered up by the his-
torical record. Of course, many
popular historians of the past
had no qualms about inventing
freely — details, dialogue, scenes
— whenever the historical record
was lacking, but the new school of
narrative history insists on higher
standards of scholarship. In other
words, we can’t just make it up.
So when deciding on what
characters to focus on in my books,
I look for people who (A), were at
the center of the important issues
of the day, (B), were complex and
interesting in their own right, and
(C), were also well documented
in the historical record. That last
criterion is important. Memoirs,
letters, newspaper interviews,
diaries — any kind of account in
which a participant in the drama
tells what happened in human,
on-the-ground terms — are critical
for me, since they give me the con-
crete details I need to bring people
and events to life. (Incidentally,
since a lot of my main characters
are colorful types who frequently
comprehensive archive. And as
highly visible public figures, they
ACCOUNTS
wound up in court, transcripts were covered extensively (in ARE ONLY AS
of trial testimony have been
particularly useful.)
McPherson’s case, one might say
“obsessively”) by the local press in
TRUSTWORTHY
Naturally, all of these documents
their lifetimes. AS THE
can be as unreliable as any other So narrative historians have PEOPLE WHO
sources in the record. Accounts
are only as trustworthy as the
definite limits on what they can do,
particularly when telling stories
GIVE THEM,
people who give them, after all, so that involve people for whom the AFTER ALL.
I find myself constantly having to historical record is skimpy or in-
judge how much to believe in any complete. That’s why I sometimes
given source. Often I’ll talk about have to take a pass on a book idea
this decision-making process in that might seem irresistible at first
the end-notes to my books, which glance. If the material isn’t there
I see as a kind of running commen- to give the characters and events
tary on how I used the historical the kind of texture and dimension
record to create the book, for those required, the idea won’t work, no
who are interested in seeing how matter how interesting the story
the sausage is made. may be in outline. Fortunately,
though — thanks to the hard work
The three criteria I mentioned
of archivists who keep developing
were important considerations
more sophisticated ways of cata-
when I chose the main characters
loguing and searching their collec-
around whom to base The Mirage
tions — the amount of raw material
Factory. William Mulholland,
available just keeps growing. It’s
D.W. Griffith, and Aimee Semple
up to the narrative historian to
McPherson were all central to
choose wisely.
the story I wanted to tell, repre-
senting the three forces — which
you might shorthand as Water,
Gary Krist is the author of
Celluloid, and Spirituality — that
The Mirage Factory.
allowed Los Angeles to grow up
in a place where no big city has
any right to be. They’re also in-
triguing, multidimensional people
with character flaws as big as their
talents. And they were all
extremely well documented in
the historical record. All three
wrote autobiographies of a sort
(although Mulholland’s was very LEARN MORE 

short). Each left behind a fairly

GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 33
MISSING PIECES:
HOW TO TELL SOMEONE
ELSE’S STORY WHEN
MEMORY FAILS
by Michael D. Lemonick

Forty-plus years ago, I was a
freshman in college, taking
Intro to Psychology. We did a unit
on memory, and the classic case
study was that of a patient known
only as “H. M.” In the early 1950s,
he had had his hippocampus and
other tissues in the brain’s medial
temporal lobes surgically removed
in an attempt to treat his severe,
unrelenting epileptic seizures. It
was in that moment that the seeds
of my book, The Perpetual Now,
were planted.
Before the operation, nobody
really knew what the hippocam-
pus was for. Afterward, it was
horrifyingly clear: It’s the central
organ of memory. From that time
onward, H. M. could no longer
form new memories. If you met
him and had a conversation (his
language was unimpaired), then
left the room and returned, he
would have no idea who you were
— and the same was true if you
came back a third or a fourth or a
tenth time.
His case launched the modern
science of memory (that’s why he
was in all the textbooks), and it
haunted me ever afterward. What
could it possibly be like to exist in
such a bizarre state of mind? How
could a person even function?
H. M.’s tragedy made such a pow-
erful impression on me that when
an old acquaintance from middle
school stopped me on the street in
2012 and told me that her sister’s
hippocampus had been destroyed
by a viral infection of the brain,
I said to myself, “Just like H. M.”
She didn’t have to tell me what this
implied.
In the intervening years since
that freshman class, I had become
a science journalist. That’s why
Aline Johnson spoke to me about
her sister, Lonni Sue: She wanted
me to write about her. I had
written a bit about neuroscience,
and even about H. M., but only in a
dispassionate, factual way.
Suddenly, I was being offered the
chance to write about someone
with the same, awful condition
in a narrative — and I knew very
well, thanks largely to the late,
brilliant Oliver Sacks, that this
was a far more compelling way
into the dizzyingly complex world
of neuroscience. (Aline Johnson
had approached Sacks himself,
who had already written about
amnesia victim Clive Wearing for
The New Yorker, but he was busy
with other projects.)
The advantage of narrative — as
Sacks, and Rebecca Skloot, and
Mary Roach, and Richard Preston,

34 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION

John McPhee, and other authors
who have written compelling
books about science know well — is
that it seduces the reader. By com-
ing to care about vividly re-created
characters in dramatic situations,
they persuade readers who might
not otherwise be interested in
science that they’re interested
after all. Far too many people think
science literacy is probably good
for them, but is too complicated
and boring to swallow. A well-
crafted science narrative is like a
spoonful of sugar.
I needed all of these people, not
just to create a portrait of Lonni
Sue from a number of perspectives,
but to reconstruct a life she herself
can no longer remember, except
in the vaguest of ways (she knows
she used to fly planes, for example
but has no memory of her ten-year
marriage, which ended before she
moved to Cooperstown).
FAR TOO
MANY PEOPLE
and events that had shaped my life
— and, worse yet, the inability to
start from scratch and rebuild my
identity — would rob me of my very
self. In fact, the working title of the
book was originally The Woman
Who Lost Her Self.
Now I know better. Lonni Sue
Johnson has indeed lost most
of her memories of the past, and
can’t form new memories in any
meaningful sense. But she is just
as warm and funny and quick-wit-
ted and generally as delightful as

This has always been important,

THINK SCIENCE my interviewees tell me she was
before she developed profound
since science underlies much LITERACY IS amnesia. The memories are gone,
of modern life, and because an
informed public can help guide ra-
PROBABLY but the woman herself is still fully
present. I’m extraordinarily lucky
tional public policy about science, GOOD that I was allowed into her life.
medicine, and the environment.
It’s suddenly and unexpectedly
FOR THEM,
even more important now that the BUT IS TOO Michael D. Lemonick is tha author of
country is being led by people who
treat scientific truth as just an-
COMPLICATED The Perpetual Now.

other set of alternate facts. AND BORING

Aline and her mother, Maggi
Johnson, who died in 2015 at the
age of ninety-seven, welcomed
me into their lives, and into Lonni
Sue’s as well. They also put me in
touch with people who had known
and loved Lonni Sue during her
childhood: her early adulthood as
an increasingly successful com-
mercial artist in New York; her
years in Connecticut, where she
developed a passion for flying
small planes; and finally, with her
friends in Cooperstown, New York,
where she was living when viral
encephalitis invaded her brain.
© 1995-2018 Penguin Random House.
All rights reserved.
TO SWALLOW.
Three years of interviews with
Lonni Sue’s friends, family mem-
bers, and colleagues, and espe-
L E A R N M OR E 
cially with Lonni Sue herself,
were not only fascinating and
heart-wrenching for me. They
were also transformative. For
decades, I’d been haunted by the
idea of H. M.’s condition. I was
convinced that if something like
that ever happened to me, the
inability to remember the people
GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION 35
EXCLUSIVELY FOR
SIGNATURE READERS
STREAM SUNDANCE NOW
FREE FOR 30 DAYS WITH
THE CODE: SIGNATURE.

36 GUIDE TO WRITING NARRATIVE NONFICTION