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Fiction and Nonfiction: Understanding the Distinctions

Becoming a skilled writer requires knowing the different genres available. Let’s start with the basics: understanding the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

What’s the Difference Between “Fiction” and “Nonfiction”?

Fiction refers to “something created in the imagination .” Therefore, fictional writing is based on events that the author made up rather than real ones. Nonfiction is “writing that revolves around facts , real people, and events that actually occurred .”

Table of Contents

What does “fiction” mean (with examples).

What Does “Nonfiction” Mean? (With Examples)

How To Write Fiction and Nonfiction Masterpieces

An artist discerns subtle brushstrokes that look identical to the average person. They can also recognize hundreds of colors by their names. Similarly, as writers, we must be familiar with distinct types of prose, with the foundation of that knowledge being the ability to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction .

If you’ve ever been uncertain about these terms, you’re in the right place. We’ll help you get a solid grasp of what fiction and nonfiction mean by providing clear explanations and examples.

Let’s dive in!

Fiction is “written work that is invented or created in the mind.” Put differently, the narrative is imaginary and didn’t actually happen. Novels, short stories, epic poems, plays, and comic books are a few types of fiction writing.

Examples of famous fiction literature include:

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 

Animal Farm by George Orwell  

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 

The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling 

Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes 

Fiction can read like this:

On my way to the city of Bolognaland, I noticed that my water-fueled flying car was running low on energy. So, I stopped by the water station and filled up the tank. There, I saw the most beautiful sunset of green, turquoise, and black. As the sun set below the horizon, the two moons—Luminara and Crescelia—took their place in the night sky.

To the best of our knowledge, every single aspect of the story written above is imaginary, from Bolognaland to the two moons. However, it’s important to note that not every component of a fictional story has to be created out of thin air. For example, someone could come up with a tale about a man who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, which is an actual place in the United States. A fictional story can incorporate many components that are nonfiction .

The word fiction isn’t always used to describe a type of literature; it can also refer to anything false.

Don’t believe anything he says—it’s all fiction !

The legend of the hidden treasure has been passed down in this family for generations, but most of us think it’s fiction .

A main part of my job as a historian is to separate fact from fiction in ancient manuscripts.

“Fictional” vs. “Fictitious”

Fictional and fictitious both relate to things or people that are made up and are often used interchangeably. However, fictional typically describes something that originates from literature , movies , or other forms of storytelling , and fictitious can refer to something that is false and intended to deceive . In other words, it carries more of a negative connotation.

What Does “Nonfiction” Mean?

Nonfiction refers to “literature that is based on facts, real events, and real people.” Nonfiction writers aim to compose everything as truthfully and accurately as possible. However, sometimes authors enhance certain parts to make them more interesting, or they are required to change specific facts, like names, for privacy reasons.

Memoirs, biographies, articles, essays, and even personal journal entries are a few types of nonfiction texts.

A few examples of famous published nonfiction works include:

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Educated by Tara Westover

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben 

Here’s a piece of nonfiction text:

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on June 28, 1971. His mother is Maye Musk, and his father is Errol Musk. Musk has two siblings, a younger brother named Kimbal and a younger sister named Tosca. 

This text is accurate and based on facts; therefore, it is considered nonfiction . But please note that it is not exemplary of nonfiction works—they’re not all boring, rigid, and monotonous. Skilled nonfiction writers weave rhetorical devices, interesting facts, and more to keep readers engaged.

Is it “Nonfiction” or “Non-Fiction”?

This word can be spelled as a hyphenated ( non-fiction ) or non-hyphenated ( nonfiction ) compound word . The spelling depends on which English dialect you’re writing in.

In American English, nonfiction is more commonly used. Both forms are found in British English, but non-fiction is slightly more prevalent.

How To Write Fictional and Nonfictional Masterpieces

We should reiterate that fiction and nonfiction writing can overlap. That means that some fiction includes components of nonfiction and vice versa .

What’s vital to remember is that fiction writing is mostly made up of fabricated stories, whereas nonfiction writing is mostly composed of the truth.

Written masterpieces can be found in all genres, including fiction and nonfiction . When it’s time for you to work on yours, make sure you entrust LanguageTool as your writing assistant. As a multilingual, AI-driven, spell, grammar, and punctuation checker, LanguageTool rids your texts of various types of errors while ensuring you stay productive to reach your goals.

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Works of prose are typically divided into one of two categories: fiction vs. nonfiction. A work of fiction might resemble the real world, but it certainly did not happen in real life. Nonfiction, on the other hand, should not contain any fiction, as the writer’s credibility comes from the truthfulness of the story.

Any writer of fiction vs. nonfiction will use different skills and strategies to write in each genre. Yet, fiction and nonfiction are more alike than you might realize. Additionally, there are many works of prose that fall somewhere in between the fiction vs. nonfiction binary.

This article examines, in detail, the writing strategies available to prose writers of fiction and nonfiction. It also examines the fiction vs. nonfiction binary, and offers insight into the role that “truth” plays in both genres of literature.

But first, let’s uncover what writers mean when they categorize a work of prose as fiction vs. nonfiction. What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Definitions

Let’s begin by defining each of these categories of literature. The main difference between fiction and nonfiction has to do with “what actually transpired in the real world.”

“Fiction” refers to stories that have not occurred in real life. Fiction may resemble real life, and it may even pull from real life events or people. But the story itself, the “what happens in this text,” is ultimately invented by the author.

“Nonfiction,” on the other hand, refers to stories that have occurred in real life. The story may have happened in the author’s life, in the life of someone the author has interviewed, or in the life of a historical figure. It also describes works of journalism, science writing, and other forms of “reality-based” writing.

To further complicate things, writers might categorize something as being either “ creative nonfiction ” or, simply, “nonfiction.” This article discusses strategies for writing both, but with an emphasis on creative nonfiction, such as memoir and personal essays, as those skills apply to most forms of prose.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: A way of categorizing literature based on whether it happened in the real world (nonfiction) or didn’t (fiction).

Now, while these two categories exist, it’s worth noting that certain genres of writing sit somewhere in the middle. Some genres that straddle the fiction vs. nonfiction border are:

• Autobiographical fiction (also known as autofic). An example is The Idiot by Elif Batuman.
• Speculative nonfiction , or writing in which invented truths are not at odds with what transpired in real life.
• Historical fiction, which typically involves the accurate retelling of real life historical events, with fictional characters and plots woven through that history.

But wait, how can a work of literature be both true and not true? We’ll explore that paradox later in this article. First, let’s explore the possibilities of fiction and nonfiction.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Examples of Each Category

The following genres can be classified as types of fiction:

• Short stories.
• Plays and screenplays (though these can also be nonfiction).
• Literary fiction.
• Categories of genre fiction – including mystery, thriller, romance, horror, and other types of speculative fiction , like magical realism or urban fantasy .
• Fables, fairy tales, and folklore.
• Narrative poetry .

Meanwhile, these are different types of nonfiction:

• Personal essays.
• Biographies and autobiographies.
• Books about history.
• Periodicals.
• Lyric essays .
• Journalism, articles, food writing , travel writing, and other forms of feature writing.
• Scholarly articles.

Learn more about different types of nonfiction here:

https://writers.com/types-of-nonfiction

Characteristics of Fiction vs. Nonfiction

As you can see above, fiction and nonfiction are both expansive categories of literature. So, it’s impossible to describe all of fiction or nonfiction as being any particular thing. If I were to say “all fiction is about stories that haven’t actually happened,” that isn’t true, because genres like autofic and historical fiction exist.

Nonetheless, there are a few differences and similarities that can generally be stated about fiction vs. nonfiction. The differences include:

• Whether the story is made up or real.
• How the writer creates a plot for the story.
• The role research plays in telling the story.
• How themes are explored within the story.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Did It Actually Happen?

As we’ve already mentioned, the main difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether or not the story occurred in real life. In nonfiction, the story did occur in the real world; in fiction, it did not.

Fictional stories can be rooted in real-life events, but the scenes, plotline, and characters are invented by the author, even if they’re based on real people.

You might think of a couple of exceptions here. Historical fiction, for example, is often based on real historical events, such as Civil War stories. While the setting for the story happened in real life, and might even involve real historical figures, there are also fictional characters in the story, and the majority of scenes and plot points were fictionalized as well. If historical fiction interests you, check out our interview with Jack Smith on his novel If Winter Comes .

Another exception, in all seriousness, is fanfiction. Yes, Harry Styles fanfiction does involve a living, real life person. But the author is making assumptions, assigning character traits, and inventing plot points for Harry Styles that did not actually occur in the real world.

The point: fiction writers can (and always do!) borrow from real life. They might even tell their own stories as though they were fiction. Even in those instances, there are always details that are added, embellished, or altered to tell a more engaging story, so the stories themselves are still fictional.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: What’s the Plot?

Fiction writers use plot as scaffolding for a story. By plot, we mean the way that the events of a story are organized from start to finish. Our article on plot structures offers different ways that fiction writers have used plot to tell their stories.

This is true even of literary fiction, which is typically defined as realistic fiction in which the characters’ decisions drive the story forward, and the characters themselves form the story. (This is a somewhat problematic distinction between genre fiction, but we discuss that in our article on literary fiction vs. genre fiction .) In those stories, plot is centered around the conflict in the story itself.

In nonfiction, the author’s goal is to organize what actually transpired in the real world into a cogent plot. For many writers, that means telling the story in a linear fashion, with careful attention to the most salient details and how they’re presented to the reader.

Of course, many creative nonfiction writers do tell stories non-linearly, particularly in genres like the braided essay, lyric essay, and hermit crab essay.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: The Role of Research

Most prose writers will have to do some amount of research to craft effective works of fiction and nonfiction. Memoirists may be able to tell their story entirely without research, but anything to verify the accuracy of information counts as research, such as looking up old emails, the streets and locations of certain events, etc. Rarely can one’s memory suffice to tell an entire story.

Fiction writers integrate their research into the story. Let’s say your story is set in New York, a city you’ve visited, but never lived in. You have a character that lives in Bushwick, which is served by the L, M, J, and Z trains. You may need to research that, and when that research is integrated into the story, you’ll write that your character “took the L train.” (In other words, you will not write “I discovered that Bushwick is served by the L train, which my character took into Manhattan.”)

In nonfiction, research informs the story, and is directly cited in the text. Let’s say your story involves New York rent and the aforementioned L train. You might be writing about the time that the city almost shut down the L train—they needed to do repairs to the tunnel beneath the East River connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. When it was announced that this service was going to be suspended, rents drastically dropped in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a recently gentrified neighborhood, and many people locked in historically low rents. People were very upset about this sudden closure, and the L service was later not suspended, meaning, ironically, a bunch of people got cheap rents without losing train service.

This is the kind of story that a journalist might write about. Or, you might be someone who locked in that cheap rent, and it’s part of the story of your time living in Williamsburg. In any case, if it’s nonfiction, you’ll want to cite it directly in the text. A journalist might cite people that they interviewed, or a city historian might cite this article and this article . Someone writing creative nonfiction might not need to add a citation, but they would still want to research and communicate the details here so that the reader has context for their story.

To summarize: fiction writers integrate research into their stories, while nonfiction writers cite research to bolster and verify their stories.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: How Themes are Explored

Theme refers to the overarching ideas presented and explored throughout the story.

Fiction writers explore themes implicitly; for them, the theme of a story is rarely stated. If, for example, the theme of a story is “justice,” then the fiction writer might explore who receives justice, who doesn’t, and how that justice (or lack thereof) is doled out. However, the fiction writer will not say “this character did not receive justice” explicitly—that’s for the reader to understand and form their own opinion about.

Nonfiction writers typically state their themes more openly. In a memoir or essay, the writer might explore why justice was or was not given to them, what factors went into that decision, and what it means to live a life after being (or not being) dispensed justice.

Some nonfiction writers might explore themes without stating them, or even without realizing they’re exploring them. But, because the nonfiction writer wants to convey what it was like to be the subject of the story, they will inevitably explore, and therefore openly state, the deeper parts of the story itself. This includes the author’s emotions, background, external circumstances, and the themes and conclusions that they drew from their experiences.

Similarities Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Despite the above differences, fiction and nonfiction have many similarities, too. In brief, these similarities include:

• The interplay of plot, characters, and settings to explore themes and ideas. While the people of nonfiction stories might not be considered “characters,” they are people presented in a certain way, and with a certain intent, on the page.
• Utilizing prose to tell a story. Fiction and nonfiction writers can both experiment with this: novelists have included poetry in their stories, and essayists, particularly lyric essayists and hermit crab essayists, often play with the prose form.
• The desire to entertain, inform, enlighten, challenge, and/or move the reader.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction Venn Diagram

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction? The below Venn Diagram summarizes what’s similar and different about the two genres. Virtually all things in the world of literature have exceptions, so while the below is not true 100% of the time, it’s a good place to start teasing out the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

The Role of “Truth” in Fiction and Nonfiction

The primary difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether or not the story happened in the real world. Yet, we’ve already mentioned three example genres in which fact and fiction can coexist peacefully. So, how much does “truth” matter in fiction vs. nonfiction?

Certainly, most works of nonfiction must be entirely factual. Memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, scholarly works, books about history, and journalism must all adhere to what actually transpired in the real world. When works of nonfiction fabricate details, someone is bound to figure that out eventually, and the ensuing scandal probably isn’t worth it.

At the same time, there’s something to be said about “truth” as a multifaceted concept. One person’s truth can be different than another’s; two people can both have honest, differing interpretations about the exact same event. What matters more than truth, if anything, is honesty.

When memoirists publish their work as memoirs, they assert to the reader that what transpired in the text actually occurred in real life. (So, publishing a memoir about wandering Nazi-torn Europe and being adopted by wolves would not be true or honest, even if it’s a potent metaphor for how the author felt.)

Yet, a memoirist might include information in the novel that’s controversial, in dispute, or otherwise not verifiably true. Does that mean the author lied to their reader?

It really depends on the writer and what they wrote. Consider a few things:

• Emotional truth is sometimes at odds with factual truth. That’s not to say you should invent a metaphor and claim it actually happened. But, the brain works in weird ways, makes odd associations, and reacts to the truth strangely. As a result, your brain might distort memories to make an intense emotion make sense. What the writer conveys to the reader is still an accurate portrayal of how they experienced something, even though their memory of the event itself has been skewed..
•  Relatedly, memory is fallible. Unless you have an eidetic memory, you will inevitably forget, distort, or invent details in the memories you set on the page. Research on flashbulb memories proves that none of us remember exactly how we experience our own lives. But, often, the details we do invent have a profound psychological importance, and can still provide moving imagery and description to the story.
• All writing, particularly literature, requires some form of invention . What we mean by this is, real life is far, far messier than literature. In literature, we use plot as a way of organizing a story, and within that story, the details of settings and characters are carefully chosen to explore broader themes and ideas. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction. By asserting these craft elements into retellings of reality, we inevitably neglect certain details, or insert our biases and prejudices into the ways we frame a story. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t strive for the truth—we should—but it is to say that the entire truth may never be properly conveyed. Again, honesty matters more.

Why bring this up? Because all creative nonfiction is an exploration of the truth. And, as all writers know, the truth is far, far messier than fiction. Few truths are absolute. As such, an author’s integrity and dedication to honesty matters much more.

As for fiction, the events of the story are usually fabricated—though writers always pull details from their own lived experiences. Dostoevsky named characters after his children; Steinbeck set the majority of his stories in Central California, where he grew up; Murakami’s novels frequently feature jazz, classical music, baseball, cats, and other things of intimate importance to his life. Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being involves characters Ruth and Oliver, named after the author and her husband. The fictional characters have similar traits to the real life Ruth and Oliver.

Sometimes, a work of fiction is rooted in nonfiction, with only some elements added or fabricated. For example, our instructor Barbara Henning ’s novel Thirty Miles to Rosebud is semi-autobiographical.

And, of course, many works of fiction involve completely fictitious elements, especially in genres like fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Even for those genres, however, fiction should still try to arrive at some fundamental truth. Good fiction will inevitably (though not intentionally) teach the reader something about themselves, about others, and/or about the world around them.

Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Many prose writers dabble in both fiction and nonfiction. Which should you write? Are there differences in writing one versus the other? What’s the main difference between fiction and nonfiction writing?

As we’ve discussed, the primary difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether the story occurred in real life. So, the primary difference in writing fiction vs. nonfiction comes down to the concept of “story” itself.

Our instructor Jeff Lyons argues that a story is a metaphor for the human experience . When we follow the plots of characters who must become different people to overcome certain obstacles, we see ourselves and our shared humanities reflected in those stories. To achieve this metaphor, the author must follow certain plot structures. Even in literary fiction, which often breaks the rules of plot structure, the plot must organize and enhance the story that’s being told, since plot is always what develops from the decisions that characters make.

Nonfiction, particularly creative nonfiction, also follows stories of adversity. In fact, most memoir publishers prefer to sell books about people overcoming adversity—feelgood stories sell better than ones that end on a low note. Yet, these stories aren’t metaphors, they actually happened. And, the author isn’t trying to follow a plot structure, the author is trying to organize the story details into a plot that people can follow.

And, other types of nonfiction are less concerned about plot, and more concerned about sharing information. Book length projects might have a plot, but many scholarly works and periodicals don’t need a plot, and many works of journalism follow the Inverted Pyramid . (There are, always, exceptions to these generalities.)

To summarize: Writing fiction involves crafting a story to create metaphors for the human experience. Writing nonfiction involves organizing factual information into a story that readers will best understand.

Outside of these differences, fiction and nonfiction typically utilize the same elements, at least in varying degrees. They both have characters, storylines, and themes, they both benefit from the tactics of stylish writing , and they both seek to inform, move, and captivate their readers.

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Fiction vs. nonfiction?

Nonfiction writing recounts real experiences, people, and periods. Fiction writing involves imaginary people, places, or periods, but it may incorporate story elements that mimic reality.

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What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction ?

The terms fiction and nonfiction represent two types of literary genres, and they’re useful for distinguishing factual stories from imaginary ones. Fiction and nonfiction writing stand apart from other literary genres ( i.e., drama and poetry ) because they possess opposite conventions: reality vs. imagination.

What is fiction ?

Fiction is any type of writing that introduces an intricate plot, characters, and narratives that an author invents with their imagination. The word fiction is synonymous with terms like “ fable ,” “ figment ,” or “ fabrication ,” and each of these words has a collective meaning: falsehoods, inventions, and lies. 

Not all fiction is entirely made-up, though. Historical fiction, for example, features periods with real events or people, but with an invented storyline. Additionally, science fiction novels function around real scientific theories, but the overall story is untrue. 

What is nonfiction ?

Nonfiction is any writing that represents factual accounts on past or current events. Authors of nonfiction may write subjectively or objectively, but the overall content of their story is not invented (Murfin 340). 

Works of nonfiction are not limited to traditional books, either. Additional examples of nonfiction include: 

• Instruction manuals 
• Safety pamphlets
• Journalism 
• Recipes 
• Medical charts 

Comparing fiction and nonfiction texts

Outside of reality vs. imagination, nonfiction and fiction writing possess several typical features. 

Fictional text features:

• Imaginary characters, settings, or periods
• A subjective narrative
• Novels, novellas, and short stories
• Literary fiction vs. genre fiction ( e.g., sci-fi, romance, mystery ) 

Nonfiction text features:

• Real people, events, and periods
• An authoritative narrative 
• Autobiographies, letters, journals, essays, etc .
• Venn diagrams, anchor charts, mini-lessons, extension activities
• Index, citations, and bibliographies 
• Academic/peer-reviewed publishers

What does fiction and nonfiction have in common?

Oftentimes, an elaborate work of fiction has more in common with nonfiction than a simple fairy tale or children’s book. Examples of shared traits include: 

• Major literary publishers ( e.g., Hachette Books and HarperCollins )
• Photographic and illustrated book covers
• Stylistic elements such as an index, glossary, or citations
• Themes involving history, mythology, and science
• Creative prose narratives 

Prose narratives of fiction vs. nonfiction

According to The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms , we can narrowly distinguish fiction from nonfiction through the use of “prose narratives,” a term that refers to an author’s storytelling form.

For works of fiction , authors typically use prose narratives such as the novel , novella , or short story . But for nonfiction books, prose narratives take the form of biographies , expository , letters , essays, and more. 

Prose narratives of fiction

A novel is a long, fictional story that involves several characters with an established motivation, different locations, and an intricate plot. Examples of novels include: 

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beloved by Tony Morrison 

A novel is not the same as a novella , which is a shorter fictional account that ranges between 50-100 pages long. You’ve likely heard of novellas such as: 

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Animal Farm by George Orwell 

Lastly, the short story normally contains 1,000-10,000 words and focuses on one event or length of time, such as: 

• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe
• The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin 

Prose narratives of nonfiction

Since nonfiction represents real people, experiences, or events, the most common prose narratives of nonfiction include: 

• Biographies
• Autobiographies
• Journals 
• Essays 
• Informational texts 

Biographies and autobiographies

A biography is written about another person, while an autobiography’s author tells the story of their own life. Popular biographies include: 

• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 

The difference between the two modes of nonfiction is further illustrated with autobiographies such as: 

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass 
• I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Was Shot by Malala Yousafzai 

Journals and letters

Journals , diaries , and letters provide a glimpse into someone’s life at a particular moment. Diaries and letters are great resources for historical contexts, and especially for periods involving war or political scandals. 

Journal and letters examples: 

• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Ever Yours: The Essential Letters by Vincent van Gogh

Essay writing

By definition, an essay is a short piece of writing that explores a specific subject, such as philosophy, science, or current events. We read essays within magazines, websites, scholarly journals, or through a published collection of essays.

Essay examples: 

• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
• The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison 

Informational texts

Informational texts present clear, objective facts about a particular subject, and often take the form of periodicals, news articles, textbooks, printables, or instruction manuals. The difference between informational texts and biographical writing is that biographies possess a range of subjectivity toward a topic, while informational writing is purely educational.

Publishers of informational texts also tailor their writing toward an audience’s reading comprehension. For instance, instructions for first-grade reading levels use different vocabularies than a textbook for college students. The key similarity is that informational writing is clear and educational.

Genres of fiction vs. nonfiction

The French term genre means “kind” or “type,” and genres organize different styles, forms, or subjects of literature. Some sources believe fiction is categorized by genre fiction and literary fiction , while others believe that literary fiction is a subgenre of fiction itself. The same arguments exist within nonfiction genres, except nonfiction is organized by subject matter or writing style. 

Whichever way you look at it, all nonfiction and fiction have distinct genres and subgenres that overlap, and there’s no single way to categorize literature without spurring controversy. If you’re ever doubtful about a particular book, try checking the publisher’s website. 

What is literary fiction ?

If we stick to the dry characteristics of literary fiction , we can define it as any writing that produces an underlying commentary on the human condition. More specifically, literary fiction often involves a metaphorical , poetic narrative or critique around topics such as war, gender, race, sex, economy, or political ideologies.

Literary fiction examples: 

• Quicksand by Nella Larsen 
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera 
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty

What is genre fiction ?

Broadly speaking, genre fiction (or popular fiction ) is any writing with a specific theme and the author’s marketability toward a particular audience (aka, the novel is likely a part of a book series). The most common genres of “ genre fiction ” include: 

• Science Fiction
• Suspense/Thriller

Crime fiction and mystery

Crime fiction and mystery novels focus on the motivation of police, detectives, or criminals during an investigation. Four major subgenres of crime fiction and mystery include detective novels, cozy mysteries, caper stories, and police procedurals. 

Crime fiction and mystery examples: 

• The Godfather by Mario Puzo 
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson 

The fantasy genre traditionally occurs in medieval-esque settings and often includes mythical creatures such as wizards, elves, and dragons. 

Fantasy examples: 

• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

The romance genre features stories about romantic relationships with a focus on intimate details. Romance themes often involve betrayal or heroism and elements of sensuality, idealism, morality, and desire. 

Romance examples: 

• Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris 
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James 

Science fiction

Science fiction is one of the largest growing genres because it encompasses several subgenres, such as dystopian, apocalyptic, superhero, or space travel themes. All sci-fi novels incorporate real or imagined scientific concepts within the past, future, or a different dimension of time. 

Science fiction examples: 

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler 
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Suspense and horror

Sometimes described as two separate genres, suspense and horror writing focuses on the pursuit and escape of a main character or villain. Suspense writing uses cliffhangers to “grip” readers, but we can distinguish the horror genre through supernatural, demonic, or occult themes. 

Suspense and horror examples: 

• The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris 
• The Shining by Stephen King

Genres of nonfiction

Finally, we meet again in the nonfiction section. When it comes to nonfiction literature, the most common genres include:

• Autobiography/Biography (see “prose narratives” )

Narrative nonfiction

A memoir recounts the memories and experiences for a specific timeline in an author’s life. But unlike an autobiography, a memoir is less chronological and depends on memories and emotions rather than fact-checked research. 

Memoir examples:

• Wild by Cheryl Strayed 
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 

Self-help writing focuses on delivering a lesson plan for self-improvement. Authors of self-help books describe experiences like a memoir, but the overall purpose is to teach readers a skill that the author possesses. 

Self-help examples: 

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The expository genre introduces or “ exposes ,” a complex subject to readers in an understandable manner. Expository books often take the form of children’s books to provide a clear, educational summary on topics such as history and science. 

Examples of adult vs. children’s expository books include: 

• Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• A Black Hole is Not a Hole by Carolyn Cinami Decristofano 

Narrative nonfiction (or “ creative nonfiction ”) tells a true story in the form of literary fiction. In this case, the author presents an autobiography or biography with an emphasis on storytelling over chronology. 

The line between creative nonfiction and literary fiction is thin when the narrative’s presentation is too subjective, and when specific facts are omitted or exaggerated. Literary scholars refer to such works as “ faction ,” a portmanteau word for writing that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction (Murfin 177). 

Narrative nonfiction examples: 

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Additional resources for nonfiction vs. fiction ?

Understanding the elements of fiction vs. nonfiction writing is a common core standard for language arts (ELA) programs. If you’re looking to learn specific forms of fiction and nonfiction writing, The Word Counter provides additional articles, such as:

• Transition Words: How, When, and Why to Use Them
• What Are the Most Cringe-Worthy English Grammar Mistakes?
• Italics and Underlining: Titles of Books

Test Yourself!

Before you visit your next writing workshop, class discussion, or literacy center, test how well you understand the difference between fiction and nonfiction with the following multiple-choice questions (no peeking into Google!) 

• True or false: An author’s imagination does not invent nonfiction writing. a. True b. False
• Which term is synonymous with fiction? a. Fact b. Fable c. Reality d. None of the above
• Which is a type of nonfiction writing?  a. Novels b. Memoirs c. Novellas d. Short stories 
• Which is not a trait of literary fiction?  a. Underlying commentary on the human condition b. Poetic narrative c. Social and political commentary d. None of the above
• Which genre of nonfiction is the closest to literary fiction? a. Memoirs b. Expository  c. Narrative nonfiction d. Self-help

Photo credits:

[1] Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash [2] Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon on Unsplash

• “ Essay .” Lexico , Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “ Fiction .” The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Inc., 2020.
• MasterClass. “ What Is the Mystery Genre? Learn About Mystery and Crime Fiction, Plus 6 Tips for Writing a Mystery Novel .” MasterClass , 15 Aug 2019. 
• Mazzeo, T.J. “ Writing Creative Nonfiction .” The Great Courses , 2012, pp.4. 
• Murfin, R., Supryia M. Ray. “ The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms .” Third Ed, Bedford/St. Martins , 2009, pp. 177-340. 
• “ Nonfiction .” Lexico , Oxford University Press, 2020.World Heritage Encyclopedia. “ List of Literary Genres .” World Library Foundation , 2020.

Alanna Madden

Alanna Madden is a freelance writer and editor from Portland, Oregon. Alanna specializes in data and news reporting and enjoys writing about art, culture, and STEM-related topics. I can be found on Linkedin .

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Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Literature Types (Compared)

• by Team Experts
• July 2, 2023 July 3, 2023

Discover the surprising differences between fiction and nonfiction literature types in this eye-opening comparison.

In conclusion, literature types are an essential aspect of written works that help readers understand the content, style, and purpose of a particular piece. Fiction and nonfiction are two major literature types that differ in their narrative style and content. Fiction includes imaginary stories and creative writing, while nonfiction includes fact-based writing and informational texts. Understanding these literature types and their differences can help readers choose the right book for their needs.

What are the Different Literary Types?

Narrative style in fiction and nonfiction writing, real-life events in nonfiction vs creative writing in fiction, informational texts: understanding their role in literature, common mistakes and misconceptions.

Overall, understanding the differences in narrative style between fiction and nonfiction writing is crucial for effective storytelling . While some elements may overlap, such as plot structure and conflict, the use of characterization, dialogue, imagery, tone, mood, setting, theme, foreshadowing, flashback, symbolism, irony, and climax differ greatly between the two styles . It is important to consider these elements when choosing a narrative style and to use them effectively to engage and captivate the reader.

Overall, the key difference between real-life events in nonfiction and creative writing in fiction is the purpose of the writing and the level of fictionalization. Nonfiction aims to inform and educate readers about real-life events, while fiction aims to entertain and engage readers through creative writing. Nonfiction requires accurate and reliable information about real-life events, while fiction requires creative ideas and imaginative storytelling. Nonfiction should be based on real-life events and should not be overly fictionalized, while fiction can be completely made up or based on real-life events with varying degrees of fictionalization. Both nonfiction and fiction require editing and revision to improve the clarity, coherence, and effectiveness of the writing.

Overall, understanding the role of informational texts in literature can provide readers with valuable knowledge and insights on various topics. However, it is important to approach these texts with a critical eye and consider the potential risks of biased or false information. By analyzing the purpose, type, structure, credibility , audience, and impact of informational texts, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the world around them.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Introduction

“We sailed out of Miles River for Baltimore on a Saturday morning. I remember only the day of the week, for at that time I had no knowledge of the days of the month, nor the months of the year. On setting sail, I walked aft, and gave to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation what I hoped would be my last look. I then placed myself in the bows of the sloop, and there spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead, interesting myself in what was in the distance rather than in things near by or behind.”

When you read the excerpt above, how do you categorize it? In other words, do you identify it as fiction or nonfiction? It can be difficult to discern the difference, especially with narrative nonfiction. The excerpt above comes from “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” one of the most renowned memoirs of the nineteenth-century. However, if you identified elements that seem familiar from your readings of fiction, you would not be misguided. Creative nonfiction, like fiction, features a narrator, scenes, setting, and plot. What distinguishes nonfiction from fact? Ultimately, little more than that the writer purports to be relaying a true story.

Nonfiction vs. Fiction

Is all fiction literature is all nonfiction literature.

Fiction refers to literature created from the imagination. Mysteries, science fiction, romance, fantasy, chick lit, crime thrillers are all fiction genres. Whether or not all of these genres should be considered “literature” is a matter of opinion. Some of these fiction genres are taught in literature classrooms and some are not usually taught, considered more to be reading for entertainment. Works often taught in literature classrooms are referred to as “literary fiction” including classics by Dickens, Austen, Twain, and Poe, for example.

Like fiction, non-fiction also has a sub-genre called “literary nonfiction” that refers to literature based on fact but written in creative way, making it as enjoyable to read as fiction. Of course there are MANY other types of nonfiction such as cookbooks, fitness articles, crafting manuals, etc. which are not “literature,” meaning not the types of works we would study in a literature classroom. However, you may not be aware of the many types of nonfiction we would study, such as biography, memoir or autobiography, essays, speeches, and humor. Of these literary nonfiction genres, they can be long like a book or series of books or short like an essay or journal entry. Some examples of these you are already familiar with, like The Diary of Anne Frank or Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. These works of literary nonfiction have character, setting, plot, conflict, figurative language, and theme just like literary fiction.

Clarification: The test of categorizing a work between fiction and nonfiction is not whether there is proof the story is true, but whether it CLAIMS to be true. For example, someone writing a first hand account of being abducted by aliens would be classified in the nonfiction section, meaning the author claims it really happened. Further, a story in which imaginary characters are set into real historical events is still classified as fiction.

Introduction to Literature. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-introliterature/chapter/introduction-to-nonfiction/

“Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.” Licensed under Standard Youtube License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPOWTIHOln8

There are many types of fiction and there are many types of nonfiction. Sometimes, distinguishing between the genres is easy. For example, it would be difficult to confuse a mystery novel with a cookbook or a romance novel with an encyclopedia. Where the differentiation becomes more difficult is in instances of creative nonfiction that uses narrative. This is sometimes called narrative nonfiction.

Narrative nonfiction has a lot in common with literary fiction. Literary fiction simply refers to literature, those works that do not ascribe to be part of a sub-genre such as mystery or crime. You’re probably familiar with many works of literature or literary fiction. Novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Catcher in the Rye are all examples of literary fiction.

What these texts have in common with nonfiction is the usage of key literary elements. These elements—a narrator, setting, characterization, plot, and theme—help nonfiction writers create memoirs, personal essays, autobiographies, and biographies that are just as captivating as their fictional counterparts. What might make them even more compelling than some fiction is, of course, the fact that purport to represent lived life.

ENG134 – Literary Genres Copyright © by The American Women's College and Jessica Egan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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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!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
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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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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)

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

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

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On opening essays, conference talks, and jam jars.

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The Five Types or Levels of Narrative and Story

What’s a narrative? What’s a story? Aren’t they the same thing? These are the questions that will be answered here. We will examine and compare five types of narrative and discover how they relate to story. We will look at narrative stories, personal narrative essays, narrative non-fiction, plus another two types of narrative. But first, a story inside of a story…

Arthur, mighty captain of his high school chess club, sauntered in dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, “Mom! Dad! You’re home early! What are you–?”

In unison, Arthur’s parents cried out, “What happened here?! What’s going on?!”

Arthur, a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead, replied, “Ohh… now… that’s a good question. I’m glad you asked. Well… I’ll be honest with you. I mean… let me be honest with you. You see, there once was this chess-club geek from a fine, upstanding family. Naturally, he was happy with his station in life, or so he thought. But then one day, while studying Bobby Fischer’s astonishing defense strategy against Spassky’s King’s Gambit, he had an idea. It was an idea unlike any idea –”

Arthur’s father sternly interrupted Arthur, “Stop right there. Wrong kind of narrative. Tell us what happened. Now!”

A Narrative Tells What Happened

Put simply: A narrative tells what happened . As we can see from Arthur’s account, we have more than one type of narrative. Sadly, for Arthur, his lack of understanding of this fact led to even greater consequences. His parents were not amused or entertained by his narrative. They did not want to be told a story. They wanted to know what happened—that’s all.

Narrative, descriptive, expository, and argument are the four main genres of writing. Genre simply means shares similar characteristics . All narratives share the characteristic of telling what happened . If a writer is not telling what happened, it can’t be a narrative.

But genres are fluid. They exist on a spectrum. If a writer is writing a mystery story, the story must have at least some characteristics of a mystery story. Doesn’t that make sense? If a writer’s mystery story has all of the characteristics of a mystery story, it may be a classic mystery story, or perhaps, a formulaic mystery story. If the story has few characteristic of a mystery story, it may be better to classify the story as a thriller or an adventure story, or even a drama.

The following Five Levels of Narrative model captures the spectrum of both narrative and story and illustrates how they interact.

The Five Levels of Narrative and Story Model

I love the term LEVELS. But truthfully, we could also call this model the five TYPES of narrative, which is really the five GENRES of narrative. Here is why I prefer the term LEVELS for this model. In this model, for the most part, we move from STORY (Level 1) down to INFORMATIONAL/EXPOSITORY text. In fact, the bottom two levels are NOT narratives. While the bottom two levels use narrative or narration, their main genre is not narrative. Here are the five levels:

8   Level 1: Narrative Story 8   Level 2: Narrative Essay: Personal Narrative Essay 8   Level 3: Narrative Non-Fiction

8   Level 4: Expository Text that Is Narration 8   Level 5: Narrative as a Tool in Other Types of Writing

Narrative vs. Story

People use the terms narrative and story as synonyms. Actually, many people use the terms as if they are one in the same. This practice is unavoidable, but it’s not accurate.

8   Narrative (or narration) is the act of telling what happened.

8   Story is adding story structure, story elements, and narrative and literary techniques on top of narrative to create a narrative story.

Every story is a narrative, and truthfully, every narrative probably has a little bit of story in it. The point here is to think about how much STORY is in the NARRATIVE—you know, on a scale of 1-10.

Level 1: Narrative Story

In a narrative story, the goal is to tell a story. We have three kinds of stories: 1) a true story, 2) based on a true story, and 3) an imaginative story.

What makes a story a story? Here’s the answer in order of importance: 1) story structure, 2) story elements, and 3) narrative and literary techniques. Each of these topics is a full topic of discussion that we won’t get into here. But I will say this: If we tell what happened, it will be a narrative. If we want to create a narrative story, we must begin with a narrative story structure and then layer on story elements, narrative techniques, and literary techniques.

It’s rare that a person tells a great story without trying to tell a great story. Admittedly, sometimes we get lucky and what happens falls into a story format. Furthermore, some people have a gift for telling stories. They pick up on the rhythms of story without formal study in the same way that some people pick up on the rhythms of music. These people can see the story structure in what happened (and many of these people seem quite comfortable with bending the truth just enough to make it fit into a story format). In short, some people just know how to tell a good story.

A huge part of story is the intent to tell a story. As an example, many true-life stories have been nominated for best picture Academy Awards, and someone always complains, “That’s not what happened, exactly.” Point being: A story is not just telling what happened. It’s taking what happened and telling what happened in story format. A writer must find the story in what happened. Mark Twain put it this way: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” That’s not commentary on truth; that’s commentary on what it means to tell a good story.

Level 2: Narrative Essay: Personal Narrative Essay

Some state writing assessments ask students to tell a story, and some assessments ask students to write a personal narrative essay. Regardless of the intent of the prompt, some students will write more of a story, and some will write more of an essay. For the most part, the rubrics are constructed in a way that either is fine. This is one reason why it’s difficult to make a distinction between a story and a narrative essay.

The easiest way to understand a personal narrative essay is to think of a college admissions essay. Do you think they just want to hear a good story? No. They want to learn something about the student. They want to understand who the student is, but probably more importantly, they want to see if the student is self-reflective enough to be able to think about who he or she is. Surely, they want to see if the student can write. And when students use story elements, narrative techniques, and literary techniques, it demonstrates high-level writing skills.

Do you remember what Mark Twain said about story? “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Well, for a personal narrative essay, we may want to let the truth get in the way. Story structure is not the most important thing in a personal narrative essay. We don’t want to abandon story structure, but we do want to understand what an essay is.

The term essay has become a generic term for any short composition where students write from their personal perspective. The five-paragraph essay is an essay because students write it from their personal perspective. “This is how I see things, and here is my support and evidence.” This personal perspective is what makes an essay an essay. But most academic essays are, for lack of a better word, formal essays. Many essay enthusiasts say that they are not essays at all.

A personal narrative essay comes much closer to the original intent of the essay than an academic essay does. Ever since Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote his first essay—credited as being the first essa y, a real essay has been a reflective search for truth. The two terms most associated with a Montaigne-style essay are reflective and meandering . Why meandering? Essays meander because the truth is not linear.

Writers seeking truth must go where the truth leads them. That’s how we get to the truth. Montaigne was known to contradict himself in the same essay, and people loved it. People loved it because it contained the truth as Montaigne personally saw it. The goal of one of these types of essays is not to give an answer.

Please note: While we want our students’ personal narrative essays to be reflective, we probably don’t want them to meander.

A personal narrative essay is three things: 1) personal, 2) a narrative, and 3) an essay. In a personal narrative essay, the writer reflects on and tells a story of a meaningful event, and the writer discusses the significance of the event: Why was the event meaningful? What effect did it have on the writer’s beliefs, values, relationships, goals—self?

The Main Difference: Narrative Story vs. Narrative Essay: One only needs to read an effective personal narrative essay to see that it is different from a narrative story. The main difference is this. In a story, the writer implies the themes and theme messages but does not discuss them. The reader infers the theme messages. Even if the writer claims there are no theme messages, the reader infers some anyways. People seek meaning in everything.

In a personal narrative essay, the writer openly discusses the theme messages (the meaning behind the events)—it’s reflective writing.

Once again, a personal narrative essay is three things: 1) personal, 2) a narrative, and 3) an essay. Here are a few related terms and synonyms: personal essay, informal essay, narrative essay, personal narrative, and personal memoir

Level 3: Narrative Non-Fiction

Pieces of narrative non-fiction are narratives, so the question is this: Are they stories? Once again, three things make a story a story: 1) story structure, 2) story elements, 3) narrative and literary techniques.

Writers can add these three components to factual information about events and turn the events into a story, or they can remove these three things from a story and turn the events into factual information. Writers must ask these question: How much of a story do I want to tell? How much story is appropriate?

Do you remember Arthur and his parents? “Stop right there. Wrong kind of narrative!” Arthur’s parents wanted Narrative Non-Fiction. Arthur probably could have included a little bit of story, but his parents mainly wanted to know what happened.

8   Types of Narrative Non-Fiction: essays, articles (e.g., news story), narrative history writing, biography, etc.

As the list shows, we have many different types of Narrative Non-Fiction writing. These types of writing blend factual information and explanation with story. If the piece of writing is mostly or entirely factual information and explanation, then it’s probably better classified as expository (informational/explanatory) text. But if a writer chooses to make a piece of Narrative Non-Fiction writing a story, it will be a Narrative Non-Fiction Story.

In journalism, it’s common for writers to use the inverted pyramid structure, in which they place the most important information (Who? What? Where? Why? When? How?) up front. Well, that doesn’t make for a great story, does it? It may still be a narrative, but it’s not a great story.

In a great story, we withhold information and delay giving the readers what they want. We let things unfold in story format in order to create curiosity and suspense. When writers do this in a news story, it’s known as burying the lead .

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have now crossed the line and left the main genre of narrative. We are now in the world of expository, argument, or descriptive writing. As the hundred-year-old quotes below illustrate, this is how it has always been. Genre exists on a fluid spectrum. Genre is a classification system created by fallible human beings. It’s not a concrete model like the three types of rocks. The three types of rocks actually exist in nature

Level 4: Expository Text that Is Narration

This kind of writing is narration, but it’s not narrative writing per se. Although the events do take place on a timeline, the writer’s goal is not to tell a story. The writer’s goal is to inform and explain.

Although the writer will certainly try to write well and with style, the writer won’t bring in a bunch of story elements (plot, characters, setting, etc.), narrative techniques (dialogue, etc.) or other LFR ™ (literary techniques, figures of speech, rhetorical devices). Here are two quotes that span a hundred years that explains this kind of writing:

a.   General Narration/Process Narration: “Explanations of a process of manufacture, methods of playing a game, and the like, often take the form of generalized narration… Such a narration will not tell what someone actually did, but will relate the things that are characteristic of the process or action under discussion whenever it happens. Such general narration is really exposition.” — Composition-Rhetoric (1905) by Stratton D. Brooks.

b.   “Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/ experiments, or technical processes.” — Common Core State Standards: Grades 9-10 (2010)

Level 5: Narrative as a Tool in Other Types of Writing

In this kind of writing, the text and the purpose is primarily expository, argument, or description. But this does not mean that the writer needs to abandon all narrative considerations. When a writer starts telling what happened, they are slipping into narrative. Writers can ignore this fact, or they can embrace it and use it to great effect. Here are two quotes that span a hundred years that explains this aspect of writing:

a.   “Both description and narrative may be used for expository purposes, and argument, as in a lawyer’s plea for the conviction of a criminal, may be thrown into the form of a story.” — Paragraph Writing: A Rhetoric for Colleges (1909) by Fred Newton Scott and Joseph Villiers Denny

b.   “Students’ narrative skills continue to grow in these grades. The Standards require that students be able to incorporate narrative elements effectively into arguments and informative/explanatory texts.” — Common Core State Standards: Grades 6-1 2 (2010)

In Conclusion

Writing begins with having something to say and an intent or purpose. As an example, an advertisement is persuasive writing because the writer uses persuasive techniques because the writer wants to sell something. Point being: each of these five types or five levels of narrative and story has a specific purpose and intent. Writers must figure out which type of narrative writing will be most effective given the audience, the topic, and the occasion. Do you remember poor Arthur? He just didn’t understand this. But now you do!

By the way, if you need help teaching organized, multi-paragraph writing, be sure to check out Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay on the homepage. It’s the fastest, most effective way to get results teaching writing… Guaranteed!

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Create academic or professional success today by improving your critical thinking, logical arguments, and effective communication.

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What is “narrative nonfiction”, exactly? Isn't every nonfiction narrative?

I came across the term “narrative nonfiction” in the New York Times article titled “What should children read?” (November 22). It seems to be a journalist’s and book editors’ favorite jargon from the following sentence:

What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “ narrative nonfiction ”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways.

What does “narrative nonfiction” really mean? I recognize it is immediately followed by a definition, but I feel like I am still missing something crucial. Why the qualifier "narrative"? Isn’t it a given that nonfiction (story) is narrative on its own, obliterating the need to expressly mention "narrative"?

What is a typical format of “narrative nonfiction”? Or is this perhaps some kind of umbrella term for personal essays on daily matters and private diaries on the one side, and news reports and expository comments on the other?

• terminology
• literary-techniques

• 1 It's “in quotes” because it's not really a standard term. But you can read more about it on Wikipedia Creative nonfiction (also known as literary or narrative nonfiction ) –  FumbleFingers Commented Nov 24, 2012 at 1:39
• 2 This is a very interesting term which I would love to address. I'm afraid however, that anything approaching a satisfactory answer would require entering into tabu matters of literary history and criticism -- matters which also extend far beyond English literature, and are thus doubly Off Topic. A very short answer: you're best off thinking of this term as one drawn not from Criticism but from Marketing. (But I have no doubt that it will presently enter Criticism, if it has not done so already, since even Critics are not immune to intellectual confusion and venality.) –  StoneyB on hiatus Commented Nov 24, 2012 at 2:11
• 1 @Yoichi: I think StoneyB's probably right that it's Marketing rather than Lit Crit terminology. Personally, I'm a bit wary of films/books promoted as "based on a true story". The fact of the matter is real life is often just plain boring , which is one of the reasons people seek entertainment/escapism in movies & such. I'm sure it's possible to both "inform and entertain", but publishers aren't stupid - if there's any problem meeting both of those requirements, they'll go for entertainment every time, because in the end that's what sells. –  FumbleFingers Commented Nov 24, 2012 at 14:55
• 1 @J.R. Here you go: "Narrative nonfiction, as an artform rather than a marketing ploy, goes back through Gibbon, Holinshed and Froissart, to Thucydides and Xenophon, and possibly the author of the Court History of David. It's just a new name for good writing people won't buy." –  StoneyB on hiatus Commented Nov 25, 2012 at 3:18
• 2 I have a feeling, though am not sure, that the term 'narrative non-fiction' is used to distinguish it from non-fiction one might find in an academic journal article, a text-book, or a reference. –  Mitch Commented Nov 26, 2012 at 1:02

3 Answers 3

Probably the best example I can give you of narrative nonfiction is the work of John McPhee , who has written largely for The New Yorker . To quote from the Wikipedia article about him:

McPhee's subjects, reflecting his personal interests, are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting body development ( The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed ), the United States Merchant Marine ( Looking for a Ship ), farmers' markets ( Giving Good Weight ), freight transportation ( Uncommon Carriers ), the shifting flow of the Mississippi River ( The Control of Nature ), geology (in several books), as well as a short book entirely on the subject of oranges. One of his most widely read books, Coming into the Country , is about the Alaskan wilderness.

Like other practitioners of the genre, McPhee tells a story in an engaging, personal way that often injects something of the author's point of view. Often he even becomes part of the story. He once went on a cross-country trip with an over-the-road trucker to document that lifestyle, becoming part of it himself. You might suppose that driving thousands of miles in a big rig must be pretty boring, but McPhee finds ways to make it engaging — turning it into a story full of interesting details, observations, and opinions. For example, did you know that truckers don't use their brakes on downgrades except in emergencies? With the enormous weight they need to slow down, their brakes would wear out very quickly, so they have to resort to other strategies. McPhee tells you this, and also what happens to truckers who don't make it. Always it is a narrative told about someone by the person sitting in the passenger seat right next to him. That is what makes it narrative nonfiction.

Here is the opening paragraph of that book , Uncommon Carriers , taken from Amazon. It should give you some of the flavor of the writing.

I don't know about you, but that makes me want to keep on reading.

Why the qualifier "narrative"? Isn’t it a given that nonfiction (story) is narrative on its own, obliterating the need to expressly mention "narrative"?

High school and college level science textbooks are non-fiction, but they're not usually narrative. Yes, there are biographies of scientists and such in the sidebars of such textbooks, and it can be hard to dispute that "historical" descriptions of natural processes included within them are other than narrative in structure, but things like the introduction, illustration, and application of the basic laws of electromagnetism in problem-solving contexts is hard to picture as "narrative", which in its basic sense simply means telling a story.

Notice in your italicized question above the introduction of "story" in brackets. This should be "writing," as your source text illustrates.

• Only history books, and to a small degree sciences books in segments describing processes tend to use narrative. Most of the content is dry facts and dry relations devoid of cause-effect progression, which not only helps captivate (if well written), but also immensely helps remembering. –  SF. Commented Nov 25, 2012 at 8:24

Why the qualifier "narrative"? Isn’t it a given that nonfiction (story) is narrative on its own, obliterating the need to expressly mention "narrative"?

Not all nonfiction is narrative; narrative implies there's a story being told. Most nonfiction is tables of facts, it seems. At least, it was in the textbooks I had. Story was rather rare.

• Hi, welcome to EL&U. This would benefit from a reference or citation to support your answer. Please take a moment to tour the site and read the FAQ , and stick around. –  livresque Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 22:20

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English CSJM. Who Do You Think You Are: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop

Instructor: Saeed Jones Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students People don’t just happen. In this workshop-based class, students will explore the capacity of memoir and cultural criticism to illuminate their understanding of memory, connection, and self-making. This course is as invested in the craft of writing as it is in interrogating how storytelling functions within systems of power. Students will be asked to consider what the work is doing to us, and what we are using our own work to do to others. Classes will alternate between workshop discussions, in-class writing exercises and close readings of nonfiction by Lucille Clifton, Eula Biss, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Vivian Gornick, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Kiese Laymon among others.   Supplemental Application Information:  If you are interested in joining the course, please complete this application by August 12, 2024. A maximum of 12 students will be selected to join the course. The application requires a 2-3 page writing sample and a 250 work maximum reflection on why this course appeals to you. We will follow up with everyone who applies for the course by email once decisions are made. This course is also offered through the Harvard Medical School as MMH 709.

English CWNM. Nonfiction Writing for Magazines

Instructor: Maggie Doherty TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students

This course will focus on the genres of nonfiction writing commonly published in magazines: the feature, the profile, the personal essay, and longform arts criticism. We will read and discuss examples of such pieces from magazines large (Harper’s, The New Yorker) and small (n+1, The Drift); our examples will be drawn from the last several years. We will discuss both the process of writing such pieces—research, reporting, drafting, editing—and the techniques required to write informative, engaging, elegant nonfiction. In addition to short writing exercises performed in class and outside of class, each student will write one long piece in the genre of their choosing over the course of the semester, workshopping the piece twice, at different stages of completion. Although some attention will be paid to pitching and placing work in magazines, the focus of the course will be on the writing process itself.

English CNYA. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Young Adult Writing

Instructor:  Melissa Cundieff Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will consider themes that intersect with the Young Adult genre: gender and sexuality, romantic and platonic relationships and love/heartbreak, family, divorce and parental relationships, disability, neurodivergence, drug use, the evolution/fracturing of childhood innocence, environmentalism, among others. Students will write true stories about their lived lives with these themes as well as intended audience (ages 12-18) specifically in mind. For visual artists, illustrating one’s work/essays is something that I invite but of course do not require. We will read work by Sarah Prager, Robin Ha, ND Stevenson, Laurie Hals Anderson, Dashka Slater,  and Jason Reynolds. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Thursday, August 22) Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

English CMMU. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Using Music

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will think deeply about how music is often at the center of their experiences, may it be as a song, an album, an artist, their own relationship with an instrument, etc. This class will entail writing true stories about one's life in which the personal and music orbit and/or entangle each other. This will include some journalism and criticism, but above all it will ask you to describe how and why music matters to your lived life. We will read work by Hayao Miyazaki, Jia Tolentino, Kaveh Akbar, Oliver Sacks, Susan Sontag, Adrian Matejka, among many others, (as well as invite and talk with guest speaker(s)). This class is open to all levels. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Thursday, August 22) Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

English CIHR. Reading and Writing the Personal Essay: Workshop

Instructor:  Michael Pollan Monday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

There are few literary forms quite as flexible as the personal essay. The word comes from the French verb essai, “to attempt,” hinting at the provisional or experimental mood of the genre. The conceit of the personal essay is that it captures the individual’s act of thinking on the fly, typically in response to a prompt or occasion. The form offers the rare freedom to combine any number of narrative tools, including memoir, reportage, history, political argument, anecdote, and reflection. In this writing workshop, we will read essays beginning with Montaigne, who more or less invented the form, and then on to a varied selection of his descendants, including George Orwell, E.B. White, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace and Rebecca Solnit. We will draft and revise essays of our own in a variety of lengths and types including one longer work of ambition. A central aim of the course will be to help you develop a voice on the page and learn how to deploy the first person—not merely for the purpose of self-expression but as a tool for telling a story, conducting an inquiry or pressing an argument.

Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Thursday, August 22)

Supplemental Application Information:  To apply, submit a brief sample of your writing in the first person along with a letter detailing your writing experience and reasons for wanting to take this course.

English CNFJ. Narrative Journalism

Instructor:  Darcy Frey Fall 2024: Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. Course Site Spring 2025: TBD

In this hands-on writing workshop, we will study the art of narrative journalism in many different forms: Profile writing, investigative reportage, magazine features. How can a work of journalism be fashioned to tell a captivating story? How can the writer of nonfiction narratives employ the scene-by-scene construction usually found in fiction? How can facts become the building blocks of literature? Students will work on several short assignments to practice the nuts-and-bolts of reporting, then write a longer magazine feature to be workshopped in class and revised at the end of the term. We will take instruction and inspiration from the published work of literary journalists such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. This is a workshop-style class intended for undergraduate and graduate students at all levels of experience. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.

Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Thursday, August 22)

Supplemental Application Information:   Please write a substantive letter of introduction describing who you are as writer at the moment and where you hope to take your writing; what experience you may have had with journalism or narrative nonfiction; what excites you about narrative journalism in particular; and what you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Additionally, please submit 3-5 pages of journalism or narrative nonfiction or, if you have not yet written much nonfiction, an equal number of pages of narrative fiction.

English CMFG. Past Selves and Future Ghosts

Instructor:  Melissa Cundieff Spring 2024: Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site Spring 2025: TBD As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: “The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the page that way, the better for our work. That character on the page is just this shaving off of the person that was within a very particular context, intermingled with bits of perspective from all the time since — it’s a very specific little cocktail of pieces of the self and memory and art … it’s a very weird thing. And then it’s frozen in the pages.” With each essay and work of nonfiction we produce in this workshop-based class, the character we portray, the narrator we locate, is never stagnant, instead we are developing a persona, wrought from the experience of our vast selves and our vast experiences. To that end, in this course, you will use the tools and stylistic elements of creative nonfiction, namely fragmentation, narrative, scene, point of view, speculation, and research to remix and retell all aspects of your experience and selfhood in a multiplicity of ways. I will ask that you focus on a particular time period or connected events, and through the course of the semester, you will reimagine and reify these events using different modes and techniques as modeled in the published and various works we read. We will also read, in their entireties, Melissa Febos's  Body Work: The Radical Work of Personal Narrative,  as well as Hanif Abdurraqib’s  They   Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us , which will aid our discussions and help us to better understand the difference between persona(s) and the many versions of self that inhabit us. Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

English CMDR. Creative Nonfiction: Departure and Return: "Home" as Doorway to Difference and Identity

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Please login to the course catalog at my.harvard.edu for meetings times & location Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

In this workshop-based class, students will be asked to investigate something that directly or indirectly connects everyone: what it means to leave a place, or one's home, or one's land, and to return to it, willingly or unwillingly. This idea is inherently open-ended because physical spaces are, of course, not our only means of departure and/or return-- but also our politics, our genders, our relationships with power, and our very bodies. Revolution, too, surrounds us, on both larger and private scales, as does looking back on what once was, what caused that initial departure. Students will approach "home" as both a literal place and a figurative mindscape. We will read essays by Barbara Ehrenreich, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Sajé, Elena Passarello, Hanif Abdurraqib, Alice Wong, and Eric L. Muller, among others. Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 2-3 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250-word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CGOT. The Other

Instructor:  Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

In this class, we will consider how literary non-fiction articulates or imagines difference, disdain, conflict, and dislike. We will also discuss the more technical and stylistic elements present in strong non-fiction, like reflection, observation, retrospection, scene-setting, description, complexity, and strong characterization. As we read and write, we will put these theoretical concerns into practice and play by writing two or three profiles about people you do not like, a place you don’t care for, an idea you oppose, or an object whose value eludes you. Your writing might be about someone who haunts you without your permission or whatever else gets under your skin, but ideally, your subject makes you uncomfortable, troubles you, and confounds you. We will interrogate how writers earn their opinion. And while it might be strange to think of literature as often having political aims, it would be ignorant to imagine that it does not. Non-fiction forces us to extend our understanding of point of view not just to be how the story unfolds itself technically–immersive reporting, transparent eyeball, third person limited, or third person omniscient--but also to identify who is telling this story and why. Some examples of the writing that we will read are Guy Debord,  Lucille Clifton, C.L.R. James, Pascale Casanova, W.G. Sebald, Jayne Cortez, AbouMaliq Simone, Greg Tate, Annie Ernaux, Edward Said, Mark Twain, Jacqueline Rose, Toni Morrison, Julia Kristeva, and Ryszard Kapuscinski. Supplemental Application Information:   Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)

English CMCC. Covid, Grief, and Afterimage

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site In this workshop-based course we will write about our personal lived experiences with loss and grief born from the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as how grief and grieving became a collective experience that is ongoing and persistent, like an afterimage or haunting. As part of our examination, we will consider intersections with other global, historical experiences and depictions of loss, including the murder of George Floyd and the AIDS epidemic. Readings will include essays by Leslie Jamison, Arundhati Roy, Susan Sontag, Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Matt Levin, and Alice Wong, among others. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Saturday, August 26) Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 3-5 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250 word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Barker 316 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: “The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the page that way, the better for our work. That character on the page is just this shaving off of the person that was within a very particular context, intermingled with bits of perspective from all the time since — it’s a very specific little cocktail of pieces of the self and memory and art … it’s a very weird thing. And then it’s frozen in the pages.” With each essay and work of nonfiction we produce in this workshop-based class, the character we portray, the narrator we locate, is never stagnant, instead we are developing a persona, wrought from the experience of our vast selves and our vast experiences. To that end, in this course, you will use the tools and stylistic elements of creative nonfiction, namely fragmentation, narrative, scene, point of view, speculation, and research to remix and retell all aspects of your experience and selfhood in a multiplicity of ways. I will ask that you focus on a particular time period or connected events, and through the course of the semester, you will reimagine and reify these events using different modes and techniques as modeled in the published and various works we read. We will also read, in their entireties, Melissa Febos's  Body Work: The Radical Work of Personal Narrative,  as well as Hanif Abdurraqib’s  They   Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us , which will aid our discussions and help us to better understand the difference between persona(s) and the many versions of self that inhabit us. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Saturday, August 26) Supplemental Application Information:  Applications for this class should include a 3-5 page (double-spaced if prose, single-spaced if poetry) creating writing sample of any genre (nonfiction, fiction, poetry), or combination of genres. Additionally, I ask that students submit a 250 word reflection on their particular relationship with creative writing and why this course appeals to them. This class is open to students of all writing levels and experience.

English CRGS. The Surrounds: Writing Interiority and Outsiderness

Instructor:  Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

The essayist, the writer of non-fiction, has historically been an oracle of opinions that most often go unsaid. They do not traditionally reinforce a sense of insular collectivity, instead they often steer us towards a radical understanding of the moment that they write from. The best essayists unearth and organize messages from those most at the margins: the ignored, the exiled, the criminal, and the destitute. So, by writing about these people, the essayist is fated, most nobly or just as ignobly, to write about the ills and aftermaths of their nation’s worse actions. It is an obligation and also a very heavy burden.

In this class we will examine how the essay and many essayists have functioned as geographers of spaces that have long been forgotten. And we read a series of non-fiction pieces that trouble the question of interiority, belonging, the other, and outsiderness. And we will attempt to do a brief but comprehensive review of the essay as it functions as a barometer of the author’s times. This will be accomplished by reading the work of such writers as: Herodotus, William Hazlitt, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Gay Talese, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jennifer Clement, V.S. Naipaul, Sei Shonagon, George Orwell, Ha Jin, Margo Jefferson, Simone White, and Joan Didion. This reading and discussion will inform our own writing practice as we write essays.

Everyone who is interested in this class should feel free to apply.

Supplemental Application Information:   Please submit a brief letter explaining why you're interested to take this class. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Saturday, August 26)

English CNFD. Creative Nonfiction

Instructor: Maggie Doherty Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Sever 205 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This course is an overview of the creative nonfiction genre and the many different types of writing that are included within it: memoir, criticism, nature writing, travel writing, and more. Our readings will be both historical and contemporary: writers will include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Audre Lorde, Hilton Als, and Carmen Maria Machado. During the first half of the semester, we will read two pieces closely; we will use our class discussions to analyze how these writers use pacing, character, voice, tone, and structure to tell their stories. Students will complete short, informal writing assignments during this part of the semester, based on the genre of work we’re discussing that week. During the second half of the semester, each student will draft and workshop a longer piece of creative nonfiction in the genre(s) of their choosing, which they will revise by the end of the semester. Students will be expected to provide detailed feedback on the work of their peers. This course is open to writers at all levels; no previous experience in creative writing is required. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Saturday, August 26) Supplemental Application Information:  Please write a letter of introduction (1-2 pages) giving a sense of who you are, your writing experience, and your current goals for your writing. You may also include writers or nonfiction works that you admire, as well as any themes or genres you'd like to experiment with in the course. Please also include a 3-5-page writing sample, ideally of some kind of creative writing (nonfiction is preferred, but fiction would also be acceptable). If you don't have a creative sample, you may submit a sample of your academic writing.

English CACD. The Art of Criticism

Instructor: Maggie Doherty Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site

This course will consider critical writing about art–literary, visual, cinematic, musical, etc.—as an art in its own right. We will read and discuss criticism from a wide variety of publications, paying attention to the ways outlets and audience shape critical work. The majority of our readings will be from the last few years and will include pieces by Joan Acocella, Andrea Long Chu, Jason Farago, and Carina del Valle Schorske. Students will write several short writing assignments (500-1000 words), including a straight review, during the first half of the semester and share them with peers. During the second half of the semester, each student will write and workshop a longer piece of criticism about a work of art or an artist of their choosing. Students will be expected to read and provide detailed feedback on the work of their peers. Students will revise their longer pieces based on workshop feedback and submit them for the final assignment of the class. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm EDT on Thursday, August 22) Supplemental Application Information:  Please write a letter of introduction (1-2 pages) giving a sense of who you are, your writing experience, and your current goals for your writing. Please also describe your relationship to the art forms and/or genres you're interested in engaging in the course. You may also list any writers or publications whose criticism you enjoy reading. Please also include a 3-5-page writing sample of any kind of prose writing. This could be an academic paper or it could be creative fiction or nonfiction.

English CNFR. Creative Nonfiction: Workshop

Instructor: Darcy Frey Fall 2024: Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. Course Site Spring 2025: TBD

Whether it takes the form of literary journalism, essay, memoir, or environmental writing, creative nonfiction is a powerful genre that allows writers to break free from the constraints commonly associated with nonfiction prose and reach for the breadth of thought and feeling usually accomplished only in fiction: the narration of a vivid story, the probing of a complex character, the argument of an idea, or the evocation of a place. Students will work on several short assignments to hone their mastery of the craft, then write a longer piece that will be workshopped in class and revised at the end of the term. We will take instruction and inspiration from published authors such as Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ariel Levy, Alexander Chee, and Virginia Woolf. This is a workshop-style class intended for undergraduate and graduate students at all levels of experience. No previous experience in English Department courses is required. Apply via Submittable  (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Thursday, August 22)

Supplemental Application Information:   Please write a substantive letter of introduction describing who you are as writer at the moment and where you hope to take your writing; what experience you may have had with creative/literary nonfiction; what excites you about nonfiction in particular; and what you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Additionally, please submit 3-5 pages of creative/literary nonfiction (essay, memoir, narrative journalism, etc, but NOT academic writing) or, if you have not yet written much nonfiction, an equal number of pages of narrative fiction.

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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 Create A Narrative Plot Structure for Nonfiction

By   Boni Wagner-Stafford

July 17, 2018

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As a non-fiction author, you may not know that consciously creating a narrative nonfiction plot structure is key to delivering a good read. You will bore your readers to death if you repeat fact after fact. You want to organize all your research and information into a coherent and compelling whole. Basically, you need to tell a story.

How do you create a narrative plot for nonfiction?

What nonfiction plot structure do you follow? Depending on where you look or who you talk to, you may hear about three-act, four-act, and five-act structures. You might find debates about how many plot points must weave through your manuscript. For our purposes, we’ll keep it simple and talk about the classic or three-act narrative plot structure.

Three act narrative plot structure

Whether you’re writing in the nonfiction sub-genres of memoir , journalistic, business or self-help, you will still want to create a narrative plot. Every story, including a true story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the basic tenet of the three-act narrative plot structure. We know these three acts as the set-up, the confrontation, and the resolution.

During the setup, you’re setting the scene.

• You introduce the protagonist who is the main character or champion of your main idea. In business nonfiction, for example, you are likely to be your own protagonist.
• You’ll introduce the protagonist’s world and what makes them tick.
• Then you’ll describe the event that sets everything else in motion.
• Next, describe the protagonist’s decision to react to that event, which is essentially the decision to embark on their journey. This is usually the first plot point.

The Confrontation

The confrontation part of the story is normally the longest part, comprising fully half of the manuscript. This is where the protagonist sets out on their journey and encounters obstacles along the way.

• You introduce other main characters, including the main antagonist who isn’t always a person. (Your antagonist could be, for example, societal beliefs, outdated technology, even a broken justice system.)
• You may describe the problem you’ve encountered and that you are about to solve, or explain how to address challenging customer demands.
• There will be some kind of major conflict about midway through: a big obstacle or setback that the protagonist experiences. You draw battle lines and the action, or intensity, increases. The protagonist’s decision to deal with this conflict is the second major plot point.

The Resolution

The final act – that of resolution – takes up the last quarter or so of the story.

• Here’s the climax, where the protagonist and antagonist face off.
• After things have calmed down, you tie up the loose ends and release the tension.
• You also emphasize the theme of the story and the lesson learned.

In nonfiction, you’re writing about events and circumstances in real life. They don’t always happen in such a clean, formulaic way. It’s perfectly fine to use the above formula as a guide and make it work for the story you’re telling. There are, of course, other ways to approach your narrative plot structure.

Other Ways to Think About Beginning, Middle, End

It’s common to think telling a story through the beginning, middle, and end approach means following a chronology of sorts, which doesn’t always work. In fact, sometimes moving things around a bit makes for a more engaging narrative. The beginning is not always the beginning of time, rather the beginning of your story. Here’s where you can get creative.

Manipulate Time

Say, for instance, that you want to tell the story of someone accused of a crime they didn’t commit fighting for justice. Following the chronological three-act narrative plot, the crime itself will come somewhere in the middle of the book. However, your readers may have lost interest by then, wading through the person’s childhood and events that may seem irrelevant.

You want to draw your readers in as soon as you can, so start the book with the person’s wrongful arrest. There will have been events that have led up to this moment and the reason authorities accused this person of the crime, though. The solution is to manipulate time. You can use flashbacks, for instance, to describe the crime itself, the reason your protagonist was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the police investigation, and so on. Your story will still have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not in a chronological order.

Circular Structure

Another option is to use a circular structure. Here you start with the climatic event that concludes the story. In our example, you may start your book with the day that the person is finally exonerated of the crime. It’s similar to the inverted pyramid structure of a newspaper article, where you start with the most important pieces.

However, unlike a newspaper article, you don’t give all the information right away. You want the reader to keep on reading to find out how things have led to this point and what the lesson is. So, you hold back. You start with the climactic event but you don’t elaborate too much. Then you use flashbacks to go back to the beginning. You always move the story forward, through the middle and on to the climax. After the climax, you tie up the loose ends.

Multiple Narratives

Often there are two or more narratives in non-fiction that are equally important. For example, let’s say you are writing about an issue like immigration. You want to reveal how different events in different countries have led to people’s need to leave their homes. Each country or each cause of immigration will have a different narrative plot.

So what do you do in such a case? Think about the movies of Robert Altman: he tells several parallel stories that may intertwine. Every parallel story has a beginning and a middle. At the end, they all flow together.

You can use a similar technique in your book: telling each separate story, maybe interweaving them and moving them towards the climax: immigration today. Then you picture the way forward to bring the story to a conclusion.

Why, What, How

Here’s another way to think about beginning, middle, and end in a nonfiction book. It’s one of my favourites. And that’s the “why, what, and how” narrative plot.

Let’s use a business book for this example.

• Your beginning may be the ‘why’: why there is a problem, why they should care about the solution you’re about to present.
• Your middle would be the ‘what’: lay out what your solution is.
• And the end could be your ‘how’: all your instructions to the reader regarding how they can implement your solution to experience nirvana for themselves.

Plot Your Narrative Plot Structure

To help you structure your book, it’s always useful to draw a diagram or write a summary in point form. Identify the main events or points from your research and see how they’re related. Is there one overarching story? Or are there different ones that you’ll need to interweave? Does it make more sense to tell the story in chronological order? Or would the story be more compelling if you started at the middle, or the end, of the timeline? The choice is yours. Just remember that whatever narrative plot structure you choose, you’ll want a logical order so your readers can follow and enjoy.

What’s your approach to creating your nonfiction narrative plot structure? We’d love to hear it!

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25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

A list of twenty-five of the greatest free nonfiction essays from contemporary and classic authors that you can read online.

Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot,  I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists  writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on  American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer  travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

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How Nonfiction Books Build College Research Skills

Raise your hand if you’ve ever stared at a blank Word document, wishing your college essay could generously write itself, perhaps thinking, “Forget this. I’ll have ChatGPT write my paper for me.” Yet many students don’t realize that nonfiction books often use the same research techniques their professors are asking for.

What is nonfiction? Whereas novels rely on an author’s imagination, nonfiction works are based on real subject matter and require facts and logic to make reasoned arguments. As such, nonfiction literature uses the same building blocks as many college research papers. Keep reading to learn how studying the former can help you succeed in writing the latter.

Separating Fiction From Nonfiction

First, let’s define fiction vs. nonfiction with respect to the writing process.

Fiction writing focuses on fundamentals like plot, characterization, and conflict in imaginary settings. Harry Potter doesn’t actually exist; Hogwarts isn’t a real school; and running head-on into Platform 9 ¾ is not, in fact, a good idea.

Meanwhile, nonfiction writing attempts to share knowledge or present an argument. Nonfiction authors put more emphasis on finding reliable sources, making evidence-based claims, and providing coherent analysis.

Understanding what is fiction and nonfiction matters because each requires different skill sets. And since academic writing is based on nonfiction techniques, it’s important to understand that nonfiction literature comes in many forms.

A Few Examples: Five Types of Nonfiction

Now that we understand the difference between fiction and nonfiction, let’s review five types of nonfiction writing. Each of these mediums is constructed differently and can cover a wide range of subject matter. However, all of them require a combination of structure and evidence to be effective.

This should sound familiar because academic papers take on different forms, but they are often assessed on similar analytical skills. The good news is that this allows students to pull from a variety of intellectual influences. Elaborating upon these types of nonfiction will show just how many resources college students have at their disposal.

The word “essay” derives from French for “attempt” or “trial.” It is a flexible form of nonfiction in which the author organizes an analysis on one of many possible literature topics.

As a common college assignment, the essay has defining traits that may be familiar to students. It begins with a thesis statement summarizing the author’s central argument. It follows with supporting claims, often in paragraphs containing topic sentences and strengthened with evidence. Effective essays are also charitable toward other perspectives, making space for counterarguments while responding with logical rebuttals. Therefore, looking to essays for guidance is always invaluable for students seeking to improve their own argumentative prowess.

The History Book

Anyone who’s been to Barnes & Noble knows that history books are perennially popular and full of dense research. With infinite topic examples in literature, history books are built upon letters, newspapers, government documents, interviews, and other sources obtained from older books or historical archives.

In that sense, writing a “history” is a bit like doing detective work. Students can learn from history books not just in terms of content – the actual historical evidence they bring to light – but also in process: the vast amount of effort required to organize diverse sources into cohesive, compelling narratives.

The Biography

The biography is a type of history book that focuses on the life and contributions of a specific person. As such, it requires the same commitment to investigative research and commonly includes, based on that research, some interpretation of its subject’s legacy.

However, biographies also frequently use narrative structures that readers can find in fiction. In following one person’s life from beginning to end, biographers have the opportunity to combine minute historical detail with the digestible language of storytelling.

That’s why biographies aren’t just useful for students researching only one person’s actions; they are also a source of guidance on how to communicate rigorous academic research through entertaining prose.

Let’s get even more specific. A memoir is another type of history book and is, in a sense, like a biography. The difference is that memoirs are written by the biographical subject themselves and are, as the name suggests, more so a collection of memories than a straightforward retelling of their life story.

While memoirs are thus prone to personal bias, they are not inherently bad resources. For one thing, identifying a subject’s bias is in and of itself a valuable part of academic research. Like biographies, memoirs also provide a model by which college students can learn to structure fact-based papers in narrative, often chronological form.

The Newspaper Article

Newspapers are among the most commonplace types of nonfiction writing and still provide a vital outlet for investigative journalism. As the “first draft of history,” news coverage can give students guidance on how to prioritize relevant information and keep background knowledge from overshadowing their research.

Journalists often structure their ideas like an “inverted pyramid,” putting their most important findings up front and asking critical questions – “Who?” “What?” “Where?” – before filling in details of decreasing importance. While distinct from argumentative nonfiction, like the essay, the newspaper article still contains a logical structure designed to communicate information effectively to the public.

Put Into Practice: A Few (More Specific) Nonfiction Examples

Having defined five forms of nonfiction literature in the abstract, let’s go over some specific examples of nonfiction.

As we cover these three pieces of literature, reflect upon their differences in structure, objectives, and use of sources. Think about their value not just in terms of content – any old study guide can list off facts, after all – but as holistic, cohesive contributions to academic discussion.

In other words, remember that strong nonfiction literature is defined by its readiness to make meaningful conclusions from clear, cogent analysis. Its ultimate goal, as with college research, is to “say something.”

Essay: “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” – Henry David Thoreau

What makes this essay so iconic? Among other things, let’s first marvel at how unapologetically Thoreau makes his case. His central claim – that citizens have the right to resist unjust governments – is stated right at the beginning with unambiguous language: “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

Weaving in provocative questions, exercises in logic, and references to slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau provides here a masterclass in analytical writing. Rather than give only indisputable facts, he delivers memorable statements that, crucially, can be debated. Thoreau shows that what’s worse than a disagreeable essay is one which does not say anything worth disagreeing with.

Memoir: Night – Elie Wiesel

One of the most famous Holocaust memoirs ever written, Night demonstrates that real historical events – the author’s imprisonment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald – can be recounted with gripping if also upsetting prose.

Being a personal narrative, this memoir does not pretend to give us a complete history of World War II. Instead, it trades breadth for depth; in focusing on one person’s experiences, combined with commentary on his loss of faith in humanity, Night reminds us that nonfiction literature can vary widely in scope. Wiesel’s story is one of millions, and yet its ability to “zoom in” on individual tragedy gives us, ultimately, a clearer historical picture.

Newspaper Article: “Kennedy is Killed by Sniper” – New York Times (11/23/1963)

Any research paper writing service can tell you to use a catchy title, but sometimes the headlines just speak for themselves. This particular article recounts John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath, organizing all of its moving parts – Lyndon Johnson’s swearing-in as president, Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest, eyewitness accounts – in order of importance.

Thus we see how, even in such a historic moment, the inverted pyramid model provides structure and flow to the story. Though still a work of nonfiction, summarizing real events from different perspectives, the investigative journalism on display here maintains its commitment to logical narrative.

Analysis: So How Will All of This Actually Help Me?

Ok, ok. At this point, you might still be wondering how a deep dive on nonfiction sources, replete with a few lovely examples, will actually translate into practical use.

In this section, let’s tie everything together and discuss how college students can use nonfiction literature as a template for academic writing. If you need college paper help and have been waiting patiently for concrete advice, know that your hard work is noted. With any luck, and perhaps even a bit of effort on a good day, you’ll never have to use ChatGPT again from here on out.

The Importance of Nonfiction Literature

Any nonfiction work is born from an author’s willingness to spend countless hours researching, editing, and thinking about a nuanced subject. It represents a triumph of intellectual curiosity.

And yet to make the most of literature, you have to be willing to read nonfiction books with intentionality. Passive readers will skim a book word by word, perhaps “enjoying the ride” but not critically engaging with its overall analysis. Active readers, however, will take thoughtful notes, not fixate on every detail, and end up absorbing more knowledge in the end. Graduating from passive to active reading marks a vital step towards appreciating all that nonfiction literature has to offer.

Applying Nonfiction Literature in College

It follows that college students who engage critically with nonfiction writing will incorporate its processes into their own academic writing.

After all, what makes somebody better at cooking: enjoying a nice meal, or watching a chef in the kitchen? Do musicians learn their instruments by putting on headphones, or do they go out and take lessons?

You get the point. If you need guidance on how to write your college research papers, you’re best advised by the contributions of those who have written before you. Observing how professional academics form sound arguments is the first step towards meeting their standards of quality in your college career.

How About Some Examples? Reviewing American Literature Topics

Just to give an idea, let’s look at a few American literature essay topics. If you need to write about American nonfiction for an assignment, these may be extra relevant. But even if you don’t, think about how you can translate lessons from robust academic works into your own college research.

Rather than just give more works of nonfiction, let’s also connect each subject to a specific kind of research assignment. Not every college paper is an argumentative essay, after all. By using these American literature research paper topics, though, it should become easier to visualize transposing these formats to other fields of study.

“Self-Reliance”: The Reflection Paper

We’ve already looked at Thoreau, so let’s turn to another giant of American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his classic 1841 essay on the necessity of self-reliance.

Imagine you’re asked to read Emerson and compile reflection paper ideas. Which arguments resonated with you? Which ones did you find unconvincing? Did “Self-Reliance” leave you with questions? Are there other texts, perhaps of Emerson’s time, that answered those questions for you?

The personal reflection format might require less formal language – first-person perspective, for example – but we thus see that it allows for the same commitment to academic analysis as a more argumentative assignment.

Legacies of Watergate: The Literature Review

At first glance, being asked to research literature review topics that other people have researched looks like an exercise in dull summarization. But that’s only the case if, as passive readers, we forgo critical engagement with scholarly debate.

Alternatively, good nonfiction histories often review nuances in historiography – in essence a historical literature review – before presenting their own original research. As an example, read how Beverly Gage outlines different interpretations of the Watergate scandal. If literature reviews still don’t sound exciting, just remember that your ability to appraise other scholars’ ideas is ultimately key to contextualizing your own.

The Civil Rights Movement: The Argumentative Essay

Finally, here’s a Socratic exercise. Argumentative essays often center around one research question, or “prompt”; however, as we’ve already established, students often struggle to transform that blank document into a sustained, nuanced analysis.

Asking questions can unlock your creative side and help you organize unlimited literature research paper topics. If you’re asked to assess the importance of churches during the Civil Rights Movement, just start asking. Which churches? Were they more important in the South? Did churches stay important throughout the 1960s?

These questions will direct your search for nonfiction literature, which in turn will guide your questions further. Before you know it, your research paper will not only have direction but the sources it needs to succeed.

In Conclusion: Finding Nonfiction Meaning in Academia

To review, we’ve learned:

• What does nonfiction mean vs. fiction
• Types of nonfiction writing
• Specific examples of nonfiction works
• Applicative uses of nonfiction literature
• How to connect American literature with different types of essays

Creating academic research at a college level is daunting, but it gets less overwhelming over time. Don’t panic if you feel stuck or confused by a vague assignment, but also, just as importantly, don’t try to reinvent the wheel! Look to nonfiction literature and see how professional scholars do it. Learn by example, and your efforts will, with honest, original work, be rewarded with academic success.

I requested the editor as I wanted my essay to be proofread and revised following the teacher’s comments. Edits were made very quickly. I am satisfied with the writer’s work and would recommend her services. I requested the editor as I wanted my essay to be proofread and revised following the teacher’s comments. Edits were made very quickly. I am satisfied with the writer’s work and would recommend her services.

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