This document contains quotes from various journalists discussing aspects of narrative nonfiction writing and reporting. Some of the quotes discuss starting with experimentation to find an effective storytelling format; writing what you see and hear without predetermined intentions; dividing chapters into small chunks of 2000 words to prevent droning; following your heart to make the reader feel the story; and how careful reporting comes down to putting in the time and being empathetic with sources to get good information.

1. “I wish I hadn’t
thought I had to
be so smart.”
—Lane DeGregory in “Letter to a Young Journalist”

2. “Figuring out a new
storytelling format is like
writing a story. You have
to start experimenting in
order to figure out what
works, what doesn’t and
what you don’t know.”
— Chuck Salter, on his Fast Company livestorytelling project “Detroit: A Love Story”

3. “I worked in newspapers for years, but during
my last few years at the L.A. Times I really
wanted to become a magazine writer. I was
tired of writing around what I didn’t know.
And I really had begun to believe you could say
more that was true in good long-form writing.”
— Amy Wallace, annotating her profile of Garry Shandling

4. “My intention was to just write
what I saw and heard. I don’t
start out with any intention. I
think that’s a mistake that
people make.”
— Lillian Ross on her classic New Yorker
profile of Ernest Hemingway, “How Do You
Like It Now, Gentlemen?”

5. “He suggested I divide my chapters into small
chunks. Two thousand words each. … Two
thousand words is just enough to paint a little
picture and convey one small idea. The word
limit prevents you from droning on and on.
Later, you can flesh out a few chapters, as
needed — 4,000 words, 6,000 words. And then
you’ve got your 70,000 words.”
— Jason Fagone, author of Ingenious, on how to write a
narrative nonfiction book

6. “You follow your heart. That’s
what a story is. You want the
reader to feel first.”
— Tom Hallman

7. “There’s a skill to reporting, I think,
in terms of talking to people and
knowing where to go for information,
but reporting really comes down to
care. It comes down to being willing
to put in the time and to be careful
with people, to be empathetic; I think
that’s how you get good information.
And then writing: A lot of it comes
down to labor, just being willing to sit
down and work and work and work
and cross-write. In those moments,
you can be motivated by fear of losing
your job, or you can be motivated by
money, or you can be motivated by
deadlines; but the best stories, you’re
motivated because you really want to
tell a great story.”
—Esquire’s Chris Jones

8. “These are three levels of the story that
I’m trying to write in almost every line
of the story: the science, the individual
story of my character, and the bigger
story of the social conflict. So that’s
hard; it takes time.”
— the New York Times’ Amy Harmon, on science
narrative

9. “I tend, in my first draft, to
write 50 or 60 percent, and I
often do two or three writethroughs, which I love doing. A
lot of reporters think it’s an
insult to have to go back and
write again, but I pray that I’m
asked that.”
— the Washington Post’s Anne Hull

10. I can’t think of another
profession where you get
paid to just explore the
world.
— Lane DeGregory

11. It was a 15-month deployment, so
at the end of it I had basically
a 15-month chronology. That’s
when the writing begins. You,
first of all, want to tell a
true story. But you also want to
tell something that reads like a
story. And it can’t be a onenote thing. If this is something
unbearably sad, you can’t
continue just to have that one
note playing again and again, of
sadness. That would be
unbearable for the reader and
also probably pretty boring.
There’s pacing, there’s a
different tone — I mean, you
want a reader to read it.
— the Washington Post’s David Finkel, on reporting
and writing The Good Soldier and Thank You for Your
Service

12. While all the journalists believe in the value
of the work they do, they also talk about the
price they pay to do it: long hours, brutal
deadlines, the emotional toll of witnessing
grief and tragedy, and the impact on their
personal lives.
— Simina Mistreanu, in her piece on seven narrative
journalists about craft

13. You need to decide going into the story
which medium is going to be the leader
and which media will tell which part of
a story best.
— the New York Times’ Sean Patrick Farrell on survival tips
for multimedia journalists

14. Structure: How is the piece
built? Chronologically?
Does it move around in
time? Where and how
does the story begin?

15. “In Somalia, I’ve seen men whip
women with saplings. In Ethiopia, I’ve
seen a man hit a woman so hard with a
wooden stick, I heard the sound of her
head crack through the closed
windows of the car. In Kenya, I saw a
mob of guys with arrows and sticks
moving toward a man who had no idea
he was going to die that day.”
— NPR’s Gwen Thompkins, now host of the New
Orleans radio show “Music Inside Out;” from our
Featured Fellow series honoring the Nieman
Foundation’s 75th anniversary

16. “Oral histories celebrate the power
of the primary source,” Texas
Monthly reports on its Oral History
page. “For it’s the firsthand
observer to history and his unique
imprint of remembrances that are
the building blocks of this form of
storytelling.”

17. “Scholars often point to “The
Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and
Depraved” as the origin of Gonzo
Journalism—that wacked- out,
hallucina- participatory style of
Thompson’s that became fully
realized in Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the
Campaign Trail ’72 , before it became
a caricature imprisoning him in a
cage of his own creation.”
— Josh Roiland, on Hunter S. Thompson’s “The
Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”

18. The flower stalls looked bright
and pretty along the promenade.
“The flowers are all sold,
Señores. For the funerals of
those who were killed in the
eleven o’clock bombing, poor
souls.”
— Martha Gellhorn and “The Third Winter”

19. “It’s hard to do something
meaningful with statistics, especially
one so shocking as that, but Frazier
conveys the grand scale of New
York’s crisis.”
— Casey N. Cep, on Ian Frazier’s New Yorker piece
on the New York City homeless

20. “We don’t talk about
compassion much in
journalism, but here’s my
deal: You can’t be afraid to
care. And too often we are
afraid to care, and hide
behind this false wall of
objectivity and distance.”
— Jacqui Banaszynski

21. “Find motion in your story. Find a way to have
your character take you from the beginning
through the end or in some way bring some
direct action into your story, so that you have
movement in there that helps describe the
complexity.”
— Cynthia Gorney

22. Once asked about the role of
empathy in his own work, Ted
Conover said, “I guess I see it as
being about connecting to others
unlike oneself. Part of that is an
intellectual exercise and part is
emotional; if you work at it, you
can close the distance.
— from “On Crime Writing and Empathy”

23. “The contradictions are the conceit.
Saunders’s short stories and reams of
cultural essays all hinge on Major
Realizations. You won’t just get writerly
exposition but also Moral Import,
Aphoristic Snap, Compassion. There will
be several opportunities to break from
the page and dwell on the material
beyond it. If you’re in a crowded place,
you’ll begin to generously consider the
interior lives of those around you.”
— Shona Sanzgiri on George Saunders’ GQ piece on
the “Buddha boy”

24. “In 17 words, you
know the setting, the
narrative voice, the
type of story, the
built-in cross-cultural
tension.”
— Tommy Tomlinson on the intersection of Marty
Robbins’ “El Paso” and narrative journalism

25. Basically the reason I do journalism is I
still have this little-kid’s reaction to
stories that I see out in the world, and
it’s either one of two things: It’s either
“no, it’s simpler than that,” or “Yes, it’s
more complicated than that.”
— Tom Junod

26. “It was the first class I’d ever taken where the light bulbs kept going
off,” he says. “I had been a biology major, but I didn’t have a sense of
how it all fit together. This was like looking at a car as a whole system,
instead of just getting all of the little pieces. It’s seeing how the pieces
all operate in a person. If you understand the big picture, all of the
rest starts falling into place.”
It is a fitting place to begin. Students start with the foundations they
will use their entire careers — the map and the vocabulary necessary
to communicate with anyone in medicine.
But gross anatomy also provides something less scientific.
Students share an experience that will bond them long after they have
graduated, entered practice and forgotten most of their time in
medical school.
“This is an elucidation of death and dying,” Hoagland says. “It’s a way
for students who have never experienced that to confront it.”
That first class, on a Monday in August 2012, Hoagland tells the
students what he expects.
Get to class early. Be scholarly and professional at all times.
No flip-flops in the lab. No shorts. No iPods.
Students will work in teams of six. There are 36 teams; 36 bodies.
Don’t talk about the donors in the elevator.
Don’t discuss them at Starbucks.
“Treat them well,” Hoagland says. “Be good stewards of the gift. These
are some of the most altruistic people around. They donate knowing
what we are going to do to the body.”
— from Mark Johnson’s narrative series, in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, on a med school class’s
experience in gross anatomy

27. “The goal is not to foreshadow
events narrated elsewhere in
the novel, but to create a quick
and colorful backstory that
will help us understand the
magically realistic actions of
the character.”
— Roy Peter Clark, on the “narrative overview”

28. “Watching is one of the most
under-used tools in reporting.
It involves silence.”
—
Anne Hull

29. ”Stop being
boring.”

30. “The most important
(thing) is to be locked
down in the process.”
— Carl Hiaasen

31. “How is it that a film director who
had never written about sports was
able to compose such a great
piece? Ironically, it may have been
Allen’s outsider status that helped
him.”
— Micah Wimmer on Woody Allen on the NBA great
Earl “The Pearl” Monroe

32. <Are you glad you did the piece?/eg <I am.
Sometimes what you think you did, that you
think was your best, other people don’t at all
think that. And then you’re reminded again and
again and again that they like this and you think,
“Well, first of all, who am I to know?” People ask
if there’s ever a piece I wish I hadn’t written. I
can’t think of one. I’m very glad I did the Sinatra
piece. Sometimes you do what you have to do.
Since it was the only job I had going, and since I
had a 1-year-old daughter, and since I had
financial obligations — I didn’t have any money
saved. In 1966, my net worth was just a few
thousand dollars./gt
—
Elon Green and Gay Talese, annotating
“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”

33. 6) “14 Tips for Building Character,” by Rick
Meyer
“Build characters by showing their actions.
Sometimes you’ll be tempted to develop
characters by saying who they are. Show them
instead. Shaq was tall. That’s telling it. Shaq
ducked to get through the door. That’s
showing it.”
—
from Storyboard’s The Big Book of Narrative:
150 tips for the storyteller

34. “Part of what I like so much about this
piece is the simplicity of Wallace’s conceit.
He goes, he sees, he feels, he ponders. And
he writes 15,000 gripping words in timestamped, straight chronology.”
—
Brent McDonald on David Foster Wallace’s “A
Ticket to the Fair”

35. “Got to get the tone right.
Got to find the right word,
the everyday word, the word
people really use.”
—
the Chicago Tribune’s Mary Schmich, channeling
Elmore Leonard

36. <It’s a lovely opening, the way you inform the
reader of Gloucester’s population size,
geography, economy — and then, in the last
sentence, bring it around to the focal point of
the story. What prompted you to begin this
way?/eg <I felt like I had to get into the place
quickly and efficiently. I really like beginning
stories by imagining them as the beginning of
a movie./sj
— Elon Green and Sebastian Junger, annotating
the Outside magazine story that became The
Perfect Storm

37. “In storytelling what I’m trying to do
— this is Snap at its essence — is put
you where I am. To give you an
immersive sort of experience: Come
sit on my shoulder for a minute.”
—
Glynn Washington, host of NPR’s Snap
Judgment

38. “We come full circle to a captivating thought:
that an artist’s view of a city —
compassionate, challenging, inspiring —
can be as crucial as a legislator’s, an
executive’s, an engineer’s.”
—
Jennifer B. McDonald on Rebecca Solnit’s
“Detroit Arcadia”

39. “The Reporter’s Trade has the feel of a Hardy
Boys adventure, if instead of investigating smalltown jewel thieves, Frank and Joe Hardy
traveled to global capitals, attended state
dinners, and had a creeping suspicion about the
Communist threat.”
—
Justin Ellis, from Nieman Journalism Lab’s
summer reading list

40. Saito nodded to his catcher. He was about to throw his 942nd pitch of
the tournament, on his way to a modern record. Tanaka had thrown
742 pitches. If the moment weren’t so touching, so inspiring, if it
didn’t leave the boys watching it from their dugouts in tears, it would
have been inhumane. Maybe it still was.
942. Fouled back for a strike.
943. Swinging strike.
944. Chopped foul.
945. High and outside. Ball one.
946. Fouled back again.
947. Fouled down the third base line.
And then, at last: 948. Tanaka struck out, swing and a miss.
Saito lifted what was left of his arms into the air. Because he was
small, and because he looked as though he’d been broken, he wasn’t
deemed a kaibutsu. There is more to the title than endurance, than
simple suffering. A true kaibutsu inspires fear as well as awe. A true
kaibutsu doesn’t get damaged. He does the damage.
— from Chris Jones’ ESPN The Magazine piece on the
Japanese pitcher Tomohiro Anraku

41. … At the moment when we clamor for
more of Campbell’s unworldly
ministering to Martin Luther King
Jr. and the Klan, reconciling the
hurt with the hurters and
attempting to penetrate the soul of
“antipreacher” Waylon Jennings,
Wright brings us back to earth by
humbly acknowledging, “I realized I
had gone as far as I could go with
my guru.”
— from Win Bassett’s look at Lawrence Wright’s
profile of the Rev. Will Campbell

42. I’m always interested in not knowing. I’m
interested in being a student, of learning
something new. And I never really like writing
about anything I already know about.
Generally, part of the journey of the writing
for me is diving into something I know
nothing about.
—
Susan Orlean

43. “It was meant to be a
personal story. The
key was to make it a
universal truth.”
— Dallas Morning News Mexico City bureau chief
Alfredo Corchado, author of the memoir
Midnight in Mexico, a Reporter’s Journey
Through a Country’s Descent into Darkness

44. Here’s lesson No. 2 you got to learn about being
a reporter: You walk in with a good face. So
when you go in to talk to somebody, do not look
judgmental. I don’t care how much you hate
them. I don’t care if it’s a serial killer. Don’t look
judgmental. Show an intelligent curiosity. Nod
your head when they talk. Here’s one thing I’ll
do: Somebody’ll say something and I’ll go, “Uh
huh,” like they put it together for me. And they
could be saying, “I walked down the street to the
7-Eleven.” “Okay, I got it.” You want to make
them feel like they’re important.
— Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth

45. “I started taking notes very
early, not because I wanted to
write something but because as a
reporter, that was comforting to
me, to take notes, to sort of get
that little invisible shield where
you’re observing something.”
—
Kelley Benham French on “Never Let Go”

46. “An opening line
should invite the
reader to begin the
story. It should say:
Listen. Come in here.
You want to know
about this.”
— Stephen King

47. <Great use of documents in reporting. A report card
helping us get to know Natalie./ak Thanks for this.
Documents are always so much better than quotes, I
think, because there is no evidence of the reporter in
them. A quote about Natalie from the teacher to me
would have immediately reminded readers of my
presence in the story, but a quote off her report card
leaves me totally out of it, and doesn’t take you out of
the narrative./es
— from Andy Kroll and Eli Saslow’s annotation of “Into the
Lonely Quiet,” about the Newtown shootings

48. “What was innovative about New
Journalism? Mailer's ego. Matthew Arnold
coined the term in 1887. I worry that 1960s
New Journalism, a marketing ploy,
ultimately did great damage to the genre.”
—
Rolling Stone’s Jeff Sharlet, in livechat conversation
with essayist Leslie Jamison on the nature of literary
journalism

49. “Trying to communicate without
using any metaphors would be like
trying to complete a paint-bynumbers canvas without red, blue,
yellow and green.”
—
from “Better Writing through Poetry and Metaphor”

50. <This may be the first story I’ve ever read
where the writer professes to be aware of
— and sensitive to — a subject’s feelings.
It’s not very Janet Malcolm-y./eg The
Journalist and the Murderer is a brilliant
and disturbing book that had a huge effect
on me when I read it. It still calls to the
surface a lot of guilt and anxiety I have
about turning people into characters (as
nonfiction necessarily does) but also
makes me glad I write pieces that don’t
profess to be standard journalism; I can
write about the process of caring about the
people I write about; there’s space for
that./lj
— Elon Green and Leslie Jamison, annotating her
Oxford American piece “Fog Count”

51. “All these shows get into a realm of
audio storytelling that is fairly new
territory for us. …There is no question
that there is a rightful expectation of
NPR programs that they be truthful. …
How do we clearly identify the
sourcing of the material, and in a way
that doesn’t get in the listener’s way?
That’s what these growing pains are
addressing.”
— Eric Nuzum, NPR’s vice president for
programming

52. WBUR is … the Boston NPR station that
is using Creatavist for its Whitey Bulger trial
coverage. The newsroom had this “incredible
trove” of source material, decades worth,
says Ratliff , an Atavist founder. “The
challenge is figuring out to display those in
the way that actually conveys as a story
rather than just a collection of parts. That’s
our goal in life.”
—
from “Storyteller, meet Creatavist”

53. 26:04: Junod once said that his “Rapist Says He’s
Sorry” story “exploded his writing process,” Colloff
says. “I was so interested in that. We all look at the
people who we admire who write and we picture
them just sitting down at their computer very
peaceful, and they’re dressed, and in a good mood,
and they type a few words and then have a healthy
lunch and then come back and write, and stop at
five. It was sort of refreshing to realize oh, even this
guy, who talks about things like self-loathing … in
the process of writing.”
— Pamela Colloff, in “Pam Colloff and Tom Junod
talk storytelling”

54. “To gain entrance into John Hersey’s 12-student
senior-year writing seminar at Yale you had to
submit writing samples and something about
“Why I should be in John Hersey’s seminar,”
which, for writers, was the crowning class in
school. I thought I’d have no chance in hell.”
—
Peter Richmond

55. This is a hurdle. It’s an obstacle of
some kind — could be a bad guy, could
be a physical challenge, could be some
sort of internal emotional demon.
— Tommy Tomlinson, from “Everything You Need
to Know about Storytelling in 5 Minutes”

56. “In every piece, there
are themes that emerge
and must be wrestled
with. How do you do that?
You gather all your
reporting, you read it
over, looking for echoes.
You spend a lot of time
thinking about what
seemed to resonate most
in the moment. There’s no
magic to it. You put in
the time and think.”
— Amy Wallace, annotating, with Elon Green, her
Los Angeles magazine profile of Variety editor
Peter Bart

57. “He had these funny, interesting stories
but then he began to tell me about some
of his friends, also from Goa, India, who
had been promised great jobs in Dubai
and Jordan and instead were taken to a
war zone, to a U.S. military base. Other
workers had been hit by rockets and lost
eyes or limbs and had been sent home to
their countries with no insurance.”
— Sarah Stillman, on how she found her New
Yorker piece “The Invisible Army”

58. Nack makes you feel every moment, every
emotion, even an older man’s thrill at falling, with
a teenager’s passion, helplessly in love. To hell
with being unbiased or detached; this is a
narrator rooting like a madman for a
thoroughbred that belongs as much to him as to
every $2 bettor.
— Don Van Natta Jr. on William Nack’s “Pure
Heart,” on the racehorse Secretariat

59. <A procedural question that relates to organization:
Do you work from timelines? Also, how much of the
case was already laid out in court documents and
other source materials, and how much did you have to
go beyond what was already known, to fill in blanks?
Did you do any investigating of your own?/pw Piecing
together what had happened in this case after the trial
was a nightmare. There were so many hearings and
motions and letters back and forth between the
lawyers, and all the lawyers involved remembered the
sequence of events differently, and they described
everything to me in very complex legal jargon. I
basically pieced together a timeline after months of
reporting and then tried to whittle that timeline down to
include only the most important things that happened.
I tried to understand them as best I could—I don’t
have a law degree—and then I tried to write this in the
clearest language possible. And then it went through
fact-checking./pc
—
from Pamela Colloff’s annotation of “The
Innocent Man”

60. The snow burst through the trees
with no warning but a last-second
whoosh of sound, a two-story wall of
white and Chris Rudolph’s piercing
cry: “Avalanche! Elyse!”
— from “Inside Snow Fall”

61. I intend to spin you toward a certain
conclusion. The process is stealthy and
has already begun; it was no accident that
I called Dr. MacDonald’s stab wound an
“incision.” I have come to believe that
Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his family
and injured himself as part of a coverup;
I’ve concluded this both because I have
researched the case extensively, and
because, as a writer, I see exactly how
Errol Morris prejudiced his account while
shrewdly appearing not to do so. I admire
his skill but not his book. I think the
media have been careless and gullible in
reviewing it, perhaps partially because the
story of a grievous, enduring miscarriage
of justice presents a more compelling
narrative than the alternative.
— Gene Weingarten, from “Just One Question for …
Gene Weingarten”

62. <How did you decide how to structure this
piece? Is this version the one you drafted
originally or did you play around with
it?/pw This story has a pretty natural arch
– animals get out, animals get shot, animals
get buried, cops still can see the animals.
(That sounds more callous than I want for it
to, but that’s basically what this story is
about. It’s an account of a massacre. It’s not
going to be pretty.) I didn’t really mess too
much with structure. I just told the story./cj
—
Chris Jones, annotating “Animals”

63. On Sept. 16, 1963, he published a column
called, “A Flower for the Graves.” It is
argument, but it also has a story. It starts
with a scene, a moment in time:
A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday
morning in front of a Baptist Church in
Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe,
one shoe, from the foot of her dead child.
He introduces a detail that immediately
becomes a symbol: a child’s shoe:
We hold that shoe with her. Every one of
us in the white South holds that small
shoe in his hand.
Roy Peter Clark, from “Building Your Canon: SmallScale Narrative”
—

64. Write in the active voice, not the
passive. I’m amazed at how often this
still happens in my own writing. Avoid:
“to be,” “to have” and “to do.” And
make sure your verbs push the story
forward. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once
wrote to his daughter, “All fine prose is
based on the verbs carrying the
sentence.”
— Amy Ellis Nutt on how to look at your own
stories more objectively

65. “Get to the scene of a story as
quickly as possible and absorb the
story, its characters and their
dialogue in the local vernacular, at
ground level.”
— Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth

66. “So these are the seven
principles of magic, and I
think they’re the seven
principles of storytelling:
palm, ditch, steal, load,
simulation, misdirection, and
switch.”
— Chris Jones