The Elements of Narrative Nonfiction: How to Write & Sell the Novel of True Events

"I wish I had had this book thirty years ago, when I started out." --Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

Name some of the huge bestselling books over the years -- In Cold Blood; All the President's Men; The Perfect Storm; Black Hawk Down; Longitude; Jarhead -- and they all have one thing in common; they all read like novels. Author and agent Peter Rubie shows the reader how to join journalistic research with riveting, character-driven prose to create narrative nonfiction. This is the only book to focus on writing and marketing the narrative nonfiction "novel." (An earlier version of this book was published under the title Telling the Story: How to Write and Sell Narrative Nonfiction (Harper). This version has been extensively reworked.)

A writer of narrative nonfiction lives in a gray zone of fact and fancy. How to balance those two things is what this book is all about. What all narrative nonfiction has in common is a story, engaging characters, the promise of adventure and controversy, the revealing of secrets, peering backstage and behind the curtain. The ill-fated boat ride (A Perfect Storm), the illicit taboo of an adult love affair with a missing father (The Kiss), going into battle in a modern war (Black Hawk Down) and so on. But every time a journalist turns a real person into a "character" and puts thoughts into their minds, every time a reporter recreates dialogue for scenes that weren't recorded and at which the writer was not present, no matter how scrupulously those thoughts and dialogue are based on extensive interviews the writer enters a gray zone of fact and fancy. Just how "true" are these stories? How much can I trust what I read? Does it really matter? Those questions are the heart of what this book is about.