The Art of Creative Nonfiction

There exists a major difference between recreation and fabrication,

I have had similar experiences, immersing myself in a subject or hanging around with a person until I could think of nothing more to ask or to learn. This is the signal that it is time to isolate yourself from the immersion and commit your experience to words.

The Art of Listening

attempt to write will reveal the gaps in your research, which forces you to return to relive certain parts of the experience, sometimes repeatedly. I usually will go back and forth three or four times until my essay or book seems complete.

Speaking in “Scenes”

Throughout this book, I have stressed the importance of telling a story through a series of scenes. It is essential to understand that although a writer may be doing something as traditional as interviewing, the results of good interviewing are also story-oriented, as in the above monologue. As an interviewer, I ask questions that lead to long and detailed answers that are turned into stories.

There was no need to dramatize or describe the hospital room scene: The drama was inherent in Becky’s thoughts and words, especially when it was discovered that the cancer that had necessitated the transplant had returned:
It is hard to say now that I am not glad that I had the transplant because otherwise I would have been dead a year ago. Yet so often I think I would have been better off dead, and that way it would be over with. Sometimes I think that all it’s done is to prolong the misery. If I would have died because I didn’t have a transplant, then I wouldn’t have gone through all the pain I am going through now.

Talese also does not believe in tape recorders. After his immersion is over for the day, he will try to get to a typewriter or computer as quickly as possible and write down everything he can remember about the experience he observed that day. He believes that tape recorders make writers lazy.

New Yorker staff writer Alec Wilkinson recently told me that he usually does not take notes during experiences he witnesses or interviews he conducts; he has to concentrate on the conversation with his subject so that his follow-up questions are sensitive and intelligent and he can maintain eye contact with the interviewee. After interviews, Wilkinson will jump in his car, drive around the corner and out of sight, and immediately commit everything he can remember to words on a yellow legal tablet.

Faxing can also be effective. Many executives monitor their fax machines, whereas underlings or secretaries screen their mail.

But by the time he finished the first draft of his book, months or years later, he realized that he was perhaps only half to two thirds done with the research.