Your Life As Story:
Introduction to Writing Narrative Nonfiction

Snow fell in the mountains outside Santa Fe this week. The aspens have gone golden and finches cluster at my feeder outside the kitchen window. I stacked oak and pinion pine on the west side of the house, and built my first fire last night. The flames leaped up the chimney, and the warmth snaked through the rooms of my little adobe.

Pause.

What did I just do in that last paragraph?

I told you a story. Sure, it was a small one, but it was still a story, a true story, a story from my life.

Telling a story is narrating. You do it every day. Narrative Nonfiction is the art of wrapping those everyday stories into a structure that moves the reader.

Narrative Nonfiction comes in many forms. There is, of course, the memoir which has garnered so much media attention, both for its gripping stories and for the controversy which often swirls around the “truth” of it.

". . . the “point” of a personal essay can be smaller, closer
to home, a reflective,
quiet moment."
—Norton

There is the personal essay, a related form, but one which is often shorter and pivots on a compact point, not like a college essay making an argument about child care or war, although the personal essay certainly can do that, but rather the “point” of a personal essay can be smaller, closer to home, a reflective, quiet moment. E. B. White was a master of this sort of essay. Well-known essay writers today range from Anna Quindlen to Dave Barry.

Journal writing can be considered Narrative Nonfiction. Most often journals and diaries are not intended for public consumption, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain stories, narrations of things that have happened. What sets journal writing apart from a more formal piece of Narrative Nonfiction is narrative arc, an element of writerly craft you’ll hear me speak of often in this space, and one which I will focus on again and again, because without it stories don’t work; they are just snippets of narrative. But more on that later.

Narrative Nonfiction includes elements of literary journalism, too, a kind of writing that reports on some real-time event in the world, but does it in a way that allows for more use of literary device‹metaphor and allusion, voice and scene construction than standard reporting sanctifies. Sometimes the reporter even appears in the story.

Narrative Nonfiction includes travel writing and nature writing, science writing and certain kinds of criticism. The field is huge and invites writers to express personal ideas and emotions, insights and observations in a variety of ways that sing rather than plod, as more standard nonfiction can do. The bottom line with Narrative Nonfiction is the existence of story, a narrative, winding through the piece of writing.