A Primer for Craft in Literary Journalism
Literary journalism is my go-to genre. It’s the genre of my two books, both about why regenerative rather than industrial agriculture is a better option for a changing climate. As most literary journalists do, I rely on interviews, usually conducted on the ground, as well as academic and other secondary research and my own analysis, in making my case.
I classify my work as literary journalism, and so I must consider the word “literary” in how I make that case. That begins with how nonfiction writers and journalists define literary journalism as a whole, and the literary part specifically. There is a long history–stretching back to Michel de Montaigne writing in the 1500s–of what we now call literary or narrative journalism, and also squabbles over the genre’s definition. Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff and writer who in the 1970s infamously sparked the definition squabbles, said literary journalism is journalism that reads “like a novel,” mainly because it features four techniques used by novelists: scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, third-person point of view, and symbolic details.
Since Wolfe’s time, we’ve added other craft elements to that list, including imagery, figurative language, tone, and character development. In contrast to hard news, which strives for objectivity in its delivery and neutrality in tone and style, literary journalism embraces style, and the author is invited into the narrative. Literary journalist Vivian Gornick described the importance of developing what she called “a nonfiction persona,” or “a narrator who was me and at the same time not me,” an imaginary storyteller that combined detachment with Gornick’s own perspective. Inhabiting the nonfiction persona, as she argues other nonfiction giants like Montaigne, William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Joan Didion did, allows the literary journalist to be both reliable and personal, to “tell the truth as I alone could not.”
Lee Gutkind, another early adoptee of the term literary journalism and founder of now-defunct Creative Nonfiction, explains creative nonfiction like this: “The word ‘creative’ refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy.” The spirit of Gutkind’s message can be found in the approach of one of the greatest—and in my opinion, the greatest—literary journalists, Joan Didion. Didion focused heavily on craft, down to the sentence level. “The arrangement of the words matters,” she wrote in her essay “Why I Write,” and the picture in the writer’s mind dictates that arrangement. “It tells you,” Didion insists. “You don’t tell it.”
The traditional understanding of “literary” in literary journalism as defined by people like Didion, Gornick, Wolfe, and Gutkind, and the parallel “creative” in creative nonfiction, centers around craft and style, and around the work’s entertainment value and ability to absorb the reader in its world. Creative nonfiction is “true stories well told,” as Gutkind says. There’s a value judgement there with the phrase “well told.” As if stories that don’t read like fiction, that don’t read “well,” are bad. In the traditional line of thinking, the literary is equal to the good, the value.
We may fall into the trap of separating the literary from the journalism—to enhance one at the expense of the other.
But thinking of the literary as the good or the valuable in journalism has, for some, been a license to think less about what a piece says—its truths and explanations of complex issues—and to focus more on style than on substance. While I enjoy work by Hunter S. Thompson, I put his writing in this category–unforgettable (if sometimes over the top) prose that forces the social issues he writes about into the background. David Foster Wallace, too, at times allowed verbosity, footnotes, and the weight of his individual perspective to disarm the power of his journalism. As Nicholas Lemann at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism claims, “Yes, literary journalism ought to be executed in memorable, stylish prose. Yes, literary journalists should train themselves in voice and structure and characterization and description. But these are techniques that make nonfiction look more like fiction than it really is. They tend to be overemphasized inside the small culture of magazines, publishing houses, interested scholars, and MFA programs… For writers, it’s flattering to be told that it’s really much more about your talent than your reporting, so this view of our work can be quite seductive.”
Most of us want our writing to be deemed good—and to achieve that label, we may fall into the trap of separating the literary from the journalism—to enhance one at the expense of the other. But Lemann urges us to see instead that “literary journalism isn’t just distinguished and memorable writing; it’s a valuable social artifact, because when done well it can lead readers to understand difficult, complex, inaccessible subjects that can otherwise play out outside the frame of active democracy.” In Lemann’s assessment, the purpose of the literary in literary journalism is enhanced truth-telling. Journalism that has literary qualities can often shed light more effectively on critical issues than work without those qualities. Take the use of “I” or first person perspective in literary journalism. That craft technique invites the reader to live the narrative’s events alongside the journalist, which can deepen the reader’s understanding of the piece and its ideas. The literary journalist’s option to tell all or part of a story from a source’s perspective can accomplish the same effect. The presence of figurative language–descriptions that evoke sensory experiences–makes those events feel even more urgent and accessible. The literary journalist’s ability to use nonchronological timelines not only allows for heightened tension, but can also deliver material in a more comprehensible and engaging way than strict chronology. These and dozens of other craft techniques work together to help readers interpret and reflect on complicated subjects more fully than traditional journalism can in many cases.
In this understanding, craft has a bigger job to do than to enthrall or entertain, to make a true story read like fiction or feel like fantasy. In this understanding, creativity is part of the journalism, working in service to ideas, not in service of earning a label. We can’t separate the literary from the journalism at all.
I didn’t used to think of it that way. But I’ve come to understand craft as a method for subtly persuading, for helping readers understand truths almost as effectively, and in some cases more effectively, than statistics or expert opinions, or moments of straightforward analysis. Because literary journalism is about making a point—it’s about showing the reader something important, revealing a deeper truth, sometimes without directly telling the reader. There’s usually subtle truth-telling at work.
When we think about truth-telling in literary journalism, we tend to think of evidence: facts, studies, quotes. But what if craft can itself explain, just as evidence can? Craft is not evidence necessarily, but it can have the effect of evidence. The accumulation of thematically connected literary elements has a snowballing impact and can reinforce a piece’s larger takeaways, all without restating them.
This borrows from a long understanding of how those same elements contribute to themes in fiction. It’s accepted wisdom that metaphors, imagery, sensory details, pacing, and the like contribute to a story’s or novel’s exposure of or commentary on universal truths—what the work is really about on a deeper level. If craft elements can work together to deliver a universal truth in fiction, then they can play a similar role in literary journalism, or any piece of creative nonfiction. Thinking about craft in literary journalism from this perspective broadens our understanding of the term “literary” to include not just a work’s aesthetic value or ability to captivate, but also to encompass how the literary nature of a work elevates its journalistic value and truthfulness—its ability to help readers understand something vital about the world and ourselves.
The accumulation of thematically connected literary elements has a snowballing impact.
An example of a literary journalist using this “explanation through craft” technique is “We Have Fire Everywhere” by Jon Mooallem, published in July 2019 in The New York Times Magazine and later included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020. The piece offers an account of a deadly wildfire in Paradise, California, in 2018, known as the Camp Fire. This essay is not only literary journalism at its finest, but also an example of the accumulation of thematically connected literary elements, and how that snowballing can complement a piece’s explanation of something complicated.
“We Have Fire Everywhere” moves back and forth between individual survivor narratives and sections of explanation and fact-telling, often supported by expert interviews. The essay’s goal is to illuminate the fire’s many tangled-up causes: its connection to climate change, the vulnerabilities of city design and overdevelopment, the poor way we’ve “managed” fire through suppression, the delusion of human control over nature, the fact that nothing really changed after the fire, and how the influence of profit and progress led to decisions that worsened the fire’s impact.
Take that last explanation. Mooallem points to a number of real, verifiable decisions motivated in part by profit and our American idea of progress, and he explains how those decisions exacerbated the fire. For example, there was overdevelopment of housing in forested areas, spurred by the idea that single family home ownership is a key progress indicator and therefore desirable. The electric company whose wires sparked the fire refused for decades to spend the money to harden its infrastructure against fire—it was too expensive and cut into their profits.
But Mooallem’s writing itself also contributes to his explanation about how the quest for profit and progress, these quintessential elements of the American dream and lifestyle, worsened the fire. Like this image of an American flag that one survivor, Tamra Fisher, sees as she attempts to flee the fire in her car: “Outside Fisher’s passenger-side window, the wind snapped an American flag in someone’s yard so relentlessly that it seemed to be rippling under the force of some machine.” The essay is exceptionally detailed, but even so we can reasonably assume that Mooallem couldn’t include everything he saw or heard as a journalist—so why this image of the American flag snapping in the fiery wind, and why compare that wind to the force of a machine?
I’d say that Mooallem understands that the image of an American flag under stress and at risk of being ripped apart conveys, in an emotional and non-stated sense, that the American way symbolized by the flag is also under stress and at risk of being ripped apart. And what is the American way? Profit, and the notion of progress that centers on material things like houses and cars and limitless energy use.
As for the comparison of the wind doing the ripping to a machine, that is likely Mooallem’s way of seeding an idea that comes later: that climate change is a force, a kind of machine we’ve set in motion through our actions, that will rip apart the American way just as it is ripping apart the flag. A few pages after the flag image, he writes:
“We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding… Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the twenty-first century.”
The snapping flag and the machine-like force now read like a foreshadow of this analysis. Stability, represented earlier by the American flag, is eroding or about to be ripped apart by the machine-like force of climate change.
Mooallem continues his use of literary techniques to reinforce the idea that the American way of life contributes to disasters like the Paradise fire. Many of the people who died during the fire perished in their cars; the traffic was too congested for them to escape. Mooallem could have simply offered numbers on how many died or settled with one or two car-related descriptions—but he doesn’t. Over and over, he shows us the burning cars and the clogged roadways:
“Her street was plugged with cars. A thick line of them crept forward at the end of her driveway.”
“Thousands of people were, on choked roadways, all over the Ridge, each sealed in his or her own saga of agony, terror, courage, or despair.”
“Some people were idling right beside other vehicles that were expelling foundations of flame.”
“The cars were still burning too, wherever he had deposited them, belching solid black smoke as the caravan of survivors slowly passed.”
“The three women wound up stuck on Pearson. As the fire curled over LeBoa’s pickup, she jumped out and handed off the older woman to another driver. Turning back for Holt, she saw only fire and two arms reaching out.”
A car, along with a house, is a crucial component of the American dream in which people succeed economically, indulge in materialism, live “the good life.” Yet in this essay, cars and the roads they necessitated are death traps. It isn’t much of a stretch to feel from these descriptions that the cars and their roadways are sinister, part of that machine-like force ripping the world apart.
Where does that sinister feeling come from? The thick line of cars creeping suggests a snake and the Biblical evil represented by snakes. The choked roadways evoke death by asphyxiation, and the drivers being sealed or trapped inside recalls how we are in many ways trapped within the expectations of the American lifestyle, a lifestyle symbolized by cars—which are now burning and killing people on the page. The belching car is off-putting, a description that invites disgust much like overconsumption of resources, and the caravan of survivors reminds us of a funeral procession—a funeral for the car, and thereby the American lifestyle it epitomizes. And that image of a burning car with just two arms reaching out—it’s a fact. Mooallem got that detail from an interview probably, but how he renders it is key. He even breaks the paragraph after that line—a craft choice—leaving us to linger on an image that, paradoxically, evokes a baby reaching out for its caretaker. In buying, literally, into the American notions of progress in a climate changed world, we put ourselves into a position of unprecedented, infant-like vulnerability.
Craft has the effect of evidence.
Let’s look at that other component of the American dream: the single-family home. Like with cars, Mooallem undermines the supposed stability of homeownership through the writing many times. One moment stands out:
“The houses had revealed themselves: they were just another crop of tightly clustered and immaculately dried-out dead trees, a forest that had grown, been felled and milled, then rearranged sideways and hammered together by clever human beings who, over time, came to forget the volatile ecosystem that spawned that material and still surrounded it now.”
It’s impressive how this passage marries style and substance. Because Mooallem is working with a big idea here: the notion of trees over time, and how humans can reduce a magnificent forest ecosystem into nothing more than dead trees that we rearrange to comfort ourselves and signify our status and success. The more human beings believe in their cleverness, and give in to the pressure to live inside the American dream, the less we see ourselves as part of that original ecosystem from which we took and in which we still live.
Mooallem didn’t have to use a series of active verbs and strategic descriptors like “clever” and “immaculately dried-out,” or rhetorically dimmish houses to rearranged trees. He didn’t have to personify the houses. But he did. Whether all this was conscious or not—with a writer like Mooallem, I’d bet it was conscious—the outcome is that craft has the effect of evidence. It aids understanding. It delivers ideas both stated and not. Like evidence can, the writing triggers emotion, which can deepen understanding. And this artfully crafted, well-told material is still true.
One caveat here: readers may ignore craft elements, or interpret them differently. This means, one: details must be as specific as possible to increase the chance that readers will make the connections you intend. And two: the journalism part, the reporting and explanation, has to be able to stand on its own. The point of the essay, the truth you’re trying to illuminate, should be visible without the aid of craft, but more so with it. The temptation, though, especially for newer writers, is to simply state an essay’s point outright. But it can be off-putting when creative writers tell readers what to think or feel. That’s where craft contributes to point-making. Coaxing the language, or structure, or pacing, or imagery to reinforce a truth you’re trying to convey—that is where some of the hardest work of writing creative nonfiction happens. It takes practice, and it takes failure. But when we are successful, we have the opportunity to reach readers, to provoke resonance and a changed perspective—and, if we keep doing this work collectively as writers, social and political change.
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Stephanie Anderson is the author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org, The Chronicle Review, Sweet and others. Stephanie is the 2020 winner of the Margolis Award for social justice journalism and a co-editor for the University of Nebraska Press “Our Regenerative Future” book series. Her debut nonfiction book, titled One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, won a 2020 Nautilus Award and 2019 Midwest Book Award. Stephanie holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction.
