Dear Transomistas,

It was daunting to have Jay Allison’s invitation to be a guest on Transom.org, because I’m no insider to radio production. I do work in a cousin genre – narrative journalism in print – in books, magazines, weekly and daily papers. There’s substantial overlap, but natural differences. A few public radio people often joined 10 or a dozen print journalists in my writing workshops during my decade as a writer-in-residence at Boston U. and some join my writing workshop at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

My writing seminars work on print pieces, and the radio folks are always among the quickest and most fluent at structure – at treating a piece not as a topical outline, but an assembly of sequential experience for audience members, arranged so the listeners and readers dip in, as needed, to some ongoing story, to background info, to other relevant-to-glimpse side stories, and coming back, perhaps repeatedly, to the main tale.

On the other hand, the radio (and film) people, when writing print articles, seem less likely to imply relevant nuances of character. And sometimes they need reminding to include a few just-right sensory details that nail down for the audience the immediacy of a set scene. Perhaps they sometimes do this part of print-piece construction haphazardly because in broadcast production, ambient sound and the attitudes redolent in a subject’s voice and recorded situation often accomplish that work in passing.

And it isn’t always clear in early drafts when the radio people intend some print passages to be taken ironically – as utterance to be doubted – a handy device to signal distancing from some character’s statement or to make the audience question a proffered explanation. The radio folks often justly count on a character’s or a moderator’s tone of voice – not words or specification of detail – to transmit the same signal quite forcefully.

Over the years, I’ve coproduced a handful of public radio pieces and a public TV documentary. I’ve learned from these few efforts, and from teaching radio people in my writing workshops, and also from daily life as an affectionate listener to our Boston public radio stations: WBUR and WGBH. These experiences lead me to suggest that we devote some time and space to exploring the role of voice in narrative work – appropriately, a term that implies tone, an audio matter.

We navigate the world taking in not just the nominal, stated, surface-content of spoken information, but also unstated, subtextual emotional cues, forceful but nearly untranslatably subtle information contained in tone of voice. This information about personality comes to us through phrasing and melody. Without even being acknowledged, it comes to us that this or that character we are listening to in a radio piece is in an emotional state of ferocity, or silliness or fury, despondence, detachment, lightheartedness, confusion, ignorance, authoritative confidence – these are just a few samples among many delicate, elusive emotional circumstances that determine a listener’s take on the meaning of a piece as surely as any list of concrete facts does.

I’m told that radio people use the term “voice” another way – as a verb, as in “I’m going to go voice my words…” meaning sit in the studio and record one’s written text – one’s introductory material or voice-over ambient sounds, or segues between actualities.

Here, the term “voice” is related to that informal radio verb, but it’s used, unsurprisingly, as writing teachers use it: Voice is the personality of the teller of the story. Defining it that way sets it up as something determined by audience perception, as well as issued forth by the writer – it’s an audience member’s ongoing, developing sense of the person who’s telling the story.

In writing your script, if you can deepen and broaden and complicate the storyteller’s voice, you can deepen and broaden and render more complexly human the content of the work.

Let me offer you a story that we might as well call:

The Night Of The Barking Dog And The Firetrucks

Throaty barks awaken me. I squint at the clock. Hmmm, it’s 2:17 a.m. and I’m now in a fix. I’ve got to teach tomorrow, and I have a writing deadline; I’m annoyed because I teach grumpily and write ploddingly on three hours of sleep.

Asleep and awake, it’s the nature of the human beast to scan for danger constantly, assisted by our delicate five senses, a portion of intellect, and adequate memory. A powerful narrative sensibility, seemingly hardwired in each of us, evaluates what the senses and intellect and memory divine, especially after one of the senses sounds its warning beep-beep that a danger threshold may have been crossed.

Beep-beep – there’s a slight smoky smell of smoke. Nope, no fire, just a cigarette smoker on the street below. I drift half-awake, jolted again by more of those barks.

I evaluate the threat by trying on a sequence of barking-dog narratives for fit:

a. Marauding wolves have come down from the steppes – I must barricade the house and find my axe.

Well – no steppes near here. I haven’t seen my axe in years; and anyhow, there’s just one barking creature – no pack.

b. My sons are up late, they’ve got “Lassie” on, and I must go shut off the TV or at least their bedroom door. I shuffle down the hall. Both sons are out cold, the one breathing deeply, the other snoring quietly, neither barking.

c. Hadn’t I vaguely noted – perhaps while walking home – that this neighborhood guy, only know him to nod, was out there this evening, being hauled along by a new, huge, high-strung mutt that was barking and leaning its way down the street? In fact, I convince myself that I recognize the dog-voice. The Narrative Way has reassured me that I’m not about to be devoured.

Now that story has helped me define and estimate the danger, a defensive plan springs to mind: Close window and find ear plugs. I sleep.

***

Brain scientists tell us that narrative is part of the scouting-for-trouble toolkit that has evolved right along with the human condition, an ancient cognitive skill that does for each of us what sentinels used to do for the towns they watched over from atop high encircling walls.

Sentinel work is awfully close to what journalists do, in the daily paper or on the morning news. Reporters scan the modern world and report to local listeners and readers. They scout for trouble, and also for that antidote to communal trouble – sources of social cohesion within a community. They report on terrorists probing our gates, and they congratulate the local ball team, covering in one short newscast, community danger from without, and community bonding from within.

I’m awakened again.

This time, it’s fire trucks squawking outside the window. I squint at the clock. An hour has passed. It’s 3:17. I recall that class I’ve got to teach and that looming article deadline. I feel for my spectacles, sigh, and peer out the window. The fire trucks are awfully loud, and they’re not even right below the window. They’re up the street, setting up a block away by some shops and old houses. That’s far enough off (I check this theory by constructing a few quick narrative scenarios about how flames might spread, or not) so there’s no danger. I pull a pillow over my head again.

At seven, as usual, I’m up, soon down the street in a line at the neighborhood coffee shop. I’m a dutiful citizen. That’s where I habitually ingest the day’s newspaper along with a morning latte. I also catch the news on the coffee shop radio, which is always set to “Morning Edition.”

And here comes that damned neighbor, pulled by the barking dog, which he ties up outside. He joins the line behind me. I want to complain about the dog, but find forgiveness in my soul and instead settle for asking, “Did those fire trucks wake you up, too, last night?”

“You bet they did,” he says, “First this new dog of mine wakes me, and then it’s the fire trucks, right in front of my apartment!” He points out at the street. “I couldn’t sleep with all that racket outside my window. I work as a reporter at the local paper, so even though I knew I’d be tired, I slipped on my bathrobe and slippers and walked outside to check things out…”

Well, this is downright optimal for me as a news consumer. Here’s a genuine local reporter, and he’s eyewitness to the cataclysmic ferocity, the sudden personal loss times the number of burned out souls, of an apartment-house fire. I ask him the reader’s basic question: “What happened?”

And looking right at me in general (I am news-audience now), ignoring me in particular (it’s his mission to inform the citizenry, not chat with his neighbor), he says in emotionless radio-reporter voice: “A fire at the corner of Third and Elm Streets destroyed several units in the north wing of Brookville Apartments, 123 Brookville Street. Damage is estimated at $800,000, according to Assistant Fire Chief Charles J. McGillicuddy. There were no reported casualties. The cause of the early-morning blaze is under investigation.”

And what do I do? I mean, this is a social situation. Citizenship is one thing, but do I really want to be stuck at breakfast with this wooden character?

I duck. I move away. It’s morning news time, and here’s the walking, talking morning news. One might even argue that I’ve lucked out and a local, reliable, factual, professional source, and like the rolled-up paper that comes flying onto my stoop every morning, here’s an earnest eyewitness delivering his account directly to the listening audience.

Nevertheless, I don’t invite him to sit at my table and tell me even more – for the same reasons that many people these days are not buying their local papers any more. Newspapers are in a business crisis (paid circulation declined 2.5 percent nationally in the past six months). Radio news has dimmed long ago on many commercial stations.

What happened? In his fire report, the neighbor assumed a formal voice of an official reporter, and in that role, he’d declined – sorted through and eliminated, didn’t even consider, perhaps – many crucial narratives that he must have sensed, that flare into being right along with a fire. No sensory report of searing heat and acrid smoke. No haunted residents straggling out, no little girl looking in at her orange bedroom window, no casual, professional firemen, detached from the sorrow and making order of mayhem, lacking the fascinated gleam reflected in the eyes of some of the gathering onlookers, not including one guy in a bathrobe with a noisy dog pulling at him.

This report cautiously mistook enumeration for responsible portrayal, mistook ignoring emotional content for remaining objective, mistook selecting civic, not personal facts for being unbiased. So the account left out most of the story – systematically strained out the parts of available content most likely to engage the listener as a person, although it indeed included material listeners-as-citizens should hear about.

But there I was, in line at the coffee shop, heedlessly, inseparably, unitarily and indivisibly being all of me, both citizen interested in addresses and damage reports, and whole person, interested in people and human consequences. The reporter/neighbor’s decision – which of course I set up in this tale to mimic conventional thinking about what constitutes news – is clearly no fun. And it’s not great for business, at a time when papers and radio stations are desperately searching for audience, to toss out the engaging parts, as if engagingness is evidence of triviality and ethical irresponsibility.

Fire has social meaning as surely as civic meaning, and the heat of its personal meanings matches the heat of the blaze. No talk of the dispossessed? No wonder about firefighting? There’s so much to say, a fine book to be written by someone willing to dissect the anatomy of a small urban blaze.

Still, the main reason I drank my coffee alone in this story is that the fellow’s lapsing into standard newsvoice left me feeling lonely. The voice signals impersonality. He delivered some goods, sure. He even delivered the illusion of fair-mindedness. But he wasn’t companionable. When I hear or read the news, I often feel officially constrained, kept back behind some cordon established for my own safety and the greater public good. Fine reporting, to the contrary, is a friend’s generous act, leading the audience where it dares not traverse alone.

And fuller exploration of experience simply isn’t possible in official newsvoice. That’s the point of it. It is drained of the personality of the teller, and there’s no one left, then, to sense, evaluate, and make the metaphors that explore what experience is like.

I have a term in my writing workshops for that sort of reporting. I call it sentinel reporting. Consider the names of newspapers: Bugle, Clarion, Patriot-Ledger, Sentinel, Tribune, Guardian. Sentinel reporting selects from the chaos of details about an event those elements that fit into a delimited “civic fact set” – facts that affect city governance, the work of the city, the behavior of people as public citizens – addresses, fire brigade numbers, names of officials, damage amounts, medical conditions, official cause determination. It doesn’t deal with quirky stuff, individual, moody stuff, not with peevishness, snits, depressions, triumphal, gloating moments at work, happy seductions, innocent drunks, unshined shoes, smelly bathrooms, compulsive cleaning of same, doesn’t acknowledge the excitement of a crowd at a fire – the stuff that fills our real lives, though not architects’ glamorous drawings of it.

Insofar as such accounts deal with emotion at all, they confine themselves to the “civic emotion set” – emotions shared by all citizens, basically, and given a multi-ethnic, multi-religious/agnostic, multi-class/multi-racial population, that emotion-set contains few elements: perhaps the civic emotion most commonly explored in the news is pity for endangered children – it’s the emotion that most directly and effortlessly crosses tribal lines. So does resentment of criminals. So does admiration of town benefactors. So does sports pride – and pride in the flag, although that’s where even the few shared emotions start to get complicated.

It is no accident that there’s a stiff way of uttering news, to which we’re all habituated by years as listeners and readers. I’d start with a strong presumption that the reasons this is the voice of news must be multiple and strong, because it’s counterintuitive that the most engaging, human-scale tales arising from public events are specifically not the traditional center of newsrooms’ work. Rather, the mannered and restrictive presentations possible in “newsvoice” represent the standard of what feels to sincere practitioners like ethical professionalism in news organizations across our nation, and world. Why? Perhaps because the diction of newsvoice tames and balances news by depersonalizing it, builds civic experience and civic unity – while still allowing open inspection of major social issues.

Still, in the light of the shrinkage of newspaper circulation, and the rise of narrative journalism as a way of retaining readers, it’s worth asking this: If the events of a city’s daily life offer up fascinating, thought-provoking tales, why must weak stories be favored by news media?

Disclosing news is a paradoxical activity. It surely seems useful to draw attention to shared danger and to congratulate unifying public events. But when we do so, we become official conveyors of these tidings, public functionaries. It’s hard to avoid becoming somehow official. And inside that role, it feels like an act of honor to strain out the irrelevant, the individual, the stuff that isn’t, in sum, community experience. This seems like the bias that propels us into the role of guardians, sentinels who watch the city for the public good. Our choosing news voice over quirkier, private voices reflects the (frequently instinctive) choice.

I hope we can explore and refine together here, an important idea for radio producers: that there are other voices available to you, appropriate to the act of sculpting a radio-listening experience for diverse audiences, than the standard sentinel voice. In fact, I’d like to suggest that many sorts of emotions and moods and activities and true pictures of our shared lives simply can’t be portrayed in that standard voice.

And yet, if you flip through the day’s presentations on public radio stations, or even scout the more individualistic ones aggregated so wonderfully on www.prx.org, most seem to have selected a voice, a diction, and thus a storyteller’s stance, that’s more conventional than the material and perspectives covered.

How much should and can you break from this conventional voice and still be part of a useful public conversation? How much is possible, given current expectations of editors and other gatekeepers? Can you offer examples of innovators who’ve explored other ways than this voice of presenting content? Is there a body of radio narrative that points to ways around the limitations of conventional voice? I’m not asking these questions with any pedagogical cunning. I ask as a radio outsider who’s frequently marveled that public radio seems often in the forefront of such exploration.

I’ll stop my presentation here. I hope I’m quitting in the middle of an exploration. It’s the place where I surely need help, as I’m a visitor in this world, here by invitation and your tolerance – and very interested in the topic, in this time when the newsroom is melting away right along with the polar icecaps, and the nature of public news is up for rigorous exploration and redefinition.

© Mark Kramer 2006

Narrative writing is returning to newspapers. No one has added up the reallocated column-inches to quantify this change, but there are many signs of the increasing interest:

“I’m not sure there’s more narrative in papers,” says Bruce DeSilva, who, as the AP’s News/Features Editor, heads the enterprise squad. “But when we do one at AP, the play is phenomenal. We’re also getting a lot of play for short narratives.”

This issue of Nieman Reports, on narrative journalism, shoulders a touchy topic. It aims at the heart of the profession, as it targets how news people pursue reporting and writing. The basic assertion is simple: newspapers might both improve coverage and retain more readers by employing storytelling techniques to convey news. But a discussion of this assertion leads to discomfiting questions about mission and practice and chain of command: most likely, some editors on any paper won’t be able to or won’t want to help reporters approach stories narratively.

Editorial interest in narrative has been stimulated in the course of a search for remedies to widespread current business problems: declining or stagnant newspaper circulation, aging readership, and decreased minutes spent reading papers. The list of antidotes has affected the look and content of many papers over the past decade. It includes running more service pieces up front, more USA Today-like micro-stories, more color printing, investing in sleeker page design, more celebrity and sports reportage, fuller TV schedules, and companion Web sites offering updated news and interactive services. Narrative is on this remedy list too, because it engages readers; in this age of mega-corporate media saturation, Web sites and workaholism, readers still are attracted to stories in which people’s lives and decision-making are vividly portrayed.

When you pause to consider the list, narrative is the “which-one-doesn’t-fit?” item; it alone moves newspapers toward deeper coverage, toward fulfillment of the civic mission that distinguishes the worthy profession. This distinction makes narrative journalism of special interest to many editors and reporters, even as it raises questions about the skills and roles of reporters and editors who might try it out.

An unofficial “narrative movement” has coalesced. Into it has tumbled a small band of itinerant newspaper writing coaches, the often-lonely editors who push their papers toward narrative, a cluster of reporters who have mastered the art of serial-writing and won professional recognition, a few foundation leaders and conference planners who bring these parties together, editors of the handful of anthologies, a few name-brand authors of book-length literary journalism who have crossed over to aid and abet, and most important, the growing ranks of reporters excited by the possibilities of such assignments.

Discussion among them moves beyond recitation of the virtues of storytelling to the on-the-job realities of adding narrative coverage. Satisfactory narrative won’t end up in print until editors and reporters have come to some understanding about some basic issues, such as:

Once narrative is assigned, those writing and editing it will come up against the limitations of the customary “news voice.” And finally, while the editing is under way, questions of what to edit for – the “mission” questions – are bound to surface.

Here’s a closer view of these steps in the process of bringing a narrative article into a paper.

Some months back, Boston Globe editors urged staffers to include more “feature ledes” in their stories. An in-house parody passed among some reporters there, a mock news story that didn’t arrive at its banner-headline-worthy burden – “a tidal wave overwhelmed all of New England and part of New York State” – until paragraph 10 and instead began something like this: ” ‘Does your leg feel damp?’ Mrs. Rosalie D’Amato asked her husband after awakening suddenly in their Duxbury home at approximately 4:15 this morning.”

Editors and reporters, even those more open to narrative, often fear mandated irrelevancy, having pursued for years a mission of sorting out the urgent, the essential, the basic. They don’t want some commercial fashion, ordered by management, to push them to absurdly personalize plain ol’ news. These editors voice concerns, as well – the more so after recent fabrication scandals – that in assigning narrative, they’ll hand away the ability to check on factuality, as only reporters on the spot will have sensed and seen events. These fears run contrary to the ballast of tradition, which tilts toward depersonalized, sober accounting, and toward the prevalence of editorial good sense.

Perhaps more to the point, the prospect of writing narrative exhilarates many reporters and editors, but also makes them nervous. It exposes their craft to individual scrutiny. It’s undeniably more fun to write, and to read, that “Clowns stumbled, lions pranced, and a glittering trapeze artist swooped over the crowd as trumpets blared Sousa marches yesterday. Bella the Clown has led his Big Apple Circus back into town again.” than it is to read “The annual visit of the Big Apple Circus commenced yesterday. According to spokesman Joe Doakes, this year’s show includes the featured clown, Bella, as well as lions, costumed trapeze artists, and a live circus band.”

Almost any news story can benefit from a morsel of narrative, because sensory reports engage readers, drawing them into the pleasurable illusion of immediacy. And narrative also opens more material for reporting – the revealing, nuanced lives of not just the prominent, but of ordinary citizens. Dull but crucial stories can be invigorated. For example, trade-offs involved in spraying pesticides in restaurants might be more readable in an article that includes a scene portraying an exterminator’s visit than by simply quoting a dry report, and a narrative approach enables such coverage proactively, even when there’s no new pesticide study to report.

In sum, there’s no mandate to crowd away crucial news or present every blizzard from the perspective of a 90-year-old shoveler, and every fire from the perspective of a weeping child clutching a singed blankie. But narrative moments add a lot. Narrative articles and serials are powerfully engaging. But both expose editors and reporters to testing, and demand honing, of their skills. An editor who accepts the vision of a Page 1 that fascinates readers by moving in close to stories with human moments will lose sleep and gain a worthy life of hard labor.

It’s surely different, reporting for story as well as for fact. It means paying attention to what Tom Wolfe terms the “status life” details about people – the clues to emotion and character and class in their outfits, turns of phrase, even their desk clutter. It means recognizing, while reporters are still in the field, potential story-tracks through events and identifying the set scenes that might lead readers through the general muddle of information. It also means doing richer background research, so that narrative foreground can be used emblematically. Narrative touches in shorter assignments need not take more reporting time; they just require more attention – a finer-grained, heads-up apprehension of the events at hand.

Heads-up apprehension implies personnel with the skills to discern and comprehend character and organizational structures. There’s no question that reporting for story engages reporters’ and editors’ erudition, sophistication, discernment, even their wryness, more than conventional reporting for fact does. And that might prove a challenge to some. Obviously, reporters who have the knack, edited by editors who have the knack, should be the ones to work narratively. That requires an evolving, candid assessment of skills and consequent tampering with shifts, protocols of assignments and story quotas. Adjusting the chain of command so it’s receptive to narrative is sensitive business, as old hands – and some young old-hands, too – just plain don’t see the world narratively.

Infrastructure changes will help reporters working with narrative avoid conflict with editors averse to such work. In-house writing coaches, empowered editorially, have helped reorient some newsrooms. A few reporters will move away from assigned shifts and beats and function more independently. As this happens, the differentials in reporting time and role may create in-house tensions needing tactful resolution. However, a paper that makes clear that reporters might reliably do narrative journalism will have its pick of able employees. There’s no mystery to the ways in which such reorganization can occur: It’s been done in Eugene and Raleigh and in many other cities, and consultants can sketch and smooth the road.

At some newspapers, changes such as these can loom large. Reporters and editors are trained to report, in the almost military sense that a police lieutenant might mean, ordering a patrolman to report facts about a house fire, pronto, excluding all trivia. The last thing on a police officer’s or reporter’s mind when reporting is presenting the story artfully, so the audience might especially enjoy it, and so it might resonate with the profound nature of the event. To the contrary; the fire story that results reads like a memo to an insurance clerk:

Newspapers do also run features on fire-displaced families, backgrounders on firehouse life, even occasional spotlight articles on the politics of fire chief selection. But let’s consider the default fire story itself, because its voice is diagnostic.

Reporters are sent out to get the information crucial to the orderly running of the city, nation and world. They are neither artists nor social workers, nor need they be. They’re guardians of the city and, as such, given special (albeit shrinking) protections under the law. They’re trained to spot situations and facts that perturb civic life and to present them in order of degree of urgency – lucidly if possible. They also laud events that reinforce and improve civic life. The bureaucratic “report” tone springs from a wholesome tradition – that the press has a vested duty to guard the population. Reporters and editors have serious business to pursue, and that mindset is reflected in the official edge to the newspaper voice.

Its very “personalitylessness” makes the voice so handy, and thrifty. It can be imitated by any reporter (unlike the personal voices each reporter might use describing the same fire to buddies at a tavern down the street from the newsroom) and it can be deployed to good effect by writers of moderate verbal skill. It enables sending reporters where needed, like police officers sent to changeable beats. In both cases, the workers’ probity and devotion to duty count, intelligibility counts, but eloquence and imagination will be controlled, if present, by the superior officer on duty. News voice is intentionally bland, nonjudgmental, quirk-free, responsible and sober, a useful presence interested in names and affiliations and times and numbers. It’s the voice of the town crier who once shouted “All’s well” through the night.

If “style is personality,” as the rhetorician Richard Lanham says, readers may detect little companionability in that persona. The news voice does not acknowledge the readers’ savvy or know-how or sophisticated comprehension of motives, people, organizations or the world. It always starts explanations from scratch. Its job is to record, explain, to create a record, report – hardly to entertain. For all its civic utility, the news voice also limits the newspaper as good company for readers. That trade-off can be moderated by narrative, without threatening the crucial mission of newspapers.

The role of “entertainer” troubles many reporters, I suspect for at least two reasons. First of all, it involves dealing with non-official considerations, acknowledging the idiosyncratic natures of people (who are then not merely citizens) and situations (which are then not merely fire sites). Effective storytelling requires just that and not just for a feature lede’s few paragraphs.

Still more alarming, narrative journalism requires an unofficial ambition to make and hold personal contact with readers. It seldom demands first person, at least that’s only called for in the occasional pieces about a reporter’s unique experience (in one recent serial, a reporter recounts donating his kidney, over his family’s objections, to an old friend). But a narrative writer must always set out to sculpt the reader’s experience, from the first to the last paragraph, and to handle that control artfully and genially. In this sense, narrative can be seen as a method of engaging readers by portraying the stories of events.

Hardboiled reporters don’t routinely seek to engineer the sequential emotional responses of readers. They don’t mess much with their readers at all. Storytellers do. The two roles are in conflict. But the conflict has often been resolved, even by some of those hard-boiled reporters. There’s a compromise voice that Tom French, Jon Franklin and Roy Peter Clark know how to use, and it’s on display in their effective serials.

A useful narrative voice for newspapers puts to work shared social knowledge, to the extent that such knowledge is our common, ever-developing heritage. That’s more easily done in papers (such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or weeklies such as The Village Voice) with delimited readerships. But it’s been accomplished admirably in one-paper-for-all cities as well. The sense that writer and reader are sharing an understanding that the subject at hand might not be party to is the gist of the powerful literary device called dramatic irony. With it, a writer gains the freedom to put his or her whole intelligence into play while making readers feel in-the-know.

It’s a given of newspaper narrative that the reporter can’t reliably address the peculiar sensibility of any sub-group of readers and still address all readers. A story for everyone, slow or knowing, naive or sophisticated, politically correct or bigoted, pious or doubting, can’t go just anywhere the writer wants without insulting or puzzling or boring some sector of readers. At that snag, a paper’s mission to explain to all and its business interests part ways. No editor wants to abandon readers.

That “given” about readership may be minimized. Narrative stories, in general, use various “emotion sets.” One that works well in newspapers can be termed a “civic” emotion set; other “emotion sets” that might work well in books, or perhaps in The New Yorker, where writers can appropriately play even with the concept of voice itself, may be termed “private” emotion sets.

“Private” emotion sets are as various as the inventiveness and natures of the writers who use them. They obviously can include emotions that might alienate newspaper readers’ godless rage, impassioned piety, bitterness, prejudice, arrogance, shrillness, sneakiness, hazy softness – the list is instinctive and endless and subtle, and outside the mission of most newspaper stories. On their individual authority, book writers such as Tracy Kidder or Joan Didion may freely include levels of explanation that upset readers, that cleave instead of bind community.

“Civic” emotions are community-integrative. They include patriotic feelings, love of children and aged parents, respect for education, anger at criminals, praise for the charitable and job-providing, sorrow for the dying and ill, gratitude toward police and fire fighters, rage at corruption, and many other feelings. It is, in fact, a rich set of emotions, and everyone in town can share in them. They draw a town together. I don’t slight work with this set of emotions. They’re quite sufficient for the craft of building intense, gripping, revealing, accurate, useful and rewarding narratives.

Advertisers have long since stepped away from the bland voice of civic probity and explored the “civic emotion set” adventurously in making personal contact with audiences. Advertisers these days (Super Bowl ads on TV are an example) stay in touch with audiences by kidding around with personal fragility, by mocking lesser pieties, edging toward titillating taboos, in short, by admitting non-Hallmarkian, all-too-human truths everyone knows anyway, by belching on camera, then selling sneakers.

To date, not many news organizations have thought much about the personality of their publications, in spite of financial hardships brought about by not doing so. Until the “narrative movement,” no one has taken the news voice toward emotional engagement with readers (at least since the days of yellow journalism), except for the odd story that shares outrage or warms the heart. The obvious and continuing casualty of this tardiness has been the Sunday magazine. Its potential for adding substance and fascination and varied comprehension to newspapers has dissipated in awkward features while the number of Sunday magazines has shrunk.

Engaging readers more deeply by presenting a braid of human stories is among the feasible remedies for newspapers’ circulation woes. Any editor who has run a successful serial will assert that it builds and binds readership. By understanding the aspects of it that make them uneasy, editors can decide when to say “no,” and so find their ways forward to offering readers good storytelling while improving news coverage.

Literary journalism is a duller term. Its virtue may be its innocuousness. As a practitioner, I find the “literary” part self-congratulating and the “journalism” part masking the form’s inventiveness. But “literary journalism” is roughly accurate. The paired words cancel each other’s vices and describe the sort of nonfiction in which arts of style and narrative construction long associated with fiction help pierce to the quick of what’s happening – the essence of journalism.

This journalism in fact has proper pedigree. Daniel Defoe, writing just after 1700, is the earliest cited by Norman Sims, one of the few historians of the form. The roster also includes Mark Twain in the 19th century and Stephen Crane at the start of the 20th. Before and just after the Second World War, James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, A.J. Leibling, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, and John Steinbeck tried out narrative essay forms. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion followed, and somewhere in there, the genre came into its own – that is, its writers began to identify themselves as part of a movement, and the movement began to take on conventions and to attract writers. Public consciousness of a distinct genre has risen, slowly.

In the 1970s John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, and Richard Rhodes – among others now in their 50s and 60s – broadened the form, joined in the 1980s by several dozen then-youthful counterparts, including Tracy Kidder and Mark Singer. Richard Preston and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, the youth of this collection, began publishing in their 20s, and both had studied literary journalism in seminars – a sure sign a new genre has arrived. Another sign is a change in its treatment by book review editors. They used to assign area experts routinely – geologists to review McPhee’s “Basin and Range” (1981), computer programmers to review Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” – with neither brand of scientist generically qualified to assay the subtle narrative techniques and deft wordsmithing. Now editors are likelier to assign such reviewing to other writers and to critics.

New forms of the written word that catch on are infrequent literary occurrences. Still, writers will forever seek ways beyond the constraints by overlapping cousin-genres – travel travel writing, memoir, ethnographic and historical essays, some fiction and even ambiguous semifiction stemming from real events – all tempt fields just beyond rickety fences.

Literary journalism has been growing up, and readers by the million seek it out. But it has been a you-know-it-when-you-see-it form. The following annotated list of defining traits derives from the work in this anthology and works by other authors I’ve cited. It reflects authors’ common practices, as the “rules” of harmony taught in composition classes mirror composers’ habits. But however accurately represented, rules for making art will surely be stretched and reinvented again and again.

Speaking at a relaxed meeting of the Nieman Fellows at Harvard University, shortly after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Soul of a New Machine,” Tracy Kidder enraged several young journalists with an offhand comment – that literary journalists are, overall, more accurate than daily journalists. He recalls telling them, “It has to be true; our reporting takes months, and you’re sent to get a story and write it up in three hours, and do two more before leaving work. A privileged journalist might get a few weeks for a feature.”

Literary journalists hang out with their sources for months and even years. It’s a reward – and risk – of the trade, as I’ve discovered on many projects. I spent one glorious June with a baseball team; I wandered intermittently in backwoods Russia through six years of perestroika and the ensuing confused transition. I spent a year in hospital operating rooms, and years in the fields and corporate offices of America’s farms. Every writer in this anthology has had similar experiences. The reporting part of the work is engrossing and tedious. It is not social time. One stays alert for meaningful twists of narrative and character, all the while thinking about how to portray them and about how to sustain one’s welcome.

The point of literary journalists’ long immersions is to comprehend subjects at a level Henry James termed “felt life” – the frank, unidealized level that includes individual difference, frailty, tenderness, nastiness, vanity, generosity, pomposity, humility, all in proper proportion. It shoulders right on past official or bureaucratic explanations for things. It leaves quirks and self-deceptions, hypocrisies and graces intact and exposed; in fact, it uses them to deepen understanding.

This is the level at which we think about our own everyday lives, when we’re not fooling ourselves. It’s surely a hard level to achieve with other people. It takes trust, tact, firmness, and endurance on the parts of both writer and subject. It most often also takes weeks or months, including time spent reading up on related economics, psychology, politics, history, and science. Literary journalists take elaborate notes retaining wording of quotes, sequence of events, details that show personality, atmosphere, and sensory and emotional content. We have more time than daily journalists are granted, time to second-guess and rethink first reactions. Even so, making sense of what’s happening – writing with humanity, poise, and relevance – is a beguiling, approachable, unreachable goal.

No Un-Literary-Journalistic-Activities Committee subpoenas the craft’s corner-cutters. Literary journalists, unlike newspaper reporters, are solo operatives. You can see the writers here, in their first few paragraphs, establishing their veracity with readers by displays of forthrightness and street savvy. These are important moments. They imply the rules the author elects to follow. Readers are the ultimate judges of which authors don’t play fairly. They have had the last word in several publicized cases. Two areas of ethical concern often jumble together in discussions of the scrupulousness of literary journalism: (a) the writer’s relationship to readers and (b) the writer’s relationship to sources.

A few distinguished essayists we retrospectively link to literary journalism did indeed commit acts that, if done by writers today, would be considered downright sinful: They combined or improved upon scenes, aggregated characters, refurbished quotations, and otherwise altered what they knew to be the nature of their material.

What distinguished them from fiction writer may have been merely intention – presumably to convey to readers the “sense” of an actuality. In fact, one of the genre’s grand old men, Joseph Mitchell, whose work is in this collection, has written about and spoken to interviewers about using composite characters and scenes in his 1948 classic “Old Mr. Flood.” John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima,” did the same thing with the main character of his 1944 article “Joe Is Home Now” (however, he later complained about the practice among New Journalists). Mitchell never complained, and neither writer did it again.

I have no trouble comprehending the liberty of either of these artists trying things out. Other pioneers, including George Orwell (in “Shooting an Elephant”) and Truman Capote (in “In Cold Blood” (1966)), apparently also recast some events, and my private verdict is to find them similarly exculpated by virtue of the earliness (and elegance) of their experimentation, and by the presumed lack of intention to deceive. None violated readers’ expectations for the genre, because there weren’t yet strong expectations – or much of a genre, for that matter – to violate.

Still, if you reread those essays having learned they portray constructed events, you may find yourself second-guessing what was real. One wouldn’t bother doing this with a novel. The ambiguity is distracting. Today, literary journalism is a genre readers recognize and read expecting civil treatment. The power of the prose depends on the readers’ accepting the ground rules the works implicitly proclaim.

There is a category of expectations, and I’d argue it describes material that falls outside the modern understanding of what literary journalism is. By the time he published “The Executioner’s Song,” in 1979, about a triple murderer named Gary Gilmore, Norman Mailer elected to specify his liberation from restrictive factuality. The dust jacket bore the odd description “A True Life Novel.” Although such truth-in-labeling doesn’t explicitly demarcate what parts are actual, it’s a good-faith proclamation to readers that they’ve entered a zone in which a nonfiction writer’s covenant with readers may be a tease, a device, but doesn’t quite apply. It would take a naive audience to misconstrue clearly self-proclaiming “docudramas” such as Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” (which Mark Singer writes about in this collection) or Mailer’s sort of “docufiction.” Most reader swill instead savor, whether as art or entertainment, the deliberate byplay of reality against fancy, in this often wholesome, but always special category of film and prose that straddles the line.

However, chats with writer friends and panel discussions at writing conferences have me convinced that literary journalists have come to share a stodgier tacit understanding with readers, one so strong that it amounts to a contract: that the writers do what they appear to do, which is to get reality as straight as they can manage, and not make it up. Some, of course, admit in private to moments of temptation, moments when they’ve realized that tweaking reality could sharpen the meaning or flow of a scene. If any writers have gone ahead and actually tweaked, however, they’re no longer chatting about it to friends, nor talking about it on panels. In recent years, a few literary journalists have drawn heavy fire for breaking trust with readers. It is not a subject about which readers are neutral.

Conventions literary journalists nowadays talk about following to keep things square with readers include: no composite scenes, no misstated chronology, no falsification of the discernible drift or proportion of events, no invention of quotes, no attribution of thoughts to sources unless the sources have said they’d had those very thoughts, and no unacknowledged deals with subjects involving payment or editorial control. Writers do occasionally pledge away use of actual names and identifying details in return for ongoing frank access, and notify readers they’ve done so. These conventions all add up to keeping faith. The genre makes less sense otherwise. Sticking to these conventions turns out to be straightforward.

Writers discover how to adhere to them and still structure essays creatively. There’s no reason a writer can’t place a Tuesday scene prior to a Monday scene, if the writer thinks readers should know how a situation turned out before knowing how it developed. It is easy to keep readers unconfused and undeceived, just by letting them know that you’re doing. While narrating a scene, a literary journalist may wish to quote comments made elsewhere, or embed secondary scenes or personal memories; it is possible to do all these things faithfully, without blurring or misrepresenting what happened where and when, simply by explaining as you go along. Like other literary journalists, I’ve found that, in fact, annoying, inconsistent details that threaten to wreck a scene I’m writing are often signals that my working theories about events need more work, and don’t quite explain what happened yet.

Not tweaking deepens understanding. And getting a slice of life down authentically takes flexibility and hard labor. Readers appreciate writing that does the job. It is not accidental that the rise of literary journalism has been accompanied by authors’ nearly universal adherence to these conventions, which produce trustworthy, in-the-know texts and reliable company for readers.

The writer’s reliable companionship with sources can cause difficulty. An inescapable ethical problem arises from a writer’s necessarily intense ongoing relationships with subjects. Gaining satisfactory continuing access is always a tough problem; most potential subjects are doing quite well at life with no writers anywhere in the neighborhood, and their lives are tangles of organizational and personal affiliations. Yet, in order to write authentically at the level of “felt life,” literary journalists will seek from subjects the sustained candor usually accorded only spouses, business partners, and dearest friends. Strong social and legal strictures bind husbands, wives, partners, and pals to only the most tactful public disclosure of private knowledge. Literary journalists’ own honorable purposes, on the other hand, require as much public discourse as possible.

During the months a writer stays around subjects, even a forthright relationship (that has commenced with full discussion of intentions, signing of releases, and display of part articles and books) is likely to develop into something that feels to both parties a lot like a partnership or friendship, if not quite like marriage. The ticklish questions the writer comes up against are these: Does the subject see himself revealing information to a friend, at the same moment the writer sees himself hearing information from a source? And how responsible is the writer for the consequences of such perceptions?

Writers, in good faith, try all sorts of ways to get and keep good access without falsifying their intentions. The most obvious has been to write about people who either don’t mind or else actually like the prospect of being written about. Anthropologists say “access downward” is easier than “access upward.” Literary journalists (including me) have had cordial continuing access to people far from the world of books, who just like the company of the writer and the sound of the project – including hoboes riding the rails, migrant workers sneaking across the border, merchant seamen, teen prostitutes, high school football players, plain dirt farmers.

Another category, exemplary subjects – a dynamic schoolteacher, a deft surgeon, a crew of tip-top carpenters, a dexterous canoemaker, a hard-bargaining corporate farm executive – also welcome attention, sometimes because they have causes they hope to represent, such as bigger school budgets, lessened malpractice liability, or fairer crop subsidies.

My own rule has been to show part articles, to make clear the public exposure involved, to explain my publisher’s and my commitments of time and money, to stipulate that subjects won’t get to edit manuscript or check quotes. Then I go ahead – if I’m still welcome after all that, and sometimes I’m not. In a few cases, I have doubted that subjects understood my intentions or their consequences well enough to consent, or I’ve felt consent hadn’t been freely given but was influenced by boss’s orders (for example, the nurses in an operating room where my subject worked). Then, I’ve made it my business to do no harm. By luck, I’ve been able to write what I wished, without having these occasional moments alter essential content. Every genre, whether daily or literary journalism, poetry, or fiction, ultimately depends on the integrity of the writer.

The ecology of convenient access impels literary journalists toward routine events, not extraordinary ones. The need to gain long-term, frank access has forced writers to seek material in places that can be visited, and to avoid, in spite of longings to the contrary, places that can’t. The level of access required is so high that it has largely determined the direction of literary journalists’ efforts.

The goal during “reporting” or “fieldwork” is not to become socialized as an insider, as an intern at a firm might en route to a job. It is to know what insiders think about, to comprehend subjects’ experiences and perspectives and understand what is routine to them. Insiders who eventually read a literary journalist’ account should find it accurate and relevant, but not from an inside perspective. At first, when I spent time with surgeons, blood alarmed me – an unsurgeonlike attitude. By the end of a year witnessing controlled mayhem, my attention had shifted. I knew when the surgeon found bleeding routine, and recognized the rare moments when it alarmed him. My rookie reaction wasn’t relevant to the surgeon’s world; my later reaction served me better in comprehending his perspective.

Routine doesn’t mean humdrum. Most anyone’s life, discovered in depth and from a compassionate perspective, is interesting. Some very routine subjects, however, haven’t been breached, and seem unbreachable except by insiders. Oddly, one major constraint is legal. Commission from a national magazine in hand, I once approached an attorney well known for effectively defending many suspected murderers. He was tempted by the prospect of an article about his daily work. I sketched out the access I’d need – including entrée to his office discussions with and about a current client. The attorney backed away. I’d be out beyond the umbrella of attorney-client privilege, he said, and could be challenged, and perhaps subpoenaed, for questioning on what I’d heard. His client could then sue him for malpractice.

Uncontaminated access to top levels of big business during a major deal has also proved nearly beyond reach, mostly because corporate sources perceive that allowing a journalist to roam might exceed prudent fiduciary responsibility, and might subject them to suit. Also, businesspeople work repeatedly within a circle of associates, and whoever let in a writer unbound by the circle’s prospect of mutual advantage could be seen as breaking trust. Writers occasionally do make it through these barriers. A few kiss-and-tell versions of business deals have also been written by former players. And writerly post-factum reconstructions sometimes re-create dramas of complex deals.

A cousin, true-crime reporting, also reconstructs events post-factum. Murderers usually try not to do their work in front of writers. But criminal cases subsequently open access to the most secret places, starting the moment the deed is revealed. Cooperative culprits looking for redemption, variety, or forgiveness; vengeful family members; and elaborate court records have taken writers far into hidden inner worlds – after the fact.

Nonfiction writers are fated to arrive late. Something that a literary journalist can only do in the first person, with hindsight, after chance has subjected him to bad or good fortune, is to write about a person about to be mugged, slip on a banana peel, or find a pot of gold. Once in a while, something untoward happens to a writer, and readers may profit from the author’s misfortune – Francis Steegmuller’s “The Incident at Naples” (which ran in The New Yorker in 1986) comes to mind. Steegmuller describes being robbed and injured while on holiday. Perhaps it is to push this limit that writers go adventuring – sailing into nasty seas and living to tell, hunting in the green hills of Africa and bagging the limit in close calls. Before disaster destroyed the lives of Christa MacAuliff and the Challenger astronauts, NASA had signed up writers wishing to go space traveling. Among the applicants was Tracy Kidder, who has gone on instead to write about aging.

In literary journalism, the narrator is neither the impersonal, dutiful explainer and qualifier of academic writing, who presents research material carefully but without special consideration of readers, nor the seemingly objective and factual, judgment-suspending, orthodox informant of newswriting. The narrator of literary journalism has a personality, is a whole person, intimate, frank, ironic, wry, puzzled, judgmental, even self-mocking – qualities academics and daily news reporters dutifully avoid as unprofessional and unobjective. They’re taught to discount their personal reactions about other people and to advance no private opinions. From the perspective of the institutions or intellectual traditions sponsoring such prose, there are sound civic, commercial, scientific, and discipline-abetting reasons for curtailing the appearance of private judgment. The effect of both academic and news styles is to present readers with what appear to be the facts, delivered in unemotional, nonindividuated, conventionalized, and therefore presumably fair and neutral voice. Obviously, they leave lots out.

The defining mark of literary journalism is the personality of the writer, the individual and intimate voice of a whole, candid person not representing, defending, or speaking on behalf of any institution, not a newspaper, corporation, government, ideology, field of study, chamber of commerce, or travel destination. It is the voice of someone naked, without bureaucratic shelter, speaking simply in his or her own right, someone who has illuminated experience with private reflection, but who has not transcended crankiness, wryness, doubtfulness, and who doesn’t blank out emotional realities of sadness, glee, excitement, fury, love. The genre’s power is the strength of this voice. It is an unaffiliated social force—although its practice has been mostly benign. It is a one of the few places in media where mass audiences may consume unmoderated individual assertion, spoken on behalf of no one but the adventurous author.

The voice is rarely no-holds-barred, accusatory, or confessional, however, even though some writers – Tom Wolfe comes to mind – are adept at making it look that way. In most literary journalism, an informal, competent, reflective voice emerges, a voice speaking with knowledgeable assurance about topics, issues, personal subjects, a voice that reflects – often only indirectly, as subtext – the writer’s self-knowledge, self-respect, and conscience. I suggest to my Boston University writing workshop that members find their voices by imagining they’re telling fairly close friends whose wit they respect about an incident they’d observed and taken seriously, linked to fields they’d studied. What emerges is a sociable, humorously self-aware, but authoritative voice – I hear it at dinner parties when people tell anecdotes. Reading it feels companionable.

This voice is a handy invention for essay writers, not a quirky preference, nor merely a way of getting into the act. It is an effective tool for a difficult modern job. It enables an author to step around acculturated views of relationships and issues that are usually guarded by walls of formal language and invisible institutional alliances. The powers of the candid, intimate voice are many, and they bother people who insist on idealized versions of reality. Formality of language protects pieties, faiths, taboos, appearances, official truths. The intimate voice sidesteps such prohibitions, says things in the mode that professionals in the know use when they leave work feeling pensive and confide to friends or lovers. It is the voice in which we disclose how people and institutions really are. It is a key characteristic of literary journalism, and is indeed something new to journalism.

A former newspaper reporter told me she’d interviewed a city traffic department official and found him stentorian and self-promoting, not sharp on issues, but a charming good-old-boy at local politics. She liked him, but she had his number. Nevertheless, her newspaper article, she recalled, had started something like, “The long-awaited design plans for a new highway exit were released today by the Office of Traffic Management.” Her observations about the man, the jokes her knowing colleagues made about him in the bar near the newsroom afterwards are sorts of material a literary journalist might bring into a narrative about, say, the complex actuality of planning and building a highway exit – along with, perhaps, material on traffic management, bureaucratic structures, urban finance, executive psychology, the politics of urban renewal, and on the meanings of driving and self-promotion and good-old-boyhood in the writer’s own life.

The audience is invited, when reading literary journalism, to adopt complex and relaxed expectations about meaning, and to share something excluded from academic and news articles – the author’s ironic vision. Irony – the device of leading readers to consider a scene in more knowing terms than some of its actors do – is virtually taboo in other forms of nonfiction. Two exceptions come to mind, and in both places, literary journalism turns up. The Wall Street Journal is the one major American paper that regularly runs ironic features on its front page. This may be because management there defines its audience as well-heeled, powerful, and in-the-know – in short, as “not everyone,” but an elite sector of the whole community, those on top, sharing some views of the world below. And Sunday newspaper magazines often feature a wholesome type of ironic voice, in articles whose narrators relate personal experiences with some sensitive aspect of communal morality – prejudice, costly sickness, the burdens of aging and of mental illness. Walt Harrington’s piece, essentially on the growth of interracial tolerance, both his own and our nation’s, is in that spirit. As the piece illustrates, the power of irony need not emerge from sarcasm or meanness. It can bind a community, simply by expanding contexts of events beyond what the actors usually consider.

A mark of literary journalism that shows right from the start of a piece is efficient, individual, informal language. The writers here have worked their language until it is spare, stylish, and controlled. Ear may be the last teachable skill of writing. Elegant, simple expression is the goal, and what many poets and novelists reach toward, too. People discern character in part by divining who’d make those word choices. Impersonal or obdurate speakers get found out. Clean, lucid, personal language draws readers toward experiencing the immediacy of scenes, and the force of ideas.

“If you want to see the invisible world, look at the visible one,” Howard Nemerov said in his enchanted essay “On Metaphor.” The best language of literary journalists is also evocative, playful, sharpened by active verbs, sparing of abstract verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and the many indolent forms of “to be,” taut in its grammatical linkages. Such uncluttered style is gracious – clear and pleasant in its own right, and suited for leading readers not merely to picture, but to feel events. Readers resist clumsy writing, often without thinking much about what’s wrong, but engage with good prose, often as heedlessly. Feeling transports readers as mere logic cannot.

David Quammen, like the other authors here, occupies a strategic stance in relation to his material in “Strawberries Under Ice.” He is the host. He entertains by telling you a good winter camping tale, immersing you in it so you feel the immediacy of it, its past, its impending future, and the ongoing “now” of it. He also guides you, his presumptive social intimate, through his evaluation of it, exiting from story to informative digressions about glaciers and his psychology, then reentering action.

Readers experience this well-spoken, worldly, witty, cagey storytelling buddy warmly, in good measure because Quammen the writer isn’t trapped within the events he portrays. He describes events (that happened to Quammen the subject) from a “retrospective platform,” recollecting action and considering its shape, meanings, and metaphoric echoes.

This mobile stance of the writer is another key element in literary journalism. Each author in this anthology, while telling tales, repeatedly looks directly at the reader, comments, digresses, brings in associative material, background, previous events – not necessarily personal ones – then reengages the story. When the author drops you back at the spot where the tale’s been left off, the place feels familiar. “Oh, good,” says the well-hosted reader, realizing the story is back on screen, “now I find out what happens next.” The reader rejoins with enhanced perspective on the events, gained from the digressive material. The forward-moving leading edge of the narrative, from which such digressions and returns happen, may be called “the moving now” – it’s a term useful for discerning essay structure. Good storytellers often digress at moments when especially interesting action is pending, and not at the completion of action. Lucid storytelling, skillful selection of moments for pertinent digression, returning to the “moving now,” are among the essential elements out of which literary journalists constructs essays.

The literary journalist’s mobile stance is not quite borrowed property of novelists – in fiction, the reader can never be sure the author has stepped away from the story, and can’t quite shake the presumption that even an author’s most out-of-story asides might turn out to be another layer of story. When the literary journalist digresses and then returns to narrative, the author’s real-world knowledge juxtaposes with story. This mobile stance is an amazing device, full of power.

The authors in this anthology have varied approaches to this mobile stance. Jane Kramer mostly tells about scenes, conversing with readers, but a several refined moments fully sets scenes, drawing readers into experiencing them. Her erudition and grasp of the larger meanings of her subject infuse these moments. We see her scenes with a pleasant knowingness; we are newly sophisticated by her erudition. Tracy Kidder, on the other hand, does almost nothing but tell tales, suspending action for digressive comments to readers only occasionally. Both authors’ stances aid their control of the reader’s developing experience.

Most literary journalism is primarily narrative, telling stories, building scenes. Each piece here carries readers along one, and often a second and third, story line. Walt Harrington’s “A Family Portrait in Black & White” achronologically braids several discrete narratives that explore his relationship to racism, starting nearly currently and flashing back. He relates the events of his own interracial courtship and marriage, and also plaits in the stories of several of his wife’s relatives, and the story of the relaxing of American racial attitudes.

The sequences of scenes and digressions – some brushed past, some dwelled upon – along with the narrator’s mobile stance relative to these tales and asides, comprise narrative structure. Literary journalists have developed a genre that permits them to sculpt stories and digression as complexly as novelists do. At any moment the reader will probably be located somewhere along the time line of at least one unfolding tale and a few developing ideas. Quammen’s “Strawberries Under Ice,” at first glance an example of unusually charming science writing on glaciers, is in fact a coyly constructed narrative of the purgation of his soul, and once that’s well along, of his courtship and marriage, of the miracle of love and its metaphorical expression in the warming effect of ice, of paradoxical and intimate metaphors, finally of rebirth from the warmth of a snow cave. Because of Quammen’s crafty structuring of these elements, the piece creeps up on you. When authors make decisions about structure – order of scenes, points of digression, how intensively to develop which elements of stories and digressions – they consider the effects of the order and intensities chosen on readers’ experience.

Readers are likely to care about how a situation came about and what happens next when they are experiencing it with the characters. Successful literary journalists never forget to be entertaining. The graver the writer’s intentions, and the more earnest and crucial the message or analysis behind the story, the more readers ought to be kept engaged. Style and structure knit story and idea alluringly.

If the author does all this storytelling and digressing and industrious structure-building adroitly, readers come to feel they are heading somewhere with purpose, that the job of reading has a worthy destination. The sorts of somewheres that literary journalists reach tend to marry eternal meanings and everyday scenes. Richard Preston’s “The Mountains of Pi,” for instance, links the awkward daily lives of two shy Russian emigre mathematicians to their obscure intergalactic search for hints of underlying order in a chaotic universe.

Readers take journeys designed by authors to tease out the ineluctable within the everyday; the trip will go nowhere without their imaginative participation. Ultimately, what an author creates aren’t sequential well-groomed paragraphs on paper, but sequential emotional, intellectual, and even moral experiences that readers undertake. These are engaging, patterned experiences, akin to the sensations of filmgoing, not textbook reading. What these pieces mean isn’t on paper at all.

The writer paints sensory scenes, confides on a level of intimacy that stirs readers’ own experiences and sensations, and sets up alchemical interplay between constructed text and readers’ psyches. The readers’ realizations are what the author and readers have made together.

***

Why has this union of detailed fact, narratives, and intimate voice risen so remarkably in this century?

Many traditions that defined behaviors and beliefs at the start of the century have fragmented or vaporized. In 1900 a few hundred categories described the routines of labor, and a handful of patterns defined propriety. These days, there are 10,000 sorts of jobs and of propriety. In the same period, science, which had promised answers, order, and ease, has yielded convolution, danger, and vast domains of knowledge that seem crucial to everyone but comprehensible only by specialists. And in a culture that once called upon experts, and leaders with creeds, for piloting, august authority has run aground. Presidents, priests, generals on horseback, professors in ivory towers – none can command collective faith these days.

Yet somehow this has not resulted in universal despair. A formidable crowd of citizens wants, I’m sure with more urgency than ever, to read books and essays that comprehend what’s happening in its complexity. They demand not just information, but visions of how things fit together now that the center cannot hold. A public that rarely encountered the personal imaginations of others at the turn of the century, now devours topical bestsellers, films and TV shows that cast issues narratively, and literary journalism.

Literary journalism helps sort out the new complexity. If it is not an antidote to bewilderment, at least it unites daily experiences – including emotional ones – with the wild plentitude of information that can be applied to experience. Literary journalism couples cold fact and personal event, in the author’s humane company. And that broadens readers’ scans, allows them to behold others’ lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own. The process moves readers, and writers, toward realization, compassion, and in the best of cases, wisdom.

I’ll even claim that there is something intrinsically political – and strongly democratic – about literary journalism, something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite. That seems inherent in the common practices of the form. Informal style cuts through the obfuscating generalities of creeds, countries, companies, bureaucracies, and experts. And narratives of the felt lives of everyday people test idealizations against actualities. Truth is in the details of real lives.