Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Many Sleepless Nights, he is currently Professor of English at The University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

Brendan Cahill is Editor in literary fiction and nonfiction at Grove Atlantic in New York.

Rebecca Skloot is a freelance writer who attended the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. She is currently at work on her first book.

Cara Ford is the creative nonfiction editor of nidus.

Ford: I'd like to begin by having all of you talk about your involvement with the creative nonfiction genre, in relation to your own jobs and your own interests in reading and writing.

Gutkind: I got involved in creative nonfiction when it was called New Journalism. I was inspired by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Lillian Ross and other people who were published in the New Yorker, who wrote in-depth, story-oriented, scenic, dramatic true stories. And I began writing that in the 1970s and have published six or eight books that are done in this way. During this time I have seen New Journalism become New Nonfiction, become Literary Journalism, become Narrative Nonfiction, become Creative Nonfiction. It has all these different names but what is so compelling and inspiring is that it allows you to be both a journalist and in some respects a novelist, a story teller, and you blend the two in order to tell the most dramatic story possible. I also started teaching in this form. I mentioned to Brendan that I am one of the first, I think, to teach this dramatic nonfiction in college and at the graduate school level. In the early nineties, after a tremendous fight that many of us had in trying to secure some sort of foothold in the academic world for the genre, I decided it was time to start the first literary journal devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction. No one had ever done this before. I called it Creative Nonfiction. We started with three thousand dollars, and we've been alive since 1993. We're doing very well. In those three areas, those are the three things I've been really interested in: writing creative nonfiction, reading creative nonfiction, and teaching creative nonfiction. And making it continue to grow in the literary world.

Cahill: I'm an editor at Grove Atlantic in New York, editor of literary nonfiction and fiction. I think what's so exciting about creative nonfiction is that it allows story and narrative to be created from elements that provide information and create a way of understanding the world through things that have happened, and bring them alive for people in a whole new way. The revolution of New Journalism in the 1970s, the use of fictive techniques to create scenes and character and dialogue, is really important to the book length works of the nineties. This style of writing has become a dominant form in creative nonfiction, more so than other forms of traditional nonfiction: science, journalism, popular science, history, biography, all of which are using these techniques more and more. Young writers are pushing the boundaries of what they can do story-wise, both in a sort of neo-Gonzo tradition and the sorts of stories that they tell using these techniques. Technique is still evolving and fresh and bigger than ever.

Skloot: I'm a full-time freelance writer. I have the same view that Lee does that it's not so much journalism as it is creative. By day I write articles for journals and newspapers around the country: Popular Science, New York Times. I'm also working on a creative nonfiction book. I try to apply the techniques of creative nonfiction to everything I do. The definition of creative nonfiction is a little fuzzy. When people think of creative nonfiction they tend to think of long magazine pieces for the New Yorker, or they think of books, and a lot of it is using the tools of the trade, like scene and dialogue, even in book reviews and shorter articles. The biggest reason I came to an MFA program rather than a journalism program was because I wanted to learn more about the elements and techniques of creative nonfiction, rather than the inverted pyramid. I wanted to apply the literary techniques to my writing rather than go the other way. I do mostly science writing. One reason I think creative nonfiction is great in science writing is that it allows you to use personal stories to explain how science actually impacts people's lives. I think Susan Orlean does similar things. I remember reading her in my hometown paper and being amazed at how accessible she made other people's worlds. My interest in writing creative nonfiction is more toward writing about other people's lives rather than my own, because I like to be a part of theirs.

Gutkind: I've been asked this a thousand times and am never quite sure of the best answer: Why is creative nonfiction so popular now? We were doing it in the 1970s. Tom Wolfe said back then the novel was the king. Why is creative nonfiction the king genre now?

Cahill: My speculation is that nonfiction has always trumped fiction overall in sales. That alone indicates something. The demographics show male readers more often buy nonfiction. I think a reason why we're seeing books now taking on these forms, as opposed to the magazine articles of the 1970s, is because it took a while generationally for it to filter from the sort of smaller scale platforms to the point where the techniques were developed so they could be used by these writers, first by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, what have you. The book form allowed these writers to broaden their smaller articles. As it moved more into the mainstream, these techniques were discovered to get deeper into the lives of characters, getting into their thoughts and world and creating it for people on a whole other level of intimacy than traditional journalism techniques would allow. And I think now these sorts of literary techniques are beginning to penetrate into other more traditional nonfiction genres, like memoir, to the point where you have...Angela's Ashes, and the fact that Frank McCourt is reconstructing conversations and reconfiguring parts of his life.

Skloot: I think people have always been hungry for true stories. The ones that linger in movies or even in fiction are stories based on reality. There have always been true stories; there has always been nonfiction; but they haven't always been written in a way that captured the story. Now there's this whole trend which came over from writers who started in journalistic form that have brought this over to books in a form that's easier for the reader to learn from.

Cahill: There's a cultural argument to make as well. To briefly run through it, the diversification of our culture to a point where there already is a Great American Novel. It's hard to have novels that channel into every aspect of American life. In the Age of Information, the sheer amount of fact that is overcoming and overwhelming us day by day instills in us a need for stories to make sense of all the views of our lives.

Gutkind: I think it also is that the world has changed so suddenly over the past few years that now there is nothing that a novel can give us that hasn't already happened in our world. Thinking about September 11 and how the movies that we won't be allowed to see now are nowhere near as horrific as what actually happened. It's hard as hell to compete with our realities of today for nonfiction. And I don't think you even want to read fantasy or imagination anymore. Young people are all a part of the intelligent culture anyway. You have to grow up that way to understand that the truth is bizarre but also much more fascinating than fiction. So this is like the Age of Creative Nonfiction. It really is! It's the age when reality is happening in the most dramatic way ever. My guess is 25 to 30 years from now we're going to want to escape from our reality, and the novel may come back.

Ford: We've talked about this shift in nonfiction from strict journalism to the implementation of techniques used especially in fiction. From an editorial perspective, is there a desired blend between informative fact and story elements such as dialogue, scene development and characterization in creative nonfiction?

Cahill: I think there's definitely a concern that the story and the truth is what's being served in any nonfiction book or article. I think what creative nonfiction allows you to do is to create an arc of storytelling to allow the facts and people's thoughts and emotions to all have a coherence to the interpretive framework that the writer uses to recap and then tell or relate it to the reader. And I think my role as an editor is to help with that narrative delivery. What I do is I'll help during the proposal stage and work with writers collaboratively on how to structure the book. Oftentimes the final manuscript will come in and I'll begin my work by doing a structural edit first, where I work to help balance out the arrangement of the facts and see how the writer is building up and introducing characters and scenes, so that there's a storytelling arc for the reader throughout the book. Then on the second draft I'll generally do a line edit, where I go through the text sentence by sentence, word by word, making sure the book is working on all cylinders. The author makes the final decision. But the writers that I've worked with in a variety of fields: science, sports, history, biography, journalism; are far more expert than me. They've been working on this manuscript, living in this world for usually two or three years before I see the finished manuscript. It's mostly my business to look out for the reader's interest, the ideal reader, and to help the author reach that person as best they can and have the book be the best book it can be.

Gutkind: I think what I hear you saying and I think what's important to say is that the information, the substance, is more important than the style.

Cahill: I'd say in almost every case, unless you're talking about a really experimental writer like Dave Eggers or Hunter S. Thompson, where the style is the essence of the book. And I would say that form of writing is so rare, the technique and what they're doing is so much a part of what they're saying, that whether or not what they say is one-hundred percent true, it's important to consider that it was true for them. These writers are faraway the exception. In most cases, from an editorial standpoint, you're betting on the content and the facts and the ability of this writer or journalist to report research and bring to life these things the public wants to know about. It's very rare that you have the writer, their thoughts and emotions, as the center of the piece.

Gutkind: As a teacher and as an editor, the biggest dilemma for me is that people think because you're telling a narrative you can tell stories about yourself. Creative nonfiction isn't just story. It's information, and the story is the driving force of the presentation of that information.

Skloot: The first thing you do tend to think about is the structure of the narrative, deciding how it's going to work as a larger piece. That's what's going to get people to the facts. If the structure of the narrative isn't right, then people won't get the facts. The story part is just as important as the facts because you're not going to get to the facts without the story. And I don't think there's any right balance. I think for most writers the story and information just comes as they gather their material. I've written pieces that have been very little story and a lot of facts and some that have been almost entirely narrative. It really depends on what it is that you're writing about and what the characters have done, and how the story's presented itself.

Gutkind: So what should we do in terms of publishing? How do we take the narrative and put it in a 30, 40, 50-page document that is going to lead to a contract with a major publisher?

Cahill: My short answer to that is I know it when I see it; and when I see it, I buy it! But there are essential things that need to be in any proposal. Generally it's got to be about a topic that's broad enough for a general readership. The writer needs to be, if not expert, than well informed about the given topic and to have done the initial thought work, legwork, that it takes to be able to render that experience in a thoughtful and intelligent way. And also to have the narrative techniques, skills, and be able to express the story in a way that will appeal to readers. There are books out there on how to write a book proposal that hone in on the specifics, but generally, once you have some sort of journalistic bylines under your belt, use the people who you know: agents, friends, friends of friends; and try to get your proposal into the hands of the right people who will be interested in it. Look at the books of the writers you admire, see who publishes them, find out who their editors and agents are. Find them and try to pitch them. Send them a pitch letter.

Gutkind: On some of the books I've written I've spent three or four months immersing myself in the world I want to write about, and then work on drafting a proposal. Is that enough to make me an expert on the subject?

Cahill: Depends on the field, depends on the person. If it's something tremendously complex, like putting forth a scientific theory that no one's put forth before, you better really be an expert in the field. For most people working in narrative journalism, it's about having a full understanding of the subject that you're discussing, the people who are involved, having lived in the town where the event took place, done some pre-interview work, read everything you can about the subject, enough to be able to form opinions that are solid. And the more you learn about your subject, the more your opinions may change. In fact, the more they should change. That's one of the most exciting things about this genre. Any good agent or editor will realize that not everything is known at the time of writing a book proposal. The more you can do to make yourself an expert, especially in the Age of Information today, the better you can make the case for your book.

Skloot: I think being an expert is important, whatever an expert means, in tackling the material that you're trying to write about in a way that shows you not only have a grasp of it, but you have access to your subjects, that you're already in the story. One thing I've noticed in the book proposals that I've seen is that the story is missing. Even though the facts, the "what this book is about," is what the editors are going to buy, they're not going to get to the facts unless you've told a story that shows that first of all, you've done the research, and there is a story out there that people will want to pick up off the shelves and read. In my proposal that was the hardest thing, to make the narrative clear and show that I can structure a story. I structured and restructured my book proposal probably ten times before I got to a point where my story was presented in the way I wanted to show it. It's important to take enough time with the narrative and be able to see how your story will work. You don't want to bore the editors.

Ford: What are some ways for beginning writers to gain credibility, to get to the point where someone will take an interest in their proposal?

Cahill: The place to start is to begin publishing. Write smaller articles similar to the Talk of the Town, in whatever town you're in. There are obscure stories everywhere. It's good to have the experience of being professionally edited to see what people respond to. I think more and more news journalism is becoming more narrative. Most of the big national publications are being open to the sort of narrative storytelling in the news.

Skloot: I think writing articles is the best way for any writer to get their name out and get writing experience. I don't think anyone should write a book who hasn't written a lot of articles. It teaches you how to write a story, how to structure a piece of writing. It doesn't matter where you get published. I think alumni magazines are a great way to get articles out there. Especially now they're all very interested in narrative styles. You can start small and eventually balloon from there.

Gutkind: I'd like to add that you have to have patience. No beginning writer understands how hard it is to be a writer. How much work it is. How much work that you're doing without anybody watching you do the work, so nobody knows you're doing the work anyway. You're there every day, writing or trying to write, reading or trying to write, and it takes an incredible amount of effort, hours all by yourself, and your ego suffers. You really have to have faith to want it hard enough to persist. And then there's the continuous rejection. I remember someone who wrote for the New Yorker saying, "We want to say yes, but we almost always say no." In fact, as editors, we want to say yes.

Cahill: There's so much out there. There are so many "no's" to say. Even experienced writers get caught up in ideas the world might not be ready for, or the writer isn't the best person to tell the story. We're always looking for great new talent, for great writers. The more aware writers are of the publishing world, the more they're able to understand how to tell their story.

Skloot: One characteristic I think a lot of writers share is obsession. They have to be obsessed about their story in order to spend the amount of time necessary to work on it and in order to eventually find someone else who shares their enthusiasm and interest in the story enough to publish it. Another good way for beginning writers to start is with book reviews. Writing book reviews helps you look at the structure of a book and see what elements either make the book work or not work.

Gutkind: One thing that's great about creative nonfiction is that you do have the chance to exercise your obsessions in a way that poetry and fiction can't. There are a variety of alternative publications that are willing to look at your story. If you're obsessed enough you can find an outlet for your work. If you work hard, you can uncover more aspects of your story. You can talk to more people, you can dig deeper, you can pester people, until you get the story. You've got to find the story. That's another thing that makes nonfiction so exciting to me. In nonfiction you search inward and you search outward.