This form of writing keeps surging back because it goes deep into a journalist's being as a teller of stories and may provide a direction for the survival of newspapers.
Journalism, especially magazine journalism, continues to debate the use of fiction-writing techniques in reporting the news. The latest movement promoting this technique goes under the rubric of ``creative nonfiction.''
In the early '80s, a similar movement influenced the reporting of news; it was known as ``Literary Journalism,'' and a popular textbook on the topic referred to it as the ``new art of personal reportage.''
Literary journalists were characterized as the young inheritors of the so-called ``New Journalism'' that took the news world by storm in the 1960's and influenced journalism into the 1970's.
The names of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Truman Capote come to mind when one discusses ``The New Journalism,'' but as textbook editor Norman Sims points out, writers such as John Hersey, Lillian Ross, George Orwell, James Agee, and A. J. Liebling -- even Ernie Pyle -- operated as literary journalists long before Tom Wolfe appeared on the scene and coined the label.
Those writers, many trained as daily journalists, ``discovered the power that could be released'' by taking a literary approach to news, Sims said.
The power Sims speaks of, endorsed by those who practice new journalism, literary journalism, or creative nonfiction -- pick a label -- can be found in four principles these writers adopt: accuracy, immersion, voice and symbolism. Debate still rages over the notion of accuracy.
Theodore Cheney, a communications professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut who is credited with first using the phrase ``creative nonfiction,'' says the label is easily and often misinterpreted.
Most people, especially young journalists, Cheney told writer Fran Hodgkins, ``hear the word `creative' and they go nuts.''
It's easy to associate the word creative with imaginative, Cheney claims, and many get the wrong idea that creative nonfiction is imaginative or made up.
``That's not what this is all about,'' Cheney says. ``It's the creative use of words, but you're not creating facts or situations.''
Accuracy is a byword, Cheney says. ``I want something accurate and informational.''
Advocates of creative nonfiction, however, don't want boring writing and argue that skilled writers take facts and situations that appear boring and turn them into interesting and exciting stories.
Clearly, creative nonfiction does not equal inaccuracy; it's not a license for journalists to write anything they want. Once past that misconception, creative nonfiction begins to show its powerful ideas.
Immersion provides the second principle, and immersion leads to details, which are keys to stirring a reader's emotions.
Immersing oneself in the subject of a story and reporting concrete specifics of life, Cheney writes in his book ``Writing Creative Nonfiction,'' gives journalists credibility and authority.
Of course, many newspaper journalists who attempt to get concrete descriptive details into their stories complain that editors often cut such details out because of space limitations. This probably explains why creative nonfiction has found better receptivity in magazines than in newspapers. Nevertheless, newspaper writers can strive to make the audience taste, smell and feel the atmosphere in which a story develops by concentrating and reporting specific details.
The third principle, voice, is another controversial item.
Most contemporary journalists were taught never to use the personal pronoun in reporting the news. The New Journalists turned this on its head. They argued for ``I'' writing in an age characterized as the ``Me'' generation.
Creative nonfiction writers assume their job is to inform, to teach, perhaps, to lecture. To this, however, they add their conviction that writing -- even informing and teaching writing -- should entertain, and entertaining means showing themselves for who and what they are.
Their idea is to break out of the mold described by writer Dan Wakefield: ``We reporters of current events and problems so often try to conceal that we are really individuals after all.''
Daily newspaper reporters still find this a difficult form to use.
Finally, the creative nonfiction writers use symbolism, something most daily journalists think they never touch and which is difficult to pin down.
Symbolism focuses on inner meaning; it goes for the ``deep structures'' of our minds that philosophers and psychologists speak of. In simple words, it is the essence of ``telling a story.'' More, it is the writer telling his or her personal story.
Probably the best known of modern creative nonfiction writers is John McPhee. In discussing this notion of symbolism with editor Sims, McPhee said, ``If you make a list of all the work I've ever done, and put a little mark beside things that relate to activities and interests I had before I was twenty, you'd have a little mark beside well over 90 percent of the pieces of writing.
``That,'' McPhee concludes, ``is no accident.''
Creative nonfiction, like literary journalism and the new journalism before it, is subtly trying to refashion journalism.
With the rising self-consciousness
and criticism that journalists are facing today, it may be time to listen
harder to these artist-critics in our midst.
Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net