Narrative Archives - Julia Flynn Siler

Five Books of Narrative History

May 31, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler 2 Comments

As a teen, I fell in love with narrative history — the use of classic storytelling techniques, such as characters, scenes, and dialogue — to write compelling histories. My first crush was on Barbara Tuchman, a journalist-turned-author who won the Pulitzer Prize for her books The Guns of August and Stillwell and the American Experience in China.

A history teacher assigned me to read A Distant Mirror, a book about what Tuchman called “the calamitous 14th century.” Her writing was so evocative to my eighteen-year-old imagination: I could almost feel and see the fine particles dust kicked up during the jousting matches she described.

Nary a nod to Tom Wolfe…

March 19, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler 1 Comment

One thing I didn’t hear anyone mention at this year’s Nieman conference was the “New Journalism” – that movement pioneered in the mid-1960s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin. Perhaps because there seems to be a growing sense that at least some narrative nonfiction writers have gone too far in plucking techniques from novelists and applying them to journalism.
What drove this home for me was one of the books I bought from the Harvard Book Store to read on the airplane. It was The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting It Right, by Sarah Harrison Smith, who worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Ms. Smith argues that the fabrications of Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Stephen Glass of The New Republic, and, stretching even further back, Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her fictionalized story about an eight-year-old heroin addict which ran in the Washington Post.

Looking for Teachers: The Nieman Conference

March 17, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

This weekend, I spent 48 hours in Boston’s Prudential Center without venturing outside once. Yes, the fat snowflakes that drifted down past our hotel window Saturday morning were an enticement to venture outside. But not enough of one to convince me to miss any of the conversation taking place inside, at the Nieman conference.
Making the trip to Boston for the weekend involved taking a trans-continental flight, spending three nights in a hotel (with my lovely room-mate, Sarah Mott, who had recently returned from Hong Kong,) lining up a sitter for our two boys, and plunking down $375 to attend the conference. It also meant missing such sweet moments as the opening day parade for the start of Little League, which our younger son plays and my husband coaches.
So why did I do it?