"I wish I had had this book thirty years ago, when I started out." --Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
Name some of the huge bestselling books over the years -- In Cold Blood; All the President's Men; The Perfect Storm; Black Hawk Down; Longitude; Jarhead -- and they all have one thing in common; they all read like novels. Author and agent Peter Rubie shows the reader how to join journalistic research with riveting, character-driven prose to create narrative nonfiction. This is the only book to focus on writing and marketing the narrative nonfiction "novel." (An earlier version of this book was published under the title Telling the Story: How to Write and Sell Narrative Nonfiction (Harper). This version has been extensively reworked.)
A writer of narrative nonfiction lives in a gray zone of fact and fancy. How to balance those two things is what this book is all about. What all narrative nonfiction has in common is a story, engaging characters, the promise of adventure and controversy, the revealing of secrets, peering backstage and behind the curtain. The ill-fated boat ride (A Perfect Storm), the illicit taboo of an adult love affair with a missing father (The Kiss), going into battle in a modern war (Black Hawk Down) and so on. But every time a journalist turns a real person into a "character" and puts thoughts into their minds, every time a reporter recreates dialogue for scenes that weren't recorded and at which the writer was not present, no matter how scrupulously those thoughts and dialogue are based on extensive interviews the writer enters a gray zone of fact and fancy. Just how "true" are these stories? How much can I trust what I read? Does it really matter? Those questions are the heart of what this book is about.
Rubie, Peter: -
Former BBC Radio and Fleet Street journalist Peter Rubie has been an editor and then a literary agent since 1986. He has also been a member of the New York University publishing faculty, where for 10 years he taught the only university-level course in the country on how to become a literary agent. For several years he was also the director of the book publishing section of the NYU Summer Publishing Institute.
Before that, in the U.K., he worked on Fleet Street before becoming one of the youngest news editors for BBC Radio News, and at 23, also worked for the fledgling BBC Radio London as a deputy news editor.
In the U.S. he was the editor-in-chief of a Manhattan local newspaper, and later a regular reviewer for the international trade magazine Publishers Weekly. A member of the Association of Authors Representative (AAR), he regularly lectures and writes on publishing and the craft of writing.
In addition to his work with FinePrint, he is the publisher of a small press, Lincoln Square Books, and is himself a published author of both fiction and nonfiction. What many people do not know about Peter is that he is also an active professional jazz musician, and writes a regular blog column on AllAboutJazz.com, called The Jazz Life. On any given week, he can be heard late in the evening and weekends playing guitar around jazz venues in New York City -- and occasionally in London and elsewhere.
