Mike Rose on Writing Non-Fiction

00:08 [Mike Rose] Well, good non-fiction writing draws a lot, I think, from the techniques of the fiction writer. I've learned so much by drawing from that well. You certainly strive to create characters who are memorable. You work hard to capture a scene, capture a moment. Sometimes

00:30 in non-fiction, you're able to capture it because you were there, you recorded it. At other times, you're doing your best to recreate it, based on what people have said or what you've read. There's so much you learn from fiction: the play of language, the attempt to craft the sentence that really works, that works on multiple levels, the incorporation of metaphor, the varying of sentence length, the

01:00 construction of the powerful image, the dramatic rise and fall. All of these different techniques, this wealth of techniques that abound in fiction are certainly available and used by all kinds of really good non-fiction writers. There are differences, of course. In non-fiction, you are at least attempting as best you can to stay close to the bone of truth, close to the bone of what happened. In fiction you're allowed to

01:30 drift from that immediate flow of events. But these differences aside, I think the similarities are profound. My non-fiction writing becomes all the more vibrant to the degree that I can incorporate in the techniques that the fiction writer uses regularly and that ranges all the way, again, from thinking of the rhythm of a sentence

02:00 to how to craft a character with some kind of vividness to looking for that one image or that one moment that really tells so much about a scene. And that can hold true in the carpenter shop, in the beauty salon, in the classroom, out in the corner of the schoolyard. The really important thing about using story and vignette in non-fiction is that you're using it to make a claim, to make an argument, to forward an argument,

02:30 then rhetorically, these literary techniques become all the more powerful. So that the argument advances, then, along multiple simultaneous and interacting planes: the plane, one hopes, of logic, but also as well the plane of art, the plane of the movement of emotion. So that, boy, when you can hit that moment in your

03:00 non-fiction, where the logic of a claim is resonating with the emotion of scene, then you've got something. I think that's what a lot of us strive for.