Narration: Real World Writers
Sue Grafton
Life is a sort of unstructured narrative. And within that framework, why we read fiction and why we read books is because they're little narratives. And the writers' job is to create that.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Well I think that all writing is narrative. There is no such thing as non-narrative writing. If you examine the driest editorial, or even the pure scientific article, what you'll find is it's chronological, it tells a story, it is narratized by some kind of a narrator that gives you a beginning situation, runs you through it, and scientific articles often read like detective stories. That's there in narrative, we had this problem, we looked at it in these ways, we've run experiments, we studied it, and we came to these conclusions. This is the narrative underlying 95 percent of the scientific articles that are published. They are all detective stories.

Santi Buscemi
Narrative writing is writing which is important to a lot of different fields, journalism for one. That's the most obvious. Historians use narrative writing. And scientists use narrative writing all the time. I remember when I was in college, I had to memorize the twenty nine steps to the Appalachian Geosyncline, which was in a geology class I took, which was the formation of the Appalachian Mountains. That was a narrative. There are thousands of examples, of course. The way blood courses through the body, the way clouds form, what happens when a volcano erupts, the very stages of it. Those are all stories essentially.

Jeffrey Goodby
Advertising's all about storytelling. I think the most persuasive thing in the world, going way back to primitive times is a story well told.

Robert Stansberry
Truck comes in, he's a cash job, he has to go that same day. So you have to have the story entered in the computer to close out the job, and the customer needs a story because he needs to know what you did. I mean, you might do the clutch, you might also do both rear axle seals, and so you're kind of bouncing, it's just a bunch of little stories put together to make one big explanation of what you did on his truck.

Kuulei Rodgers
When we write our dive logs we have to submit them to the university dive safety officer, and we also have to keep our own dive logs so we know exactly how much time we spent underwater. And there are spaces there where you can also write various organisms that you've seen that are unusual, or something that happened on the dive. And it's a way to look back at the dive logs and remember, it's something similar to a journal where you can look back, a diary, and look at your diving past.

Chitra Divakaruni
I think there are some very clear possible ways of moving from personal writing to academic writing and I want to clarify that for me when I say academic writing, I don't necessarily mean technical and dry. I think the best academic writers are the ones who let us realize the importance of what they're writing about in human terms. Why should we be interested in the way in which, let's say a building is designed, if I see no connection between that and the rest of my life. So in my academic papers that I have my students write, I always have them try and come up with a thesis which is personally meaningful for them. And from that, that becomes a bridge, that thesis between a personal narrative style that they might have and a more objective, argumentative paper.