5 insider tips from author and journalist Lauren Kessler

By Berit Thorson

October 2022

Originally published on Medium

Written for Reporting II (Fall Term 2022)

Lauren Kessler is an author, teacher and storyteller writing books of narrative journalism.

She has explored the worlds of professional ballet, the anti-aging movement, the struggle with Alzheimer’s, and life during and after incarceration in great depth. Kessler runs her website, Instagram, and Twitter, writes on her blog, and contributes to various online sites. She also leads a writing group for men who are incarcerated.

After many years at the University of Oregon, Kessler now teaches storytelling for social change and solutions storytelling at the University of Washington. She recently led a course on moving from journalist to author at the Forum for Journalism and Media (FJUM) in Vienna, Austria.

Following her time at the FJUM, Kessler began backpacking Spain’s Camino de Santiago. She spoke with me about narrative journalism during the evening of her final rest day before completing the journey.

“This is something special that way. There are not that many jobs, really, where you get better the longer that you do it.”

From our conversation, I learned five things you should know about narrative journalism, both what it is and what it is not.

1. Narrative journalism is not traditional journalism.

Kessler said that writing for a narrative must be the focus from the outset. Interviews, which are central to traditional reporting, are not useful for a narrative story, she added, which requires being embedded in the community.

“You can’t come back with the information that you get being a traditional journalist and then make it into a narrative,” she said. “It just doesn’t work that way; the technique is so different.”

Narrative journalism goes deeper than finding a few people to provide a variety of perspectives and combining those quotes with research to form a story, Kessler said, which is the basic format of traditional journalism.

This kind of storytelling dives deeper into the experiences of its subjects than does traditional journalism. The traditional approach to journalism that is based on interviews does not provide enough freedom and insight into people’s experiences to write narrative journalism.

Instead, narrative journalism tells stories from a place of intimate knowledge and understanding. For her books, Kessler spends months or years with her subjects. Her most recent book, “Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home,” tells the stories of six people for two years as they transition out of prison. In reality, though, she followed the subjects for longer than two years to best capture them and their experiences.

2. Narrative journalism requires good storytelling techniques.

Where most journalism training starts with sources, writing, and research, Kessler said people who want to learn narrative journalism should begin with the basics of storytelling.

This starts with conceptualizing stories, considering what makes a story and how to include characters and narrative arcs. Then comes reporting, which focuses on “observing, listening, embedding,” according to Kessler, “and not interviewing.” Finally, crafting a story and bringing the features of narrative and journalism together, presenting an honest story centered on real people backed by research and data.

In the end, narrative journalists “have to know the essentials of a story,” Kessler said. The components of storytelling are the skeleton, she said, and the journalism is the muscles and skin.

“The fact that you chose to do that story, and the lens through which you saw that story — that’s all subjective. We hope it’s honest. We hope it’s thorough. We hope it’s accurate. But it’s all subjective.”

3. Narrative journalism is not advocacy journalism.

Traditional journalism grapples with the idea of objectivity; reporters avoid advocacy. Critics of solutions journalism sometimes claim it is advocacy journalism, but supporters find distinctions between solutions reporting and advocacy.

Given that her two most recent books, “Free” and “A Grip of Time: When Prison is Your Life,” focus on people who are incarcerated, I wondered whether she characterizes her work as advocacy.

She does not.

“What I hope when somebody reads “A Grip of Time” and “Free,” is that they say to themselves, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that this was what life was like [in prison].’ And in the book, I am certainly not saying ‘we should not punish people, prison is bad.’”

But, she added, “I think we advocate just by what we choose and what we notice and what we decide to include and decide not to include.”

“The fact that you chose to do that story, and the lens through which you saw that story, and the people you chose to be around and the scenes that you chose — that’s all subjective.

“We hope it’s honest. We hope it’s thorough. We hope it’s accurate. But it’s all subjective.”

4. Narrative journalism lets the story tell itself.

“I use myself as a vehicle to move people through a story,” Kessler said.

She sees herself as the camera in a movie, “but I’m not an anonymous camera; I want people to trust me, so they know something about me and then they follow me into the prison.”

“And then the scene opens and we meet these people and they talk and they tell stories. And this is not me, this is them,” Kessler said. “Yes, sometimes they talk to me, so I’m in there — I have to be — but I’m the vehicle that brought you there.”

Narrative journalism goes beyond just providing a platform for someone to share their story. Instead, it lets the story tell itself.

Like in a movie, the characters are all leading their own lives, but as the camera, she is there, “telling you where our focus is and telling you where to look.”

“I’m turning the audio on at a certain point,” she said, “But it’s not me stepping over it and saying ‘Oh, look, here’s now what’s happening, please have this emotion because I have this emotion.’ You give the reader space to have his or her own emotions.”

5. Narrative journalism is hard work, but it’s also rewarding.

When I asked for insight and advice for people who are interested in pursuing narrative journalism, Kessler said her best advice is to “apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

“The work is hard,” she said. “It takes a long time. And the cool part about it is you can get better, unlike being, say, an NBA player, who at 40 has bad knees and will have to find something else to do.

“I’m past 40, and the last book that I wrote is better than the first book that I wrote and it’s better than the second book that I wrote. I learned. I not only learned about the people and the places and the issues, I learned how to tell stories.

“So, this is something special that way. There are not that many jobs, really, where you get better the longer that you do it.”

Author Lauren Kessler writes narrative journalism.