Replay: Janine di Giovanni shares Five Things She's Learned about Writing Narrative Non-Fiction
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
“If you’re a writer, my aim is that when this class concludes you’ll be better equipped to make your non-fiction as successful as you want it to be. If you’re a reader, I hope all we share together will increase your continuing appreciation and enjoyment of great, essential writing.”
– Janine di Giovanni, Five Things I've Learned about Writing Narrative Non-Fiction
Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Here’s the first five minutes of her two-hour class in which she shares the Five Things She’s Learned about writing — and appreciating — narrative non-fiction and memoir.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing Narrative Non-Fiction considers the essential role that great non-fiction narrative plays in shaping readers’ and writers’ understanding of the world. Janine covers the best ways to interview sources for her writing (including family members and voices from the past), and addresses each of the essential components of great narrative: construction, timing, research, pace, dialogue, and recall.
In her two-hour class, Janine also talks specifically about memoir — about how to construct a compelling and successful narrative that shares the substance of your own life and what we all can learn from specific techniques of great writers including Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Barbara Skelton, Lillian Hellman.
If you’re interested in thinking fully about the immediate and long-term impact of trauma and moral injury, this class is for you.
Janine writes long format reportage, mainly about war and the politics of conflict. She was awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a public speaker and a foreign policy analyst. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non-fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. She is currently working on a new book called The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East which will be published this year.
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