Narrative Nonfiction: The Craft of True Stories
Scene construction, voice, structure, and the ethics of writing about real people
Sarah Oduya teaches narrative nonfiction as a discipline of observation, structure, and moral responsibility — lessons drawn from two decades of writing for the highest-stakes publications in journalism.
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What you'll learn
- Build a scene from interview notes and observation
- Develop a distinctive, earned voice that is consistent across a long piece
- Structure a long-form narrative with deliberate control of pacing and revelation
- Conduct interviews that generate material rather than confirmation
- Navigate the ethical obligations of writing about real people and events
Curriculum
2 modules · 5 lessons · 8h total
- The sentence as the unit of meaning22 minPreview
- Scene construction: the three elements28 min
- Voice: what it is and how to find yours24 min
Requirements
- Have written something — anything — of at least 1,000 words
- Reading: The Journalist and the Murderer (Janet Malcolm), The Elements of Style
- A project in mind, even if only vaguely formed
About the instructor
Sarah Oduya
Author & Writing Coach
New York Times bestselling author · Former editor, The Atlantic · MacArthur Fellow
Sarah Oduya is a two-time New York Times bestselling author whose essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022 for her contributions to narrative nonfiction. Before her writing career, she spent seven years as a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she developed the voice of a generation of emerging writers. Her teaching focuses on the sentence — the unit of meaning — before it expands to structure, argument, and the reader's sustained attention.
Full profileStudent reviews
“Sarah's lesson on scene construction is the single best piece of writing instruction I've encountered in ten years of professional writing. The three-element framework sounds obvious once she explains it, which is how you know it's actually right.”