"Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like"
About this Quote
Rick Moody is staking out a territory where the old genre border patrol can’t really do its job. “Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies” is a mild-sounding preference that actually smuggles in a whole aesthetic manifesto: facts aren’t enough; the telling has to earn its keep. He’s signaling allegiance to a strain of American writing that treats reality as raw material and craft as the engine - the New Journalism afterglow, the essay as scene, the reported piece that steals pacing from thrillers and interiority from literary fiction.
The phrasing matters. “Devices and strategies” is the language of the workshop, not the confessional. Moody isn’t arguing that nonfiction should lie; he’s arguing that it should be built. Scenes, character construction, suspense, compression, voice - the tools that make a reader feel time passing and stakes accumulating - become, in his view, not decorative but ethical: a way of paying attention hard enough to make experience legible.
There’s a quiet defensiveness in “That’s material that I really like,” too. It’s casual, almost shruggy, as if anticipating the predictable backlash: that narrative nonfiction is manipulation, that “novelistic” equals fake. Moody’s subtext is that shape is inevitable, so you might as well choose a shape that reveals rather than obscures. In a media culture drowning in information and starved for meaning, he’s endorsing nonfiction that doesn’t just report the world, but stages it so we can actually see what’s been happening.
The phrasing matters. “Devices and strategies” is the language of the workshop, not the confessional. Moody isn’t arguing that nonfiction should lie; he’s arguing that it should be built. Scenes, character construction, suspense, compression, voice - the tools that make a reader feel time passing and stakes accumulating - become, in his view, not decorative but ethical: a way of paying attention hard enough to make experience legible.
There’s a quiet defensiveness in “That’s material that I really like,” too. It’s casual, almost shruggy, as if anticipating the predictable backlash: that narrative nonfiction is manipulation, that “novelistic” equals fake. Moody’s subtext is that shape is inevitable, so you might as well choose a shape that reveals rather than obscures. In a media culture drowning in information and starved for meaning, he’s endorsing nonfiction that doesn’t just report the world, but stages it so we can actually see what’s been happening.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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