Nicholas Lemann is the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The New Yorker, and author of “The Big Test,” among other works of non-fiction.

The following excerpt is from a longer oration by Lemann on New Journalism, how his book ideas evolve, and the structure of his book "The Promised Land." That longer oration can be found here.

One other thing I'd like to talk about before I stop talking gets back to the narrative issue. The problem with the book as I've described it is how do you tie all this together and make it seem like one story? So, links become very important [because] essentially I'm writing a narrative that's a fake, but when you read it it seems real. It's a constructed story. A trial, or a murder, or a year in the life of a teacher is a naturally occurring narrative. What I'm doing is making a narrative. I don't want you to notice that as you're reading the book, but much of my work goes into making it look like it's a naturally occurring story, when it's really a bunch of disparate stuff that I'm pulling together into a story. Now, I was interested in linking the material…I wanted to sort of cut back and forth between the big makers of the world and the kind of ordinary people who are living within this meritocratic system that's been created. So, you get a real feel for what it's like to be growing out of the system…

I would kind of call it “The Baton Technique.” And the way it works is you meet a character, then you meet another character, and that person has a link to the first character, but then that person becomes the main character and you sort of lose the first main character. Then you're going on for a while, and then that person meets another person and then that person becomes the main character. And as the books goes along there's a little crosscutting. The advantage is, I hope, that you're not locked into having to follow people – setting up all the characters in the beginning and then having to follow them through the whole time when they become less interesting. You sort of get to hit them when they're their most interesting and then kind of let them fade. So that's what I'm trying to do in terms of narrative structure and, again, I won't know whether it's worked until I'm finished writing, but that's the goal.

When you stop your narrative line and want to open something up, how far can you go before you start losing the narrative? In a way it's not a very satisfying answer, but the answer is “voice.” You have to develop an authorial voice that is flexible enough to let you do that, which Halberstam does, for example, in The Best and the Brightest very well, and Wolfe does in The Right Stuff. Therefore, in my view, to do this kind of work you have to get away from that kind of very flat, affectless voice that was sort of invented by Hersey in Hiroshima, and to some extent picked up on by Capote in In Cold Blood.

Particularly Hiroshima, which is sort of the first nonfiction novel, I would argue, with third person omniscient narrative. You can't digress in the voice…It's so spare and so clean, and clearly he's trying to be kind of aesthetically Japanese somewhat in the writing, but it's so spare and so clean and so direct, it serves his end very well in a certain way, because it's a counterpoint to the horror of the war—of the bomb. You do better in that book by not saying the bomb is horrible, just by very calmly laying it all out. But in that voice, which is the dominant voice in that book-length narrative nonfiction, still you can't digress and talk about policy and make other points.

But narrative does not, in and of itself, preclude making these other points. And you don't have to have this kind of very rigid chapter approach where you say, “I'm going to have a narrative chapter, and now I'm going to have a policy chapter.” Instead you can develop a more flexible writing voice – it’s hard to do in a newspaper, I admit, but easier to do in a book – that will allow both kinds. And what I'd argue is that it's that extremely direct, spare, austere voice that will not allow you to get into the analytical stuff.

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