ABSTRACT
Successful stories require not only logical time sequences but timing as well. Too often, the story is no story at all, at least not in the sense of E. M. Forster's classic definition: "a narrative of events in their time sequences". Didion does just this in her chilling book Salvador, in which omnipresent black Jeep Cherokees become symbolic of sudden death because Salvadorian death squads use these vehicles to make political enemies disappear for vultures to find and tear apart. The techniques of fictive devices in nonfiction come naturally to nonfiction masters Harrison, Didion, and Tom Wolfe, who also write fiction, but journalists too can and do use fiction techniques to create dramatic narrative, stresses Wolfe, an expert on what has been called the New Journalism. A writer such as Didion or Wolfe employs metaphors, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, and foreshadowing, among other literary devices. Such expertise means that today's feature always is a notch better than last week's feature.
