Nonfiction writers must find their themes in their material. The world delivers the facts, and nonfiction specialists have to make some sense of them. “By meaning,” Jon Franklin said at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, “I really mean the shape of the story and what the shape of the story says. It’s not something that you bring to the story. It’s something that you find in the story and extract from the story.”
