With David Valdes Greenwood, Kimberly Davis, and Ethan Gilsdorf. Hosted by Charles Coe.

David Valdes Greenwood is the author of "The Rhinestone Sisterhood: A Journey Through Small-Town America, One Tiara at a Time," two other nonfiction books, two memoirs, and teaches creative writing at Tufts University. When his daughter went from being a fan of Sporty Spice to everything Princess, he wanted to research how female characters are presented in media as either pretty and sparkly or plain and strong. He entered an alternate universe when he googled "festival queens", and spent $13000 of his own money traveling throughout Louisiana. His particular challenge as a guy - and gay dad - from liberal New England was to gain the trust of his subjects in order to access local life. He thought the book would be about the Queen of Queens, because the various beauty queens (Frog, Cotton, Cattle, etc.) compete for the ultimate title, but the arrest of one of the queens gave the book melodrama and it became a narrative with a story arc.

Kimberly Davis is a poet and writer, teaches creative writing at the CCAE and is the author of Kim's Craft blog. Her book, "Teaching the Dog to Think," comes out summer 2011. When it came to writing her book, she struggled with two issues: How to impose a structure to the book by making the stories episodic, as in real life; and learning how to dramatize events. In her workshops she sees that narrative journalists who don't have a fiction background have issues with pacing, such as journalists and academics, who come with rules about research and don't know how to turn it into a compelling narrative. She uses the example of Sebastian Junger's "A Perfect Storm," in which he writes the chapter about what it's like to drown: "If this happened, then this happens. Using syntactical structures allowed Junger to "get into" the Andrea Gale (fishing boat). He had done enough research to place a physical presence in the scene; it is speculation but grounded well in fact. Her upcoming book is about training agility with her collie dog. "It's the story of myself being a jerk and seeing myself for all my inadequacies. She applied the lessons learning about dog training to parenting and teaching, and had a revelatory experience: Dog training teaches the power of will.

Ethan Gilsdorf writes for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Wired and other publications, edits a blog entitled Geek Pride and is the author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks." Immersion journalism is not news and has many names. He quotes a filmmaker who once said "documentary film is the creative treatment of actuality." But the question for him is, what role does the author have in it. His book is about why gaming and role-playing are so popular now, and about how people in costumes become confident, different people. Like a camera in a room, he often wanted to fade to the background to let people tell their own stories. He had nine months to research and write the story and come up with a satisfactory ending. His greatest pressure was not knowing how it would end. There were scenes that he had to make up, such as events that happened when he was twelve. His first duty is to tell a truthful story, but the scenes he invented felt true to the experience because he was true to the spirit of what happened.

Q and A:

When you decide about what you want to write about, do you think of themes that will appeal to a wide audience or do you make build your theme to have universal appeal?

DVG: I sold my book as a study about power in least likely places (festivals). There are "universal specific" themes here, but you can be accurate and speak freely about a world. It's universal in that you are dealing with real people, and what the girls deal with on a daily basis is their striving for the goal of queen. It's a strange subculture but it's what a lot of girls go through.

KD: It's a good question, like 'why is reality TV is so compelling?' Those stories are specific and quirky, not general and universal. But its very specificity is what's authentic and interesting. Small details become universal. The weirder the better.

EG: when you try to sell a book it is a proposal with a marketing plan and aimed at a specific audience; a bit of BS. You have to give numbers that are real. He didn't want to focus on the online flirtations and marrying kind, he wanted to look at regular people who had the view that adolescence sucked. He followed his subject's stories into adulthood. Love, heartbreak, and fear are universal themes.

EG: In the narrative, whether it's TV or a novel, characters go through change. They start at A and end at B. The build is what's the guy thinking, his emotional struggle. You follow them, in their shoes. The arc in my book was me re-embracing role playing games again. I still play Risk and Dungeons and Dragons, though not online.

DVG: Arc is large, it just changes experience of writing it. You meet your world and something changes and watch how it plays out to get to the other side.

Did you ever think you could write a novel based on your investigations?

KD: Yes, but a novel more difficult to sell. Fiction is not selling on Amazon, unless it's aimed at particular audience. Nonfiction does sell. To find big stuff that is popular, google 'key words.' A lot of what will sell in the next ten years is linked to keywords and meta-data. Producing reality TV is cheaper than scripted drama, and falls into specific niches, like romance or young adult. If you write in those genres it will sell, but literary nonfiction won't sell unless you're an academic. And there are ways to reach and build an audience, such as through a blog.

EG: The silly answer is that it would be great to travel and write and not be shackled to truth and reality. My fantasy is to be a novelist in pajamas. There's freedom in novel writing but there's research involved for writing fiction, too.

DVG:I kept a blog and posted pix so they could see my take. I didn't fictionalize, but could have, since there's a great screenplay here. I often deal with the issue of "platform" when you go to publisher with the next idea, and must include a quantifiable number of readers who will buy it. This is especially true of nonfiction.

How did you discover the shape of the book and where it was going: the "arc"?

DVG: The arrest helped. Life provided the arc. I believe each chapter has to have its own motion, and the shift includes the big picture. Chaim Potok said all literature is when humans meet and come out of it differently. The reader has to come out on the other side. Each chapter has a task to accomplish.

KD: My story has a personal narrator, about my trouble with dog training. I also had to do a lot of research, but it was difficult to work the research into the narrative organically and staying in voice, and not casualizing the research.

EG: How much of my story to invent was an issue. But it's been interesting to discover that there is a mini-arc in a 1200-1500 word story. The narrator has to go through change. The curious thing is that there wasn't going to be too much about me, but the editor liked it and wanted more of me in it. Some books start in middle of action, and you have to read through them to learn the background and ending.

When you see a manuscript or draft, what do you find doesn't work?

EG: People make the mistake that they have to tell every detail (as in memoir). Celebrities can do that, but the rest of us have to find shape and arc. If we're not going on that journey [in a book], I get turned off.

KD: The voice and tone determines if I'll stick to it. It's that tone of wisdom. ("I lived thru this") It gets reflected in syntax you use and in the poetry of the voice. In my workshops I look for where their [students] voice is developing.

DVG: I now like narrative nonfiction, but if I'm going to read an essay and the writer is not in such command, I'm done.

It's all different ways to ask same question: why should anyone else care? Too many writers think others will be interested in a story because they they're into it. But how do you make somebody care about this? (CC)

DVG: Honestly, I care about what I write. I'm blogging on same sex parenting for AOL and it's exciting. But I also blog for "platform."

Re: research, do you use little pieces you find along the way to sell stuff to other publications, or save it for your book?

DVG: While I'm writing the book I do not expect to sell to other magazines. When writing the blog, some stories might show up in other places.

KD: I didn't blog about dog training, but starting using my blog to develop the audience. The comments push you in areas you didn't know. What will be in book are things I hadn't thought of.

Writing articles on the topic is more helpful after the books come out because it helps you sell the books.

EG: Three of four chapters in my book were previous articles. The rights revert to you after a period of time. I recycled my ideas into op-eds, and more articles. When movies come out to relate to my book, I use this to tie it in. If you own the rights, you can recycle ideas everywhere.

DVG: Huffpost and AOL have similar policies. No paid or low-paid blogs. I get $100 for a blog post, but HP has rights in perpetuity. I get $100 from AOL to go to charity. There is a lawsuit over HP and AOL policies that said you can keep writing if we choose to keep you, but the lawyer said it's slavery.