My confusion came from a curious warning. Awash in a sea of writers and would-be writers in a drab-walled meeting room at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference a few years ago in Vancouver, B.C., I was listening to author Dinty W. Moore extol the virtues of creative nonfiction writing when suddenly he straightened his stout body and leaned across the podium.

"Look out," he cautioned, his tone dire, "the journalists are coming!"

I didn't know what he meant—why he might see journalists as adversaries rather than kin of creative nonfiction writers—but I couldn't ask because he kept on talking, telling the crowd about his online magazine, Brevity, where "form is more important than content" and nonfiction comes in all kinds of forms, "even verse."

More baffled than before, I waited impatiently for the question-and-answer period and then raised my hand. "Nonfiction in verse," I said. "Isn't that poetry?"

Moore just frowned and lifted his chin. "We don't want to limit ourselves," he said, "with expectations and categories."

He may have meant only that his magazine prefers unusual approaches to form that bring new meaning to subject matter, rejecting strict definitions of what nonfiction writing can be, but his fuzzing of lines and devaluing of content made me uneasy. I couldn't help thinking that his warning about "journalists" had something to do with the success many self-described journalists (such as Susan Orlean or Jon Krakauer) have had in recent years, weaving compelling stories from solid reporting. Instead of choosing form over content or worrying about making art, they've concentrated on doing their research well and staying true to what they've discovered. The result has been greater trust in, and growing readership for, the kind of creative nonfiction that is reported rather than remembered or constructed—the kind that is focused on facts first and creativity second while seeking to balance the two.

Although he's attained his own reputation as a creative nonfiction apostle, Moore was originally a disciple of the man credited with coining the term creative nonfiction, Lee Gutkind, who taught a class with those words in its title at the University of Pittsburgh as early as 1973. I don't know if Gutkind defined the term in that original syllabus, but he's been explaining and refining it in prose and in person ever since, focusing primarily on the "creative" rather than the "nonfiction" component.

In a piece that appeared in 2001, "Becoming the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction," Gutkind defines it this way: "writing nonfiction using literary techniques like scene, dialogue, description, while allowing the personal point of view and voice (reflection) rather than maintaining the sham of objectivity."

He goes on to draw a distinction between creative nonfiction writers and journalists that may have influenced Moore: "Literally or symbolically, we [creative nonfiction writers] can dye our hair green, wear earrings in our navels, and allow our own personalities to appear on the page with our ideas and observations—a seemingly special violation to the journalist, who has been locked into the inverted pyramid 5W format (who-what-when-where-why) over the past half-century and beyond."

Although Gutkind credits journalists such as Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe (the New Journalists, as Wolfe dubbed them in 1973) with using "literary techniques and personal voice" as early as the 1960s in writing for magazines like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New York and acknowledges "the journalistic, fact-oriented roots of creative nonfiction," he leaves journalists outside the creative nonfiction tent because "journalists have, over the years, been so stifled from being creative that they don't exactly understand what the word creative might signify beyond the parameters of fiction."

One reason Gutkind can make such a claim, of course, is that "creative nonfiction" has strayed far beyond what by any stretch of the term might be called "journalism." Memoir, for instance, which has garnered more attention—and criticism—than other kinds of creative nonfiction, often relies exclusively on an author's memories and imagination. In a note at the opening of his memoir, This Boy's Life (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), for example, Tobias Wolff states unabashedly that "this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell." This reliance on dubious recall and the troubling fictionalizing done by memoirists such as James Frey (as well as the my-awful-experience-is-more-shocking-than-yours approach of many memoir writers) has led readers and critics to think of memoir as closer to the novel than to anything truly fact based.

The same can be said of the personal essay, which by nature offers a deeply subjective view of things, no matter how many facts it employs.

With both memoir and personal essay, Gutkind's comments about point of view, personality, and the foregrounding of an author's ideas make sense—as, to a lesser extent, do Moore's about favoring form over content, if that means finding fresh approaches to writing about common human situations. Their appealing ideas about personal freedom run into trouble, however, in creative nonfiction's third category—what Moore, in his generally useful guide to writing creative nonfiction, The Truth of the Matter (Pearson Longman, 2007), calls (without a trace of irony) "literary journalism."

What distinguishes this third category from memoir and personal essay, according to Moore, is only that it "usually focuses outward, on an event, location, or person the author finds worthy of careful examination." He stresses that "literary journalism" must be based on "facts" but offers no advice on how these facts can or should be collected or tested. Or how they might be different from what are taken to be "facts" in a memoir. Instead, he says more than once that all reporting is subjective, as if there were no difference between a memory and the notes taken from direct observation.

In his "Godfather" essay Gutkind stresses, too, that "creative nonfiction writers must always work as hard as necessary to be true to the facts." But while making vague statements about the need to avoid "a loss in substance, integrity, or verifiable facts" when using story to enliven an otherwise journalistic account, he never defines these terms or tells us where the "substance" and "facts" come from. He condemns outright inventions such as making up "saucy dialogue" to improve a story, calling them "inexcusable laziness," but he never suggests how much research, or what kind, a "true" nonfiction account requires.

In 2008, Gutkind did edit a slim book called Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Norton) that emphasizes the importance of research in all kinds of creative nonfiction. A collaborative effort by twenty writers whose ideas and voices are blended together, the book lays out a number of fact-gathering methods. But because it attempts to cover all aspects of creative nonfiction writing (even publishing) in just 161 pages, fact collecting and assessment receive only cursory treatment.

It is important to note here that Moore and Gutkind and others like Philip Gerard, Bill Roorbach, and Michael Steinberg—all of whom have written or edited books on creative nonfiction with titles or subtitles like The Art of Truth or Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life—teach in university writing programs (as do I). Most of their programs offer a master of fine arts degree, and they themselves think of the writing they write and promote as art. From this springs their preference for words like creative or literary or even nonfiction over, say, narrative or journalism or that old stuffy term, expository writing. They are artists first, craftsmen second.

So what about those on the other side of the fence? Those who proudly call themselves journalists? Those who prefer the word craft to art because art to them is a slippery term? Are they stuck in their inverted-pyramid ways, as Gutkind suggests, or have they freed themselves? And if they have, how do they view the use of what are commonly called fictional techniques in writing fact-based stories?

I have to confess here that I went to journalism school, have worked as a journalist, and continue to freelance for a major newspaper. As a reviewer and writer about the arts, I've had my share of fights with copyeditors wanting to excise the "I" from my writing. Among hidebound journalists (and editors, in particular) there is, as Gutkind suggests, resistance to abandoning journalism's traditional ways. But over the past two decades or so, attitudes have been changing rapidly, influenced not only by the New Journalists but also by a new generation of fact-based writers who practice what Robert Boynton, in his book of conversations with some of them, calls The New New Journalism (Vintage, 2005).

This new generation may include the journalists Moore was warning his audience about, authors like Orlean and Krakauer, Jonathan Harr and Jane Kramer, whose fact-based books are finding a larger readership. What distinguishes them from traditional journalists is that they trust their perceptions, accept that objectivity is a myth, and work hard to communicate the human dimensions of their subjects by using storytelling techniques—a narrative approach, a distinctive voice, scenes and dialogue and setting. What sets them apart from those who insist on words like creative and art is that they're reporters and researchers first. Gumshoes and craftsmen. Their stories always begin with strong—often exhaustive—reporting.

In fact, what distinguishes these New New Journalists from the old New Journalists is a greater awareness of all the ways a story can be reported—by spending extended amounts of time intimately involved with their subjects, for example, or bringing in relevant information from ancillary fields such as anthropology or sociology—and the firm belief that any idea can lead to an authentic story if the research is done well. In pursuit of authentic stories, they've hopped trains with hoboes, followed an orchid aficionado into the Florida swamps, and mucked through the rat-infested meatpacking plants that service the fast-food industry. They've also used their imaginations to find less-than-obvious sources for plausible—often visceral—depictions of events they couldn't witness themselves.

For his best-seller The Perfect Storm (Norton, 1997), for example, Sebastian Junger blended information from interviews and documents from as long ago as the nineteenth century to imagine the final moments on a fishing boat that sank without survivors. Nothing he used was more effective than an 1892 account—from a Scottish doctor who lost consciousness underwater yet somehow survived—of what it feels like to drown. Inserted just before Junger's imagined description of the fishermen's deaths, the doctor's account makes us feel in our bodies what those men probably endured. "It's as close," Junger writes, "as one is going to get to the last moments of the Andrea Gail."

Narrative journalism (the term these writers tend to prefer) is advancing rapidly on memoir in terms of sales and awareness because, contrary to Moore's assertion, form is not more important than content when you claim that something is true. For the best narrative journalists, research drives the story, not the other way around. And this has earned them a payoff: Unlike memoir, readers still believe that narrative journalism is true—not just in some heartfelt sense but factually as well.

As any newspaper reader (how many of us are left?) can attest, narrative is everywhere in journalism these days. Even informational articles often start with a scene and center on a main character. In newsrooms and journalism schools, the talk of "narrative" is incessant. The danger in all of this is that storytelling, while basic to human communication, has different imperatives and raises different ethical questions than does traditional journalism. When we appropriate other people's lives and experiences, rendering them according to our own beliefs and the requirements of story, we have to be careful. We have to make sure we not only find the necessary and verifiable facts but also honor them, refusing to let the impulse to tell a good story or to privilege our own point of view distort what the research says or might say if we had done it better.

This applies to all of us—whether we call ourselves journalists or creative nonfiction writers—who want to claim that the stories we tell are true.

The Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark states the problem succinctly in "The Line Between Fact and Fiction," a chapter on ethics in Telling True Stories (Plume, 2007), a Nieman Foundation anthology that is one of the best books available on narrative nonfiction writing. "Some contemporary nonfiction authors defend invention in the name of reaching for some higher truth," he writes. "Such claims are unjustifiable in any journalism."

Clark doesn't mean just the wholesale fabrications of a Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass but also what John Berendt, the best-selling author of the supposedly nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Random House, 1994), calls "rounding the corners"—making up dialogue, for example, or manipulating events to end up with a better story.

Some of the more insidious inventions may not seem like inventions—even to the writers themselves—because they're based on solid "facts." They come, paradoxically, from the more sophisticated research-gathering techniques and better understanding of story today's most talented nonfiction writers possess. In this case, the facts aren't made up or changed; what's manipulated is how they're presented and interpreted.

A good example comes again from Sebastian Junger. In A Death in Belmont (Norton), his 2006 follow-up to The Perfect Storm, he revisits the rape and murder of an elderly woman named Bessie Goldberg in the Boston suburb of Belmont in 1963, when the Boston Strangler was active. Although an African American handyman named Roy Smith was convicted of the crime, Junger suggests that a white man named Albert DeSalvo, who later claimed to be the Boston Strangler and was working at Junger's parents' house—not far from the Goldberg place—on the day of the murder, might have been the real culprit.