In the field of nonfiction writing, it's not the style that wins over readers, but the facts -- the writer's ability to discover something special in the subject matter that a lesser observer might not divine. That's why teaching students how to write amounts really to teaching them how to report.

William Zinsser, a former newspaper reporter, prolific magazine writer, and author of many books, took note of the distinction when he was asked to give a course in nonfiction writing a couple of years ago at the New School for Social Research in New York City. So, rather than subject his students to those lectures on how to write leads, "billboards," and query letters, he thought instead to bring in eleven accomplished graduates of a similar course he had taught at Yale University and have them explain just what they went after in a story and how they got their stuff. He tape-recorded the sessions and jiggered the transcripts into this book of instruction.

"Come and tell stories," he told his acolytes. "Tell stories about what you do and how you do it, and how you got started, and what experiences you learned from, including your mistakes."

The result, aside from relieving Zinsser of a considerable amount of class preparation, is an entertaining and enlightening companion to his highly praised On Writing Well, one that anyone contemplating a career in newspaper or magazine journalism can read with great profit. Arranged in chapters dealing with such categories as Nature and the Environment, The Sports Beat, and Writing About People, it transmits lessons that one can apply to almost any sort of story.

The most important one he stresses is that good writers need to have fun at what they do to provide readers a good time, too. "It takes audacity, and exuberance, and gaiety, and the most important one is audacity," he quotes from S.J. Perelman. It also takes going your own way on a story instead of keeping up with the pack -- zigging, as Jane Mayer of The Wall Street Journal puts it, while everyone else is zagging. A White House corespondent who hated her job because it tied her to press briefings, Mayer always looked for opportunities to break away, such as when President Ronald Reagan's advisers arranged a trip to the island of Grenada so he could celebrate the U.S. victory over that benighted little republic with a photo op under sawying plam trees. Mayer went down a week early to dig beneath the p.r. story and came up with an article on how the patriotic gesture, considering all the expenses of shipping down the president and his entourage, was going to cost taxpayers between $ 3 to $ 5 million. Of cours "You can pay a price for this kind of reporting," says Mayer, who was subsequently put on the White House "death list" and for days afterward couldn't even find out the bare details of the president's schedule.

The rule of following your own head holds especially true for newspaper feature writers, who often find themselves prisoners of editors taken with predictable and dull story ideas. When assigned to do a piece about women who sign up for self-defense courses, John Tierney, who reported on science for Rolling Stone and other magazines before joining The New York Times, sensed that the story here wasn't on the women but on the "model mugger," the pretend rapist in a padded suit who took all their kicks and punches. Or, sent out to do a color story on the famous championship chess match between Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Tierney decided that there wasn't much to be written about two guys sitting silently at a table and chose instead to survey the art of one-upmanship in the field of kibitzing. "Always give yourself an escape," he quotes one kibitzer as saying. "If you're not sure whether a move is good or not, say, 'That's interesting,' or 'That's worth taking a look at.' If it really looks wrong, say, 'I not quite sure that's sound.'"

Another valuable lesson when getting an assignmetn is to track the story down in the history books to enlarge readers' understanding of what's going on today. When Roger Cohn, an environmental writer, now a senior editor of Audubon, was assigned a story about a disagreement between two neighboring Indian tribes, the Northern Cheyenne and the Crow, over whether to exploit a coal reserve, he did some library work on the background of the tribes and came up with a fascinating precedent for the dispute. The Cheyenne, who were against despoiling the land to get at the coal, had been the ones who helped wipe out Custer at the Little Bighorn. The Crow, on the other hand, who wanted to strip-mine the coal for ready cash, had served as Custer's scouts.

Then there's the fly-on-the-wall approach, "making no demands other than the right to tag along," says Mark Singer, the New Yorker writer and author of Funny Money, about the collapse of the Penn Square Bank during the oil bust in Oklahoma. "Sometimes you ask your subject ahead of time, 'I notice that you go every Wednesday to such and such. Could I accompany you there?' knowing it would be a place where you can see him in character...."

Singer also says he took a course in shorthand "because I thought it was important to get dialogue as accurately as possible." And the dialogue he elected to use in his oil book often revealed the subject's personality in just a few words. "Murray started out in the Bronx, or someplace like it," he wrote about one particular character, "but he had been in Oklahoma enough years so that his monologues contained frequent pauses, which were followed by the statement, 'Now, mister, I'm gonna tell ya somethin',' whereupon he would launch into a parable full of local color and universal implications. When I called him to make a date I would always ask how he was and he would always say, 'Well sir, I'm still short and I'm still chubby.'"

One of the important tips Zinsser's ex-students pass on, albeit not one terribly helpful to writers assigned a less than thrilling subject, is that it's a lot easier to make someone interesting if you choose someone interesting to write about. Here's Singer on the eccentric film maker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line). "If Morris could find time to finish Dr. Death, he might at last tie together an odd melange of material: ... scenes from lab research on a mammal called the African naked mole rat, archival footage from an Edison silent film called Electrocuting the Elephant, and a meditation on Zoar, an extinct utopian community in Ohio. After a trip to Europe, Morris had told me with satisfaction about finding the right music to accompany the Zoar material.... 'I'd been hearing this stuff on the radio in Zurich, and then I went into a record store and asked whether they had any liturgical yodeling. They came up with "Yodeler Messen." It's, like, based on the idea that God might be hard of hearing.'"

As with anything patched together from tapes, the book reads a little breezily at times and suffers slightly from repetition. It could also have benefited from a tad closer attention by the copy editor to make sure people actually meant what they said. As part of an interesting explanation of how he got material for one story, for instance, John Rosenberg, the editor of Vermont Magazine, is quoted thusly: "As it happened, the magazine came out a few days after I had waited to have breakfast with the governor, who had just died of a heart attack."

Say I to my smart-aleck self: Rosenberg must write his stuff without using a lot of direct quotes.

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