These Four Tools of Narrative Medicine Can Apply to Any Kind of Writing Work

(matthewhenry photo courtesy Wikimedia)

ASJA is pleased to share this article by member Olga Lucia Torres, a Latina narrative medicine practitioner whose cultural fluency shapes how she listens, reports, and writes, in celebration of 2026 Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.

I didn’t learn to truly listen until 2012, when I returned to graduate school as an adult and received a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine. Now, I use the tools I acquired in the program all the time in my writing. Other writers can apply it to their work, including journalism, content marketing writing, and nonfiction books.

Let me explain.

Growing up in a Colombian and Puerto Rican household, I was surrounded by family, my abuela, mami, tío, tía, primos, and primas. We spoke loudly, each trying to get our points across, so whoever spoke the loudest won. We listened well enough to prepare our responses. Then I went to law school and became a public defender. That’s when I learned how to listen so I could make points on behalf of my clients in court. At home–selective listening. In court–argumentative listening.

The combination served me well. But neither taught me how to truly hear someone. Narrative medicine did.

Narrative medicine seeks to improve healthcare by creating a dynamic in which clinicians become radical listeners, helping patients become honest and fearless storytellers. It allows us to enter another person’s world through close reading, creative writing, self-reflection, attentive listening, and bearing witness to their experience. Since its founding at Columbia University in 2000, narrative medicine has expanded into other fields, including education, law, and journalism. 

Here are four common narrative medicine tools I use when writing articles that other writers can incorporate into their work.

Narrative Competence

Dr. Rita Charon, a physician and literary scholar, co-founded the field of narrative medicine with other Columbia University clinicians and humanities scholars. She believed that clinicians needed to learn to absorb, interpret, and be moved by what they heard, not just diagnose it. She called this narrative competence. I think of narrative competence as the ability to notice what is happening beneath the words: the hesitation, the ambiguity, the shift in tone, the moment a story changes shape.

Here’s one example of how I have applied the concept of narrative competence to my journalism work. I was writing an article on the difference between how BIPOC people invest and how white people invest. I had set up an interview at a café in Harlem with a source who had worked at two investment firms. The source was reticent, careful, measured–not yet willing to trust me with what he knew.

Because I was actively focusing on what was happening beneath his words, I did not start by asking him to share his experiences working at the firms. Instead, I asked him how he felt when his supervisors pushed him to sell financial products that people didn’t need, products that were not designed to serve BIPOC clients.

He went quiet for a moment. Then he started talking. That is narrative competence. It is the difference between gathering facts and entering someone’s experience. After our meeting, the source emailed me materials that became a major part of the story. After another meeting and reading the finished article, he even agreed to be named in the piece.

Narrative Medicine and Its Three Tenets

In their interdisciplinary qualitative research, Dr. Charon and her colleagues identified three tenets of narrative medicine that all clinicians could follow: attention, representation, and affiliation. As the field has expanded, these tenets apply to anyone in a listening relationship, including journalists, educators, advocates, and social workers.

Attention is defined as selflessly focusing on the teller and listening. Representation means witnessing and co-creating what is being heard, usually in writing. Affiliation stems from active or radical listening and is defined as the knowledge gained through representation, binding the listener and the teller.

These tenets have helped me build rapport with sources like the one I described, represent their stories accurately, and earn the kind of trust that makes people say things they have never said in print before.

Attentive Listening

Practitioners of narrative medicine develop attentive listening through a close reading of something. It could begin with reviewing a text, image, video, or recording to tune the eye and the ear. Then we write in response to a prompt.

When working on an article, I practice this technique by focusing on what a source says and doesn’t say: facial expressions, crossed arms, the words they chose and the ones they avoid. When I met the source at the cafe in Harlem, I noticed when he turned toward me, and then his shoulders shifted. I noticed when he stopped choosing his words as carefully. I noticed the moment he decided to trust me. None of that was in his quotes. All of it shaped how I wrote the story.

Narrative Humility

Dr. Sayantani DasGupta, a faculty member in Columbia’s master’s program in narrative medicine, developed the concept of narrative humility. The concept holds that we can never be fully culturally competent because we can never fully know another person. Stories are not static facts to capture and pin down. They are living realities we enter, navigate, and hold room for in all their complexity.

Sitting across from my source in Harlem, I named why the story was important to my mami and me. I told him who I was: a Latina whose own community has been failed by financial institutions, who understood something about being steered toward products not designed to serve me. I did not pretend to fully know his experience. I acknowledged the distance between us and the things we shared. By telling him I was there without judgment, that I wanted to hear his experience, and then sitting in silence until he was ready, I changed the conversation.

How Narrative Medicine Translates to Writing

The fact that my source emailed me documents I wasn’t expecting and agreed to be named in the article is exactly what narrative medicine can look like when it’s incorporated into the practice of journalism. Not a technique. Not a formula. A way of being present with another person’s story until they trust you enough to hand you the parts they were protecting.

I became a journalist after my narrative medicine studies. And from the beginning, those studies shaped how I listened.

Narrative medicine gave me the only tool that actually matters–the difference between listening to respond and listening to understand.

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Olga Lucia Torres is an ASJA member and headed the 2026 conference scholarship committee. She is a patient rights attorney, narrative medicine lecturer at Columbia University, and health advocate whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Parents, and other publications.