A communist spy sweats it out in a Brooklyn hotel room. Is the FBI on to her? Is the KGB secretly plotting her liquidation? Is the guy she’s sleeping with a counterintelligence agent? She takes another drink to calm her nerves and considers her next move.

He is a small, slight man in a trim, dark suit and a Chaplinesque derby. He has the serene, unlined face of a teenager, with clear coppery skin, full lips and a high, broad forehead. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes are dark, intense, serious, like student intent on passing an exam. He is twenty-one years old, an immigrant from Japan, and he is stepping off the train in Hood River, Oregon, and looking, for the first time, at the strange landscape he hopes to call home.

Elvie goes from bad to worse. She is no longer able to eat or drink anything. She is choking on her own saliva. She is wide-eyed. Her body is stiff and tense. She knows there’s a process going on, she knows she is dying, and she is fighting it. Her family is with her now, her son, her daughter-in-law, two grandchildren and one great grandchild. They take turns sitting with her. Someone is always there. They talk softly to her. They hold her hand, stroke her arm, fluff her pillows, keep her lips moist, apply cool compresses to her forehead, rub her body with lotion.

The first scene took place in 1945, the second in 1908 and the third, just last week. They are all historical re-creations, the beginnings of narratives crafted from deep research rather than direct observation. The first is the opening scene of my latest book, Clever Girl. The second comes from an early chapter in Stubborn Twig, another of my books. The third is something I’m working on right now. For each, the challenge was the same: making a moment come alive for readers, making characters real on the page, telling a compelling story when I had not been there to watch, to take notes, to ask questions.

I consider historical re-creation one of the essential skills in writing literary nonfiction. Of course it’s essential when writing history itself, which many narrative nonfiction writers do – from Melissa Fay Greene’s story of the Springhill Mine Disaster(Last Man Out) to Erik Larson’s chronicle of the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, in 1900 (Isaac’s Storm) to Mark Kurlansky’s kaleidoscopic tale of the only rock we eat (Salt).

Without the ability to re-create scenes, to animate characters, to use factual documents to craft real life, a writer is left writing a dry chronicle of events that reads suspiciously like one of those tomes we all carried back and forth in our book bags and never opened unless we had to. If you’ve read the books I just mentioned, you know they are anything but dry. In fact, they are page-turners.

But what about those who do not write history? Why should they learn the art of historical re-creation? First, I would argue that there is no such thing as writing literary nonfiction without writing history. History is embedded in every story we tell. The characters who populate an unfolding-before-the-writer’s-eyes story all have pasts, and those pasts often hold the key to understanding who they are, what they do and what they care about. And so we find ourselves needing to re-create a moment from a character’s past – a defining moment, a turning point, a traumatic event. We weren’t there to see it, but it needs to be in the story.

Places too have pasts, and writing a contemporary story about a place or a story in which place is, itself, a character, means more than just being there and experiencing the locale. It means delving into the history of that place and mining its past for insights into its present.

Second, the reality of reporting a story is that you can’t be everywhere, and you can’t be working all the time. That means that even if you are writing a story devoid of history (if that’s possible), and even if you care nothing about the past of your characters or locale (if that’s possible), you still often find yourself facing the challenge of recreating a moment you did not directly experience. Either that, or you don’t include the moment.

Several years ago I was researching a book on the experience of being a female athlete (Full Court Press). The basketball team I was following had early morning practices five days a week, and I dutifully rose at 5 a.m. to get there in time to stand on the sidelines, observe and take notes. I did this every day for weeks and weeks. Most days nothing much happened. Entire weeks of practice would go by without offering the glimmer of a new insight. Then, one morning, my infant daughter awoke with an ear infection, and I missed practice. It was at that practice – the first I had missed all season – that one of the starting seniors broke her hand. How could I not write about that? I had no choice but to carefully reconstruct the scene based on multiple interviews.

So the question is: How do you tell a story -- relate an event, write a scene -- which you yourself did not witness.

And the answer is: The same way as if you did witness it. In both cases, you write from the vivid, detailed picture you have in your head. It’s how the picture gets in your head that’s different.

When you are eye witness, the images are first-hand impressions. You try hard for accuracy by your keen observation, furious note-taking and interviews both during and after the event. When writing stories about events you’ve not personally experienced – whether they happened yesterday or a hundred years ago -- you look to documents and photographs and interviews and whatever else you can think of to build those mental images piece-by-piece.

The process of re-creation begins with knowing – or more accurately, learning over time – what it is you need to vividly write a scene, from what was for lunch that day to the color of couch to the precise chronology of events. The detail you train yourself to notice if you are an eye witness is the same detail you need to discover from other sources if you want to make the scene come alive.

And so the work begins. You brainstorm the kind of sources that will likely, or even possibly, get you the depth, quality and precision of information you need. You investigate public documents and private papers. You scour newspaper accounts, court records, census data, photographs, weather service reports, oral histories, Congressional testimonies – whatever makes sense given the story you are after. You conduct interviews. You watch videotape. You read poetry. You immerse yourself in the moment you are trying to recapture.

Then, if you are diligent, patient and resourceful, careful, thorough and a little lucky, the pictures start forming inside your head. You see them, you focus, and you write from that place of vivid detail. Or, as often happens, you soon discover that you can’t write, or can’t write well, because something missing.

I spent weeks doing research to re-create a particularly dramatic moment in a character’s life, one of those “let’s just see what you are really made of” moments. I had hours and hours of taped interviews. I visited and revisited the locale. I poured over maps. I read newspaper accounts. I thought I had it. But when I sat down to write the scene, I discovered that I was missing one seemingly small detail: the weather.

My character was going to be walking the streets of Portland, Oregon, for hours waiting to be arrested (to test the constitutionality of a curfew for Japanese Americans), and I had no idea if he was bent over in the pelting rain, shivering with his hands clenched in his pockets or taking a stroll on a mild spring evening. I had to find out before I could write. And, apparently, I had to start writing before I knew I had to find out.

Art really is in the detail. And, to invert the cliché: You do have to sweat the small stuff.

LAUREN KESSLER (www.laurenkessler.com) is the editor of Etude. Her latest book, Clever Girl, was just released in paperback.