Pity the Poor Reader

Writing with “porpoise” involves five principles:

• Thinking in two dimensions
• Thinking big
• Pushing for insight
• Writing with the power of the why
• Organizing by ideas
  

 Let’s take a look at each principle.

Thinking in Two Dimensions:

You must work your facts, find an order that reveals their truth. And that takes planning. That’s why a skilled writer constructs his story as if playing a two dimensional game of chess. On the top level, he conceives a campaign for his story, the strategy that will best convey his material. He considers what are the facts, data, sources and scenes needed to make a story work - and then what order in which to organize them. Should he tell the story through the history of one person or place; or instead marshal the most compelling facts in a descending order of importance? Writing a story without some greater strategy is like “pasting feathers together and hoping for a duck.”

A strategy, however, is only as good as its execution. That’s why a writer also works the lower, or tactical level, of his story chessboard. He has to plot how to advance the campaign of his story line by line down the page. That requires figuring where to deploy his best material and when. The wrong fact at the wrong moment can slow the momentum of a story or derail it altogether.

Let’s look at a writer’s two-dimensional chess game in action.

Say, for example, you wanted to write about students struggling to find affordable college loans. As strategist, you’d ask yourself, what elements are necessary to make such a story credible? The answer might include credible data measuring both the lack of affordable financing and the number of students affected by it. You’d also want to find students who illustrate what’s depicted in the figures. And then you’d want an expert to verify the students’ experience as representative.

As tactician, you’d set out to find all these elements. You’d comb the Internet for government, nonprofit organization and university sites that track college loans and their affordability. While online, you’d Google for chat rooms where students are discussing their struggle to find affordable college loans, looking for some people to interview about their experiences.

With research in hand, you’d switch back to strategist. How best, you’d wonder, to organize your material in a way to make it persuasive and readable? That question might lead you to decide to open your story with a dramatic example, say, of a student who was accepted by Harvard yet couldn’t find the affordable financing to enable him to attend. Next you might follow this dramatic opening with the best figures documenting how many students are faced with such a terrible dilemma. And then you might close the top part of your story with a quote from a respected expert on the topic.

This simple example illustrates that there is nothing random in a well written story. A skilled writer calculates what facts are needed and how to organize them. He carefully considers his every word, sentence and paragraph. Even a light-hearted parody is calculated down to the final word. As comic writer Peter DeVries once said, “Nonsense is such difficult business.”

 
Think Big

Why would anyone want to read about a rooster attacking a little girl in South Florida? You might if the writer used the attack as a comic vehicle to lampoon our national obsession with crime and police jargon.

That’s what a 20-something writer named Kelley Benham did at the the St. Petersburg Times. Her power of observation transformed a routine item on the police blotter into parody. The facts of the case were simple enough, even trivial. In a poor black neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Fla., a pet rooster attacked two-year-old Dechardonae Gaines as she lugged an Easy Bake Oven across the street.

But look what Benham does with those simple facts:

“Authorities apprehended the offending rooster, named Rockadoodle Two, and its sister, named Hen. Hen was not involved in the attack, police said.” Later in the story, Benham wrote, “Everybody there knew Rockadoodle Two. Neighbors described the rooster as a normally well-behaved bird from a good family.”

You can hear the stilted, self-important language of countless cop shows and television news reports in Benham’s writing. In applying this language to such a trivial crime, Benham highlights our voyeurism when it comes to others misfortune.

The lesson here is to think big, even about the smallest things. A writer plumbs for what’s universally appealing in any story, whether about a person, place or thing. The best can find meaning in the everyday: Greed in the price tag of a used car; thrift in a man who uses the same plate for every meal and obsession in the way a girls eats a banana.

I once used a buffalo nickel to represent a lifelong quest to fulfill a childhood dream. The child was media mogul Ted Turner and his dream was to own a herd of buffalo. As a boy in Savannah, Ga., Turner couldn’t afford even one buffalo, so he collected buffalo nickels. "I've always been a collector, and the buffalo nickel was the favorite in my coin collection," Turner told me.

Turner’s dream more than came true. Today (at last count), he owns 17,000 head of buffalo on nine ranches across the West. He uses his herds to feed a chain of restaurants named after himself that specialized in serving buffalo meat. You can see how those nickels began to add up to some serious change.

In another story, I used the outsized personality of a Dallas entrepreneur Billy Bob Barnett to represent a seismic shift in the Texas economy in the late 1980s. Here’s how I put it:

“Ranch-reared, athletic and self-made, Billy Bob Barnett was a big man with even bigger dreams. And when Billy Bob dreamed, Texas dreamed with him.”

My story portrayed Billy Bob as the P.T. Barnum of Texas’s booming oil economy. He transformed an abandoned Fort Worth stockyard into a Disney-esque urban amusement park with a Wild West theme, complete with a mechanical bucking bronco. The park drew Dallas’ nouveau riche transients like bees to nectar. But when oil prices collapsed so did Billy Bob’s yuppie park. His fall marked the rise a new pragmatic group business leaders in Texas who began to wean the state off oil as the only piston driving its economic engine.

Push for Insight

All three of the examples above share a common thread. Each story exhibited a keen power of observation. The universal was teased out of the mundane, whether a neighborhood rooster or a buffalo nickel. The writers of these stories saw what others had missed. In short, they wrote with insight.

What’s drives insight is understanding and understanding comes from a thorough grasp of your material. That means seeing a person, place or event in 360 degrees. You’ll know you’ve reached understanding when you can answer for yourself these questions about a story:

• What are the major conflicts?
• What’s the important history?
• Who are the major players and what is the agenda of each?
• Who are the loudmouths and who are the ones with something meaningful to say?

Such knowledge well equips a writer. For one, it enables him to recognize cliché, the tiresome repetition of conventional wisdom. Cliché is the death knell of all that’s fresh and original. Its use signals that a writer has unplugged his brain and is cruising on anothers once fresh but now stale insights. Besides, who wants to read yet again that teenagers are callow and incapable of meaningful relationships because they love text messaging and Facebook? This, like most clichés, is bunkum.

Recognizing cliché is the first step on the road to insight. The next is pushing past the obvious. Once a writer is committed to shunning all that’s cliché, he’s free to question and challenge what others have said and written about a topic or person. Is there really any credible evidence that text messaging and Facebook make teens callow? Such questioning leads thoughtful writers to wonder, “What is my story really about?” It’s a question that prompts writers to dig deeper to find new and revealing facts. And those new facts empower a writer to give a fresh take on an old story.

Here’s an example from New York Times Health Writer Jane Brody. In August 2008, she combed through the scientific literature to puncture the myths about the dangers of caffeine, which are promulgated across the Internet by pseudo health and science sites. What Brody discovered should make the heart race of any tea and coffee lover. Her careful research showed that caffeine doesn’t dehydrate. Neither does it raise blood sugar nor blood pressure. Caffeine does speed up the body’s metabolism, Brody found, but not enough to prompt weight lose.

In puncturing these myths about caffeine, Brody displays a keen power of observation. She unearths just the right facts and then she wields them like a light saber to cut through the fog of misconception.

Often, meaningful detail isn’t hidden or obscured. It’s lying in the open for all to see. Yet it remains invisible to all but those who’ve honed a keen eye for meaningful detail. Here’s another example, this time from Andrew Ferguson. In a 2008 Wall Street Journal book review, Ferguson uses facts we all know to push past the obvious and provide insight. "Like our common language, like our love of baseball and bleached flour, our resentful mistrust of Harvard is one of things that have traditionally bound Americans to one another, from the snootiest Yale graduate to the lowliest stevedore. Meanwhile, everyone is trying to get in."

In these two simple but lively and provocative sentences, Ferguson achieves something poet Emily Dickinson called “seeing the world aslant.” What Dickinson meant was this: By tilting the world, if just every so slightly, it can be seen in a new perspective. Writers tilt the world by asking tough questions and questioning the obvious.

When writing, it’s time to fire up the old noodle and put it to good use. Push yourself to rise above cliché and see beyond the obvious.

The Power of the Why

Attempting to explain the French Revolution in 1792, William Godwin penned a line that still guides writers today. The Englishman wrote: "He that knows only what day the Bastille was taken and on what spot Louis XIV perished, knows nothing." What Godwin meant is that facts, in and of themselves, aren’t understanding, let alone truth. It's how you arrange them - in what order, against what backdrop and within what context - that imbues facts with meaning. “All historians know that facts never speak for themselves,” says contemporary American historian Mary Beth Norton.

Facts will speak to readers if stitched together in a way that distills order out of chaos, that attempts to explain or make sense of the world. In such writing, facts represent something larger than themselves. They’re marshaled to explain why Louis XIV’s execution signaled the rise of a nobility no longer beholden to a monarch; why an upstart such as Barack Obama was able to defeat Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary. This is writing powered by the why. It infuses stories with a sense of purposeful direction; it gives people a reason to read.

Writing with the power of the why is not unlike making fresh bread. A writer kneads his material, rereading notes, trying out different openings and restructuring outlines, until what’s meaningful rises to the top. But the meaning of a story has to be baked into a form that readers can digest. Otherwise his story is a formless mess that no one can make sense of.

What gives form to the why in writing is theme. Theme is nothing more than stringing together facts, quotes, data, backdrop, anecdotes in an order that provides insightful perspective. Constructing a theme is a ruthless process. It involves cherry-picking your material, using only those few facts that best illustrate a theme. A writer may have collected 10 notebooks worth of material, of which only a third may end up in his story.

In deciding what material to use, a writer asks himself three questions: What is my story really all about; why should anybody read it; can the story speak to something larger about American life or the big issues of the day? Answers to these questions won’t come easily. But when they do, you’ll have discovered a theme for your story.

In newspapers and popular news and style magazines, writers showcase their themes high up in their stories. Readers are told in no uncertain terms what a story is about and why they should read it. We’ll talk more about this in the section about types of stories but here’s some quick examples.

In profiling Beck in a 2007 New York Times Sunday magazine article, Arthur Lubow asked this question: What does Beck and his eclectic style have to say about modern music? He decided that Beck represented the ultimate example of how all art is derivative. The details of Beck’s life and his rise to stardom were used to document this point. In doing so, the writer used Beck as a vehicle to talk about a much bigger issue, deepening the readers’ understanding of artistic expression.

Another example is a 2007 story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about the phenomenon of Japanese cellphone novels. A growing number of writers are composing novellas designed to be read on the ubiquitous cellphones of Japan. These are stories written quickly in the shorthand of text messaging and delivered in digestible screenfuls. The Journal arranged the facts of this phenomenon to craft a theme that spoke to something much larger. While storytelling’s form is forever changing, its basics remain the same. An effective story needs a charismatic protagonist who embarks on a difficult and meaningful quest. That's true whether the story is sung by heralds in the times of Homer or typed in the cryptic shorthand of text messaging.

In longer works of literary nonfiction,  such a books and articles in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, a story’s theme is often hidden. The writer’s influence is like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, gently guiding the reader to understanding. The Italians call this technique, sprezzatura. It means the art of concealing art, or what some scholars call a studied carelessness. The best in creative nonfiction reads like a fable, with theme embodied in the telling of the tale.

Take  a 2007 New Yorker piece by humorist David Sedaris. At first blush, the story reads like a funny retelling of a spat over airplane seating. Sedaris refuses to trade seats with a man in the bulkhead who wants to sit with his wife. He doesn’t care for the bulkhead, a reason the man’s wife, Sedaris’ seat mate, considers selfish and she tells him so.

It soon becomes clear that this little story is about much more than who gets to sit where. It’s a thematic fable about how even the most fleeting of human encounters soon becomes a power struggle over who’s on top in any social setting.

Shunning Sedaris, the woman turns away from him and dozes off. Sedaris tries to ignore her, too, but can’t. He accidently spits up a cough drop on her lap. He’s concerned, although not about soiling the woman’s lap. Rather, he frets that the cough drop, if discovered by the woman, will confirm her opinion of him as a ill mannered lout. And that will mean Sedaris’ loss of face and standing. Yet he’s paralyzed with indecision. Does he try to retrieve the cough drop, risking awakening the woman. Or does he let her discover it when she awakes and then feign ignorance?

Nowhere in this tale does Sedaris state his theme, as a news writer would, but it’s clear all the same. He uses only those details that illustrate and underscore his theme. There’s not an extraneous line in the story.

 Organizing by ideas

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