Chapter 11
The Artful Tease
The New Yorker magazine once ran a sprawling story about the improbable modern day quest for the monster squid of seafarer legend. Nowhere in the 10,000-word story will you find a news hook, nut or so-what graph. Why, then, you might ask, would anyone read such a monster of a story - other than the handful of scientists, explorers and crackpots pursing this legendary creature? The answer is storytelling. A good storyteller can make even 100 tons of barnacled mollusk sound interesting.
In this story, writer David Grann casts the squid as a character in a story. It plays an elusive giant who has taunted sailors and scientists alike for centuries. The squid may have been repeatedly glimpsed, leaving behind tantalizing clues such as pucker marks and even limbs, but it has never been captured. Now a New Zealand marine biologist takes up the quest anew to capture the beast. He becomes an Ahab and the squid his Moby Dick. Man and squid are pitted against one another in an epic quest.
Such are the techniques of storytelling. Storytelling, or narrative, isn’t about scooping up as many facts as you can, as quickly as you can, and then listing them in a descending order of importance. In fact, the opposite is true. Only a few lucky facts, the most colorful and telling ones, are chosen for a story. They’re arranged in a way that depicts a transformative journey.
Nor do storytellers front load stories with a hard sell on why readers should read their work and read it now. There isn’t any billboarding, as in a news feature story. Rather, what draws the reader is the power of the tale itself.
How does a writer make a tale powerful? There are several ways. One is to make a story represent an issue larger than itself. The quest for the giant squid, for example, embodies man’s unquenchable thirst to understand the world he inhabits.
Another is to tease order out of chaos. Good storytelling finds a pattern in a seemingly random set of facts, giving meaning to what had been meaningless. That satisfies the deeply-felt human need to feel that the world makes sense. Never mind that it probably makes about as much sense as a bird that continually flies into a plate glass window. It’s the illusion of order that we crave - and smart writers learn how to provide it.
Indeed, the techniques of storytelling are creeping ever more into print media. It prevails most noticeably in the long magazine stories of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Esquire. It’s also used widely in nonfiction books. And increasingly national papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and, especially the Wall Street Journal, are embracing storytelling.
Newspapers and news magazines are adopting storytelling for good reason. It’s a way for them to distinguish themselves from 24-hour news outlets such as CNN, Google and OhMynews. Increasingly, online media - not newspapers, magazines nor television - are the arbiters of what’s news. It was the tech news Web site Gizmodo, for example, that first reported Wal-Mart had pulled the plug on its much heralded movie download service in 2008. And online columnist Matt Drudge was the first to reveal President Clinton’s indiscretion with his intern, Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s.
Readers also are driving the renewed interest in storytelling. In 2007, Northwestern University’s Readership Institute released a study that showed readers learned more from stories written, well, as stories.
No offense to Northwestern’s readership scholars, but writers have known that for hundreds of years. There’s really little new about using fictional techniques in nonfiction. Narrative expert Mark Kramer has traced the origins of the practice back to the rise of the novel as a genre in 1700s England. He credits British writer Daniel Defoe, who helped popularize the novel with his book Robinson Crusoe, as the first to employ fictional technique in his economic and political writing.
The practice continued in the mid-1800s with the rise of the penny press in New York City. Newspapers such as the Sun, Tribune and Herald routinely used verse or doggerel to depict - even mock - events or public figures. Take, for example, this rhyme, written in 1836 by James Gordon Bennett and published in his daily, the New York Herald. It describes a madam named Rosina Townsend, a key witness in a trial about the brutal murder of a prostitute:
“Rosina parts for all mankind,were open, rare and unconfined,
like some free port of trade;
merchants unloaded here their freights,
and agents from each foreign state, here first their entry made.”
Hardly the modern news voice of disinterest. In a sense, such poetic license dates back to our first news carriers, the town criers and troubadours. They wandered from town to town, entertaining villagers with verse depicting events, both past and present. Infotainment has long informed history and news.
The modern incarnation of nonfictional storytelling began with the advent of so-called “New Journalism” in the 1960s. Its practitioners included such writers as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Robert Caro, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.
The first of this group to attract popular attention was Capote. His 1965 depiction of the brutal murder of Kansas farm family the Clutters by two drifters became a best seller. Reveling in his success, Capote declared that, in writing “In Cold Blood,” he’d created a new art form: the nonfiction novel. It was constructed as a series of scenes that built dramatically to a climax. The book used a protagonist through which to tell its tale. And Capote plumped the psyche of his characters.
Journalism historians have shown Capote’s claim of invention was an invention of his own. One could say he employed fictional technique to embellish his own reputation. Nonetheless, “In Cold Blood” inspired a generation of writers. Not only did they imitate him but the best built on what Capote had started.
In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Robert Caro used fictional technique to expand journalism’s repertoire of what was considered legitimate material to cover. Wolfe, the best known of the three, explored the hippie counterculture, the inner workings of high society and the publicity machine of celebrities. In the “Electric Kool-Aide Acid Test,” for example, he used novelist Ken Kesey and his entourage, the Merry Pranksters, to tell the story of the hippies’ twisted rise to popularity.
In doing so, he expanded the meaning of meaningful detail. Wolfe depicted his characters in gesture, mannerism and dress. Through such detail, he tried to reconstruct, moment by moment, what people felt but left unsaid. Novelists have long used this technique.
Building on Wolfe and Capote, former Long Island newsman Robert Caro turned a shadowy New York bureaucrat into an complex figure worthy of Tolstoy. The figure was Robert Moses, who used an obscure state agency, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, to open up much of metropolitan New York to suburban development. Moses built a system of sculpted, landscaped bridges and freeways. He lined those freeways with beautiful new public beaches and parks. Tens of thousands of rising middle class New Yorkers used Moses’ freeways to flee their crowded and decrepit city.
Caro used Robert Moses’ life to tell the story of New York City’s decline and rise of its surrounding suburban metropolis. In doing so, Caro made Moses a parable about the transformation of Post World II America into a paved paradise.
Caro, Wolfe and Capote. Their work revived and modernized the storytelling techniques introduced by Homer 3,000 years ago. Each broke new ground, both in the detail of their writing and what they wrote about, expanding the repertoire for all of the writers who’ve followed in their footsteps.
Let us, too, learn, from these writers.
Protagonists
Strong narratives need strong protagonists. Someone, something or somewhere that can embody the theme of a story. He or it must be rich enough in character, history and struggle to sustain readers’ interest. And the protagonist must embody an issue larger than himself. The more timeless and universal the better.
That doesn’t mean protagonists need be super heroes. In fact, the more imperfect, frail and vulnerable, the better. There’s nothing more boring than a goody two-shoes who never stumbles.
Writers try to be imaginative in their choice of protagonists. Think of the squid in the New Yorker story, which the writer used to embody man’s unslakable thirst for knowledge. Or Caro’s use of Moses to explain the rise of suburban America.
The story of illegal immigration has been told through the lives of undocumented workers. New York Times writer C. J. Chiver once used Lenin’s pickled remains (both someone and something, you might say) as a protagonist. Lenin’s cadaver served as an ideal crucible to examine Russians’ ambivalence about their soviet past. They couldn’t decide whether to preserve, hide or throw out the remains of their former leader.
Finding the right vehicle through which to tell a story isn’t easy. There has to be a strong connection between protagonist and theme. A writer can’t draft the first person he meets while researching a story as the main character. Nor can that character be dumped midway in the story when he no longer serves the writer’s purpose. Readers will feel duped.
It takes mindful legwork to find the right protagonist. A writer might have to interview a dozen people, visit scores of places. Sample dozens of lattes until he finds just the right blend to represent a story about what’s the cutting edge in milk coffees.
It’s a tough job, I know.
Foils
Imagine the main character of a story, or protagonist, sitting alone in the dark corner of a big library. No one comes to talk to him; nor does he move from his corner. Instead, he spends the entire story sitting alone and twiddling his thumbs. Not very interesting, right?
What's missing here is any dramatic tension. And that comes only when a protagonist interacts with the world - talking, fighting, laughing, drinking, whoring - or all of the above. A protagonist needs someone, something or some place to react to in order to make a story come to life.
Literary types call these people and places foils. A foil can play two roles in a story: To add dramatic tension or to illuminate every corner of a protagonist's personality, making him complicated and nuanced, and thus human. It's often easier to see someone clearer when he's set in relief against another personality. The best of foils simultaneously add drama and illuminate character.
It's easy to see how foils work in fiction. That's true whether it's a novel, comic book, movie or video game. What would Atticus Finch be without his daughter Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Batman without Robin, Jack Sparrow without Will Turner, Sonic without the Hedgehog? None of these protagonists would be half as interesting without their foils.
While harder to see at work, foils abound in nonfiction, too. But there’s one key difference: Journalists, unlike novelists, never invent their foils. There's no need for invention, really. Real life is rich in foils. After all, people don’t live in isolation. We're shaped and defined by those around us.
Look at your own life. Don’t you have family, friends, colleagues, lovers, even rivals, all of whom prompt you to respond differently? I bet you act one way with your parents, another with your teachers and yet another way with your friends. I know that’s true for me.
When I read one of my children's books at an elementary school, I'm silly and playful. But when I'm in a student conference at my university, I am serious and thoughtful, even demanding (check my reviews on RateMyProfessor.com). A child who had attended one of my readings wouldn't recognize me in conference with a college student and vice versa.
The same is true if you change my backdrop. Put me in front of a classroom and I’m animated, funny and engaging. But switch the classroom for my den at night and you'll find me slumped on the couch, zoned out. Alone, neither classroom nor living room couch defines me but taken together they start to give a full picture of who I am.
Foils come in all guises: Comrade and rival, lover and ex-lover, ally and nemesis. Let me offer some examples from my own work.
In writing about Ted Turner in the 1990s, I always tried to include Rupert Murdoch in my stories. The two media moguls detested one another and served as each other’s nemesis. Their hatred was rooted in a common desire: Each wanted to dominate world media, from news to movies.
Ironically, the careers of both men began in a similar place. Each inherited a faltering media business. For Turner, it was his father's Southern outdoor advertising concern; for Murdoch, a small chain of Australian newspapers.
But here the similarities end. Murdoch was a silver-tongued patrician with an uncommon feel for the tastes of the common man. He loathed speaking ill of anyone. He preferred to eliminate his rivals with a crowbar sheathed in a velvet glove.
In contrast, Turner was a loud-mouthed, profane and volatile college drop out who nonetheless could cite Ovid and Homer from memory. He never cared for velvet gloves and always kept his crowbar unsheathed and ready for battle.
He brandished it often against Murdoch, who Turner deeply envied. Murdoch had built the global media empire that Turner craved to own. That made Murdoch the perfect vehicle to add drama to any story about Turner. The men competed in every corner of the globe. Mention Murdoch's name and Turner would start to bluster.
In fact, Turner himself loved to use Murdoch as a foil. He'd paint Murdoch and his New York Post, News of the World and Fox News as the basest of panderers. It wasn't hard, given these publications fondness for half naked women, celebrity gossip, sex scandals and ranting right wing commentators. In contrast, Turner's CNN and TBS, with their documentaries about global warming and the Cold War, looked far nobler.
Here's another example, this time using a foil to add both drama and dimension to a protagonist. At Business Week, I once wrote a story about Ness Motley Loadholt Richardson & Poole, a small law firm in Charleston, S.C. that had won a giant liability settlement against the tobacco companies. The $246 billion settlement was a record at that time (It may well still be). It earned Ness Motley not only national recognition - lead attorney Ronald Motley won a flattering portrayal in the Hollywood movie "The Insider." It also won the firm $1 billion in fees. But that largesse proved to be Ness Motley's downfall. The firm imploded as its partners quarreled over how to divvy up the spoils of the tobacco case.
To make the story come to life, I tapped Motley as the protagonist. Then I pitted him against another leading partner, Terry E. Richardson, Jr. The two men couldn't have been more different. Where Motley was outspoken, theatrical and flamboyant, Richardson was the model Southern patrician: dignified, reserved and scholarly, a lawyer's lawyer. Each man also represented starkly opposing ideas on how to use the $1 billion windfall. Motley wanted to lavish the money on yachts, airplanes and other expensive rewards to himself and his legal team in the tobacco case. Richardson, on the other hand, wanted to invest the money into expanding the practice.
Richardson's staid personality made him the perfect foil. It served as a backdrop that cast Motley's theatricality in stark relief. And the struggle between the former partners added the dramatic tension that propelled the story forward.
Motley and Richardson - and their epic struggle - were the kind of characters a novelist might spend months, if not years to develop. Yet here they were waiting to be discovered in broad daylight. All it took was the keen eye of a seasoned and skilled observer. Train yourself to see what others cannot. Then you'll rarely lack for protagonists and their foils, both of which are important tools for enlivening your stories.
Quest
A strong protagonist needs a worthy quest. Think of quest as a struggle with legs. It’s a journey, at the end of which either the protagonist has changed, or he has changed the world around him. Such change gives a story momentum, helping to pull readers through to the end.
Consider this famous example: Wolfe’s chronicle of the fledgling hippie movement of Northern California in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” In researching this book, he discovered that novelist Ken Kesey and his followers, who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, planned to wage a guerilla war against square America. They bought an old school bus and painted it in Day-Glo flowers and psychedelic paisley. Then they set off to spread their gospel of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, a cross-country freak-out. In the Merry Pranksters’ bus trip, Wolfe found the quest of his story, which became a best selling book. It remains one of the definitive works on the hippies to this day.
Wolfe illustrates the power of thinking imaginatively about what makes a worthy quest. Here’s a more contemporary example. A writer might tell the story of reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina through the struggles of one Mississippi Delta town. Reconstruction may force the town to change forever, rebuilding every house on stilts or moving the whole town half mile back from the river. Or the town’s successful reconstruction may inspire other towns nearby to follow suit.
It has to be one or the other: The protagonist changes or changes others. Otherwise, there’s no story. At least no story that many will want to read.
At the heart of any quest is struggle. The greater the struggle, the more uncertain its outcome, the more interesting the story. The struggle need not be one of life and death - although that helps - but it should test a protagonist in some way.
For example, a writer could illustrate how a delta town battled looters, FEMA and insurance companies in its quest for revival. In the New Yorker’s squid story, the New Zealand biologist suffered freezing nights and gale-force winds as he chased his prey.
For writers, hardship and suffering are bread and butter of good storytelling. Without them there’d be little worth writing about.
Struggle
What drives struggle is conflict. Peace, I’m sorry to say, is the enemy of good writing. Your writing doesn’t have to ring with the clash of arms, but there has to be a clash of some sort.
This has been true since the first stories were told, from the Iliad to Beowulf, from Macbeth to Nacho Libre. There’s something about the human psyche that craves conflict. Its allure explains the popularity of everything from the grainy black and white World War II footage on the History Channel to American Idol.
It’s no surprise, then, that every storyteller, whether conceiving a video game, cartoon or news feature, struggles to tap into this most human of cravings. Wolfe found conflict in the hippies taunting Suburban America; Caro in Moses’ destruction of Old World New York and Capote in the senseless butchery of the Clutter family.
Conflict resides not just in extraordinary stories such as the Clutter’s murder. It’s as everyday as sibling rivalry, woven into most every human activity.
If writing about a new idea, a writer could find those who oppose it. If profiling a rising young politician, he could look for those in power who feel threatened by him. If explaining a new trend, he could seek out those vested in the last big thing.
Stories need to be cast in conflict from the first paragraph. That’s why the New Yorker piece about the giant squid opens in a squall on the high seas, signaling the great struggle of finding this mythic creature.
Voice
In
addition to protagonist, quest and conflict, there’s a fourth
element essential to storytelling. It’s called voice. Any good
story has an interesting voice. I’m sure you’ve heard
this term a lot. Writerly types love to talk about voice. But what
does the term really mean?
Think
of voice in a story as a kind of haunting. You as writer lurk behind
the words, infusing a story with your obsessions, pet peeves,
prejudices, imperfections, interests and insights. A good story reeks
of personality.
I’m
not talking here about merely sounding witty or clever. That’s
just style. Style by itself is like a mustard sandwich. And mustard’s
no good without roast beef, to paraphrase Chico Marx. Style provides little meat for readers to chew on.
That's not to say great writing can't be funny and full of wit. Nothing deepens understanding like humor. But wit, just for wits' sake alone, can pose grave risks to aspiring writers. It tempts them to fall in love with their own words, to become "self be-puffed." That's what Edgar Allan Poe, our Dark Prince of American Letters, called Transcendentalist writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. These New England-based writers of the early 1800s, besmitten with the simple beauty of the natural world, loved to write ornately fawning reviews of one another's work.
When
writers fall in love with their own words it tends to taint their work
with an annoying self importance. These writers care more about
dazzling readers with technique than with the power of their insight.
The why of a story becomes lost in the pyrotechnics of the how. In
reading such work, I often feel as if I'm watching a male peacock
parading his magnificent iridescent plumage.
Self
puffery enfeebles a writer over time. It muffles his critical ear,
ruining his ability to prune from his own work the unnecessary and the
nonsensical. He can no longer
distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. What was once clever
or witty in his work degenerates into the corny or the cliché.
Resisting
the love of one's own words isn't easy. It's among the hardest and most
painful lessons to learn. Imagine spending hours, if not days
perfecting a dazzling sentence or phrase - only to have to jettison it
at the last moment. Not an easy decision. Yet the skilled writer will
do just that if the sentence doesn't move the story forward or deepen
understanding. Skilled writers are ruthless in their pursuit of lean,
muscular prose.
No one captured this hard-nosed sentiment better than Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, author of an influential book on writing published in 1916. In "On the Art of Writing," Quiller-Couch wrote:
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."
Any successful writer is a serial killer.
What does make your writing memorable is insight. That’s what really drives voice. Do you have a meaningful take on a person, place or issue? Getting one requires gathering a rich trove of material, thinking deeply about it and then casting that material in a new light that illuminates.
There
are few new stories in the world. “Everything has been thought
before,” said 1900 century German writer and philosopher Goethe, “but
the difficulty is to think of it again.” In a sense, writers
today are just retelling Beowulf and the Iliad. That said, old
stories can be forever retold in a fresh voice.
It
takes an interesting person to write in an interesting voice. That’s
why it’s so important to feed your head, to lead an interesting
life. Someone who knows only the cocktail lounge or swimming pool of the Acapulco Hilton can’t
write an interesting, knowing story about Mexico.
Your voice manifests itself in the facts you choose, how you order them and the words you use to express those facts. Consider this example. It’s the opening paragraph of a 2003 New Yorker essay entitled "All washed up":
There's
no self puffery here. The author employs just a few facts, but oh what
facts they are., simple yet telling. Although the writer reveals
neither age nor sex, I bet you can surmise both
from this passage. The writer shows - not tells - us her gender and
age through the facts she chooses. I know of only one type of person
who summers as a waitress: a high school or college student.
She clearly doesn’t need the job, either. Why else would the writer swear she’d never suffer a kiss. Such wording reveals the writer’s class. Any working stiff, thankful for a job in difficult times, wouldn’t so breezily proclaim that she would fend off a boss’s advances. She might suffer a kiss to keep a job. Not this writer. Her cocky defiance reveals a sense of entitlement, an affliction particular to the wealthy brood who inhabit our elite private colleges.
Notice how this young writer bared her class, age and personality in three little sentences. And she did so in an interesting voice that reeks of personality. Make your work smell like hers.
Greek or Roman?
Storytelling, whether in books, magazines, movies, video games or epic poetry, is all about timing. At its essence, timing is an artful tease. Reveal too little too late and you’ll leave readers frustrated and befuddled; reveal too much too soon and you’ll bore them. The secret balance turns on this principle: revealing just the right fact at just the right moment.
In short, organization is critical.
Novelist and historian Robert Graves once said that, in Western tradition, there’s only two ways to organize a story: The Greek or the Roman way. The Romans, being the no-nonsense methodical people that they were, liked to start at the beginning and then proceed chronologically. Hero born, hero grows up, hero vanquishes villain. In the best of the Roman-style stories, the hero meets an untimely demise. The more tragic, the better.
Nothing could be more boring to the contemplative and arty Greeks. Their stories might open with the death of the hero and then proceed backward through his life. Or a Greek story might open in the middle of a climatic scene and then branch out in all directions. The details of a hero’s childhood might not appear until the end of the story.
Although Graves analyzed Roman and Greek styles of organization in the 1930s, what he said holds pretty much true to this day. Most books and magazine articles follow either the Greek or Roman form of construction. Caro followed the Roman, albeit with long discursive detours to give history; Capote the Greek, his story jumping wildly about in time and place.
Each form has its strengths and its weaknesses.
The great strength of the Roman method of narrative is that it’s the simplest way to organize a story. It’s easy for readers, too. They find it hard to lose the thread of a story proceeding from historical moment to historical moment. Trouble is, chronology easily becomes boring. A story that moves mechanically down a timeline quickly loses its ability to challenge and surprise.
Chronology works best with stories with a lot of events or dates. That’s probably why Caro chose it to organize his profile of Moses, “The PowerBroker.” Chronology also would work well to organize an article that reconstructs how President Bush botched the war in Iraq. In such a story, the reader needs to see how one event lead to another. There’s no better way to convey that than through chronology.
Otherwise, save chronology for a boring professor who wouldn't know drama from a ham sandwich.
The Greek style of storytelling is anything but boring. It lends itself to dramatic effect. Mixing up scenes, if done right, builds suspense. That’s probably why New Yorker writer Grann chose the Greek method for his story about the scientific quest for the giant squid. He opened aboard a research boat in a squall on the high seas. Researchers think they spot their prey on sonar but the reader doesn’t find out for sure, at least not immediately. Instead, the story switches to a passage about why scientists believe the giant squid may not be mythical after all. See how this breaking up of the logical order of events builds suspense?
The trouble with the Greek style of organization is that it’s tricky to manage well. It’s easy to confuse the reader and lose the thread of the story.
Peeling the Onion
Still, most writers today prefer the Greek method, often called episodic writing.
Episodic writing strives for an effect that’s the opposite of news feature writing. It doesn’t front load stories with a hard sell on why readers should read a piece, and read it now. Rather, meaningful facts and details are scattered along the journey of a story like tantalizing bits of cake. Episodic writing is nothing but an artful tease.
In episodic writing, stories are conceived as a series of scenes. Each scene stands on its own yet connects to preceding ones and suggests at those to come. No scene is like any other. Each one reveals a little more about a person, place or event; each takes the reader ever closer to the heart of the story. Understanding emerges slowly.
Think of this technique as peeling back the skins of an onion.
The beauty of this technique is twofold. First, it generates a sense of momentum. Readers feel that they are moving toward some destination of enlightenment. Second, readers believe they are discovering the meaning of a story on their own, without being pulled by the nose to some conclusion. People are more apt to value and remember insight if they believe it was their own. In the hands of a skilled writer, of course, it’s an illusion.
I won’t tell, if you won’t.
Episodic writing frees a story from the monotony of chronology. It’s an effective way to build suspense. Take, for example, Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” He intersperses grisly but matter-of-fact descriptions of the murders, where the bodies are scattered and how they’re butchered, with scenes of the murderers drifting from Mexico to Florida. They appear harmless bunglers. This contrast between the grisly crime and its seemingly hapless perpetrators keeps dramatic tension high. Readers want to read on, hungry to learn the how and the why of this grisly crime. Capote doesn’t reveal the killers motivation until the end of the book when the two are caught and interrogated by police.
Unlike news and news feature writing, there’s no rule book on how to organize a long narrative. Organization is limited only by a writer’s powers of imagination and storytelling. Still, wise writers become master remixers, copying and tweaking techniques copied from the best stories. It pays off handsomely to read the works of many others. When it comes to art the best always learn from from one another.
Consider this example from rock ‘n roll. In the late 1960s, the Beatles were the uncontested kings of pop music. Yet their reign was far from secure. The Beatles were badly shaken with the release of Pet Songs, the mastermind of Beach Boy song writer Brian Wilson. His Pet Songs broke new ground in terms of lyrics, harmony and sound - and the Beatles recognized it immediately. They tore apart Pet Sounds, trying to figure how Wilson made every sound on the album. The Beatles learned much and immediately put what they’d learned to use in making their own groundbreaking album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Artistic innovation inspires yet more artistic innovation.
While highly effective, writing in scenes is daunting work. There’s no one formula, per se, to guide you. Still, through trial and error, I’ve developed a five-step routine that works for me. Perhaps it will work for you, too. At least it’s a place to start. Feel free to modify this routine to suit your own preferences and practice. No two writers work in the same way.
Step one: Sift through your reporting to find a theme or “so-what” of your story. As you read your notes, keep these questions in mind: Why write this story, why would anyone want to read it? What in your material speaks to the human condition; what does your story have to say about greed, sacrifice, love or suffering?
Be open to what you discover. Don’t worry if your reporting suggests a theme that challenges or contradicts conventional wisdom. The best writing breaks new ground.
Also be open to the possibility that you may not yet be ready to write. You may have gathered some interesting facts, but not enough of them to make an interesting story. Or the facts you have don’t say anything new or insightful.
Many a writer has made this disconcerting discovery. It means he has either too few facts, the wrong ones or both. There’s no shame in admitting this. It’s an insight that often leads to a better story. The thing is to be open to the idea that a story is half-baked and then act on that discovery. Never be afraid or ashamed to go out and do new reporting. You need just the right detail to say something meaningful, to write with a theme.
Why all this bother with a theme? Because themes connote understanding. And understanding is what makes facts relevant and meaningful to readers. Consider a theme the thread through which you string the facts of your story. Without that thread, facts are no more interesting or meaningful than a tubful of colorful glass beads. It’s stringing a few of the beads in a particular order that makes a beautiful necklace.
Step two: Glean from your reporting just those facts that illustrate your theme. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you’ve got a ton of notes. There’s a tendency, particularly with green writers, to see unused reporting as a wasted effort. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skilled writers typically use a third - or less - of their reporting in any one story. To snare the best facts, you must cast your reportorial net wide, especially at the onset. A successful fisherman throws back the old boots in his net, keeping only his best catch - and so do skilled writers.
Look at it this way. Gathering all those facts was a necessary step in preparing a good story. It helps you figure out what’s new and meaningful and the best way to cast it. Exploring dead ends is part of this process.
Besides, unused material isn’t necessarily wasted. Save what’s unused for another story on the same subject but with a different theme. Successful writers squeeze many stories out of the same material.
Step three: Make a storyboard. This Hollywood construct helps in conceiving a story’s organization. It forces a writer to figure out how to show - not tell - his story. Ask yourself, “how can I illustrate in a scene each fact or thematic point?”
Take the New Yorker’s squid story as an example. The writer had to ask himself, what in his reporting illustrates the difficult quest for this elusive giant? Not surprisingly, the writer settled on the facts depicting the lead scientist aboard his ship on a troubled sea as an opening scene.
Step four: Summarize each scene. Index cards are the best tool for this step. Use one card for every scene.
Today index cards have gone high tech. There's several software programs, for both Mac and PC, that replicate the function of paper cards. These programs, I'm afraid, don't ease the hard work of figuring out the flow of your story. But they can display your ideas in lovely color schemes that are pleasant to look at while you wrestle with the organization of your story.
Step five: Shuffle your deck of index cards, whether digitally or by hand, to find a compelling order to the scenes of your story. Some of those writers who prefer the physical cards pin them to a cork board; others spread them on the floor or a bed. Still, others will pile cards across a room or house. It doesn’t matter how you do it. What counts is finding an order for your story that’s both clear and compelling.
Feel free to experiment. Shuffle and reshuffle your scenes. Try different openings. Is there one scene that best reflects the theme of your story, one from which the rest of the story flows most naturally?
Play with creating suspense. Break up the flow of action with backstory and history. Consider this 2004 Rolling Stone profile of anti-abortionist activist Troy Newman. The story opens with a scene depicting Newman’s group, Operation Rescue West, intimidating abortion clinic workers with threatening letters and protests. Does the intimidation work? The reader doesn’t learn right away. Instead, the story jumps to a scene that begins to reveal Newman’s backstory. He’s portrayed as more “breezy Southern California surfer than one of the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion activists.” See how this organization deepens the mystery about Newman, intensifying reader interest in him and how his group operates?
Jot down various organizational schemes and compare them. When you find a scheme that seems to work walk away from it for a few hours or even a day or two. Does it still make sense when you return? If the answer is yes then you’ve got a winning organization.
There are as many ways to organize a story as there are ways to organize your songs in iTunes. And, like an iTunes’ playlist, change the order of your facts and you change the mood and theme of your story. Again, there’s no one right way. The only criteria is that your organization enthrall readers.
Fact or Fiction?
While fiction and nonfiction are becoming increasingly similar in technique, there is a crucial difference between the two forms of writing. As Stephen King put it, fiction is about emotional truth; nonfiction about factual truth. In nonfiction, writers "seek truth through fact." Nothing is made up.
Contrariwise with fiction. Facts are made up to represent the truth. “The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse,” said Aristotle. “It consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.”
Ironically, most good novelists are sticklers for accuracy. It lends credibility to their fiction. If writing a novel set in Elizabethan England, a writer will try to capture exactly how 16th century Londoners spoke, walked and dressed.
Inversely, there’s never any reason for nonfiction writers to invent protagonist, quest or drama. All three elements are everywhere, if you know how to look for them. It’s a matter of perception, seeing like a writer.
There’s only one reason I can think of for a nonfiction writer to fabricate and that’s laziness. It requires the highest level of reportorial skill to dig up the meaningful detail necessary to make a nonfiction story read like fiction.
Unfortunately, a few of our high-profile nonfiction writers have publicly admitted defeat, copping to making up scenes and characters in their stories. The list includes not only the now infamous diarist James Frey, the New York Times Jason Blair and Stephen Glass of the New Republic but Capote himself, who fabricated the final scene of “In Cold Blood.”
I don't recommend following in these writers’ footsteps, despite their high pedigree. Their more honorable colleagues hold them in low regard. Indeed, Capote has lost a lot of his cachet today.
Credibility is a writer’s most valuable asset. While easily tarnished, credibility takes a long time to regain its former luster.
Copyright© 2006 by Nec Aspera Terrent
All rights reserved.
Barking Dogwood Press, Atlanta, GA
