Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

by Jack R. Hart

John McPhee’s Coming into the Country

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine

Tony Lukas’s Commo...

Storytelling has such wide application because, at its root, it serves universal human needs. Story makes sense out of a confusing universe by showing us how one action leads to another. It teaches us how to live by discovering how our fellow human beings overcome the challenges in their lives. And it helps us discover the universals that bind us to everything around us.

So, at its most basic, a story begins with a character who wants something, struggles to overcome barriers that stand in the way of achieving it, and moves through a series of actions—the actual story structure—to overcome them.

A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.

A plot, says Burroway, “is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.”

Narrative plus plot, according to this view, equals story.

So when you’re looking for a protagonist search for the person who makes things happen.

Any problem constitutes a complication, but only certain complications justify a story.

Another way to think about complications is in terms of human wants.

But don’t start thinking that you need an earthshaking complication to write something compelling. Good little complications make for good little stories.

Resolution is the ultimate aim of every story. The resolution releases the dramatic tension created as the protagonist struggles with the complication. It contains the lesson that the audience carries away, the insight that the story’s readers or viewers or listeners can apply to their own lives.

You can resolve a complication, in other words, by changing the world or changing yourself.

Others commented on how seeing the world from Sam Lightner’s point of view helped them recognize their common humanity, strengthening their sense of solidarity with the rest of society. (“I saw the world through Sam’s eyes, and in so doing felt intensely many of the emotions that make us all human.”)

Good stories teach, and that essential function must date to the earliest storytellers.

The art exists purely in the arrangement of words. —Philip Gerard

Stories tend to certain shapes, and if you stray too far from them, you’ll end up with no story at all.

Stephen Hall’s little experiment with storytelling during an MRI brain scan strongly suggests that story blueprints emerge from the right brain, and that the neural networks that help us visualize a story’s shape are closely linked to the visual cortex.

“I find it helpful in the planning stages to draw each line of plot as an arc on a piece of scrap paper. Put an A at one end and a B at the other. A is to be a question; B is its answer. Generally this question should relate to the concrete desire of the protagonist.”

The most confused, anxious, and unproductive narrative writers work like contractors without blueprints. The successful ones eventually figure out that they need a plan.

Good exposition provides just enough backstory to explain how the protagonist happens to be in a particular place, at a particular time, with the wants that will lead to the next phase of the story.

“Where all is known, no narrative is possible.”

the Charles Dickens formula for success has it: “Make them laugh. Make them cry. But, most of all, make them wait.”6

A plot point, as you might remember from the preceding chapter, is any development that spins the story off in a new direction.

Novelist Darin Strauss suggests that you “think of your focal character’s life before your story begins as a boulder perched unsteadily on a hilltop.” The narrative arc begins when a bird comes along and strikes the boulder, starting it down the hill.

As Ted Conover reminds us, “A narrative is when things go wrong.”7

“There is no moment in a play,” Lajos Egri says, “which does not grow from the one before it.”

Each development in skillfully crafted rising action raises a question. Philip Gerard notes that dramatic story structure consists of “a string of mysteries organized in a deliberate order. The mysteries will be large and small, and the writer will make good use of this variation in interest, resolving the mysteries in escalating order, using smaller questions to lead into larger ones, saving the resolution of the biggest mystery for last.”

“In the first act set forth the case,” he said. “In the second weave together the events, in such wise that until the middle of the third act one may hardly guess the outcome. Always trick expectancy; and hence it may come to pass that something quite far from what is promised may be left to the understanding.”

Good narrative also follows the rise and fall of hope, another characteristic of effective rising action. Batman wins one. Hope rises. The Joker wins one. Hope falls.

The final ingredient that’s critical to successful rising action is the cliff-hanger.

Aristotle wrote of the “peripeteia,” or “reversal of the situation,” a third-act twist that suddenly plunged the protagonist into dangerously deep water. Most modern story analysts prefer to think of the peripeteia as “the crisis,” a broader idea denoting an increase of intensity that brings the story to a head.

The crisis is the point where everything hangs in the balance, where things could go either way.

Homer began his epics in the middle of the action and then flashed backward in time to clue listeners into the essential backstory. He began, in Horace’s terms, in medias res, or “in the middle of things.” Beginning at the beginning, according to Horace, was to start ab ovo (“from the egg”) or ab initio (“from the beginning”).

But even when you don’t have a true psychological transformation, it’s useful to think of the crisis culminating in a point of insight. Ask yourself, “What event sets up the resolution of the crisis?”

The climax is simply the event—or series of events—that resolves the crisis.

You may be a piece or two short of a complete story structure, but the power of a dramatic true story, the reader’s knowledge that the story is true, is enough to entice readers through the complete narrative arc.

The climax takes you to the story’s peak, and from then on you have nowhere to go but down. Hence the notion of “falling action.” Intensity fades. The pace slows. Things wind down.

You deal with such questions in the falling-action phase of the story, which for that reason is also known as the denouement or “unknotting.” It is the point in the story where everything becomes clear.

Once you’ve answered the necessary questions, you have one remaining task—bring the story to an end with what journalistic types call a “kicker.” A good one will sum up, surprise a little, perhaps bring things full circle, firmly planting your protagonists in their new status quo. It will leave absolutely no doubt that the story has ended.

But for our purposes here, point of view boils down to the answers to three questions: Through whose eyes do we experience the story? From which direction? From what distance?

It has to be somebody’s story, and one of the first questions any narrative writer has to answer is “whose?”

It’s the gritty trapper who engages the complication, passes through a series of challenges, experiences a point of insight, and ultimately resolves the story’s dramatic tension.

All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating. There were 229 people who owned cars and houses, slept in beds, had bought clothes and gifts for this trip, some with price tags still on them—and then they were gone.

Stance is simply the place you position your camera and the direction you point it, but it reveals worlds about your approach to a subject.

“Each story can be told from many points of view,” said Don Murray, the dean of American newspaper writing coaches. “It is the writer’s task to choose the point of view that will help the reader see the subject.”

The point is to let them see the action as though they were there themselves.

Storytelling at different distances requires two different kinds of narrative, each of them essentially a different language. When the distance is great, when you step way back from the action, you write in summary narrative. When you shrink the distance, you shift into scenic narrative.

Because it’s an abstract report of what happened, it takes what is essentially a journalistic point of view that’s conveyed in a style we know as summary narrative or, appropriately, as historical narrative.