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

by Jack R. Hart

Readers viewed the unfolding action as though they were hovering above it, just a few feet away, which is why we refer to this useful and effective storytelling perspective as the hanging-balloon point of view. When they assume it, good storytellers shift into scenic narrative, a form that—for obvious reasons—some analysts also call dramatic narrative.

At its most fundamental level, the difference between summary and scenic narrative lies in the relative positions of the two forms on the ladder of abstraction

The lowest rungs of the ladder put you in the scene. Hence the notion of scenic narrative.

Emotion originates on the ladder’s lower rungs.

As you climb the ladder, the classes of things represented reach further across time and space. A sentence or two applied to them necessarily ignores a lot of detail in favor of a shorthand reference to everything in the category. Hence the notion of summary narrative.

So greater meaning resides on the ladder’s upper rungs.

Stories convey experience. But reports convey information, often great gobs of it. And reports emphasize outcomes.

Stories emphasize process, rather than outcomes.

Instead of news values like timeliness and proximity, which reflect broad social concerns, storytellers emphasize dramatic values that concern us as individuals, such as coming of age or coming to terms with our handicaps.

They ignore the writing gurus who harp at them to “show, don’t tell,” knowing that good writing constantly ascends and descends the ladder of abstraction. They show and tell.

Good writers rely on the same technique, varying distance by moving up and down the ladder of abstraction, regardless of whether they’re producing for newspapers, magazines, books, or for their online equivalents.

Voice plays a key role in attracting and holding readers, regardless of subject.

I still find it hard to define “voice” with one quick pass over the keyboard. The best all-encompassing definition I’ve managed to come up with is that voice is the personality of the writer as it emerges on the page.

By adopting a persona, the writer adopts a distinctive stance toward the material, bringing an identifiable personality to bear on the subject.

Persona is also an essential element of voice. If you want to bring personality to the page, you raise the question, “What kind of personality?”

Naturally, a persona should be as honest as the reporting that expresses it. Still, it’s human to have multiple personas. We’re one person when we’re chatting with an old buddy over a beer, and we’re another when we’re getting to know a stranger at a dressy cocktail party. Both may be honest representations of who we are, but we intentionally vary them to suit the occasion.

If you think of narrative as action unfolding on a stage, position refers to where writers stand as they narrate the unfolding story.

If voice is the personality of a writer as it appears on the page, then style is the outermost expression of that personality.

In the world of narrative writing, an author’s level of diction is one of the prime markers of his style.

Syntax, as Darin Strauss pointed out, shapes the linguistic surface, too.

Strauss listed metaphor as the last element in the linguistic surface, and it may be the principal element in the stylistic dimension of voice.

I was inspired by an anecdote about Hemingway and Fitzgerald careering through the Spanish countryside in an open car, playing a metaphor game. One would point to a roadside object, and the other had to coin a simile instantly. The penalty for failure was a long pull on a bottle of Spanish red.

The best thing any writer can do is to read every piece of writing out loud.

But the ultimate secret to letting your voice sound on the page is simply to relax and be yourself.

The business of a writer, in the end, is human character, human story. —Richard Preston

Great narrative rests on the three legs of character, action, and scene, and character comes first because it drives the other two.

A work of fiction that has a lasting effect, that somehow changes the way we see the world, does so through the people who live on its pages.

character is the key to reader interest.

Ultimately, we define ourselves in terms of others. What we really want to know is what, how, and why human beings do.

The genius of modern narrative nonfiction is that it replaced the journalist’s who, what, where, when, and why with character, plot, scene, chronology, and motive.

Human beings are the sum of their values, beliefs, behaviors, and possessions. They’re distinctive because they look a certain way, talk a certain way, and walk a certain way. We know them only when we start to tap the larger context that defines them.

For a storyteller, the critical element of character is the want that drives the story.

The bigger the want, the bigger the story.

Really big wants carry an element of danger that fuels the story’s drama.

“A pivotal character must not merely desire something,” Lajos Egri says. “He must want it so badly that he will destroy or be destroyed in the effort to attain his goal.”

A corollary is that the greater the want, the greater the obstacle to satisfying it.

Drama is interesting only when opposing forces appear evenly matched.

“A protagonist is pretty much defined by the strength of the opposition (or antagonist) he or she faces,” Peter Rubie says. “Ideally, whatever is trying to stop your protagonist from reaching her goal is so formidable that all the...

What tips the scales in the best stories is, once again, character. Typically, the protagonist fails during early attempts to satisfy the central want. Time and again, she confronts the antagonist. Time and again, she loses. Finally, the story reaches a crisis, the point at which—in Egri’s terms—the protagonist will destroy or be destroyed. Then she achieves the point of insight, a new way of looking at the world that allows her to...

In fiction, it’s axiomatic that character drives novels while events drive short stories.

Even though a nonfiction storyteller has no control over the content of a protagonist’s character, he does control his choice of protagonist. Finding someone who’s been through a struggle and experienced a point of insight suggests that you’re on to something worthwhile.

Fiction theorists point out that the most fully crafted characters are round, rather than flat.

Janet Burroway draws the distinction this way: “A flat character is one who has only one distinctive characteristic, exists only to exhibit that characteristic, and is incapable of varying from that characteristic. A round character is many faceted and is capable of change.”

Change is th...

“In the best stories,” Jon Franklin says, “the odyssey from complication to resolution changes the character profoundly.”

Profound character change unfolds along an action line that moves through a narrative arc.

Human foibles, inconsistencies, and a capacity for change make protagonists sympathetic.

Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction divides the techniques of characterization into two broad types. The first, indirect characterization, is straight commentary by the writer,

the best modern fiction and nonfiction writers let a character’s visible persona speak for itself, the method Burroway calls “direct characterization.”

To immerse themselves in a story, readers need enough descriptive detail to visualize characters as they move through the narrative arc.