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

by Jack R. Hart

“Detailed descriptions tend to defeat their own purpose,” Wolfe said, “because they break up the face rather than create an image. Writers are much more likely to provide no more than a cartoon outline.”

If readers know something about the context and if you just need to mention a flat character in passing, you can create a pretty good image by triggering just one connection to a stored archetype.

Long expository descriptions take readers out of the unfolding story.

The point, as always, is that every word must do some work, and every detail must advance the action line and develop character. You never include detail for its own sake.

The purpose of character is to drive story.

One point of story, after all, is to teach us the secrets of successful living.

While the outline is the structural skeleton of the narrative, the flesh and blood that turns that skeleton into a living thing are not chapters . . . but scenes. —Peter Rubie

We’re hardwired to absorb stories by scenes—even our dreams consist of characters moving across a mental stage.

When you set out to craft a nonfiction story, it doesn’t hurt to think of yourself as a playwright. You must, after all, create a stage, a place where the story can unfold. Once you have a story space, you can people it with characters. Then, with a snap of your fingers, the characters can breathe, move, act. You launch your plot, and complete the storytelling tripod created when you combine character, action, and scene.

Scene selection gets more complicated in a story narrative. Each scene should unfold along the narrative arc, propelling the action line through the phases of story. You’ll want to open a story narrative with a scene suitable for exposition, which in an opening means introducing the protagonist and providing the backstory necessary for understanding the complication. If the first scene doesn’t contain the inciting incident, the next scene should. Then a series of scenes will proceed from plot point to plot point, moving upward through the rising-action phase of the story. The crisis will unfold in one of the story’s key scenes, as will the climax. A single scene may be enough for falling action and denouement.

Robert McKee underscores that last point in his advice for screenwriters, noting that each movie scene must change what he calls the protagonist’s “value charge.” The phrase refers to the degree to which a character is up or down relative to the ultimate goal of resolving the complication.

“Is there opposition in the scene?” Peter Rubie asks. “Forward momentum is the overcoming of opposition.”

And, as Bill Blundell has pointed out, the main point of description is story progression. That means details must be meaningful,

Readers expect writers to follow Chekhov’s Rule—“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”1

Every good narrative has a larger point, and every good narrative writer is constantly primed to spot les petits vrais—“the little truths” of life.

The need to create a sense of surrounding space transcends print. Television and movie storytellers talk about “establishing shots,” wide-angle views that take in the entire setting that will contain a sequence of actions.

Ultimately, the point of description is to create scenes that seem absolutely real, and vivid details are the most important elements in living scenes. A sense of space helps, as do texture and atmosphere. But the frosting on the scenic cake is the illusion that we’re seeing a scene through the eyes of particular characters as they move through their own worlds.

The technique Tom Wolfe listed as most basic to the New Journalism—“scene by scene construction”—is also the technique that most distinguishes narrative nonfiction from expository forms of nonfiction. It is, in other words, a characteristic that separates reports from stories. We organize reports by topic.

A narrative, in contrast, proceeds through a series of scenes carefully selected to tell the story.

Once you get used to thinking of stories as a series of scenic episodes, plotting the scenic structure becomes the natural first step to planning the narrative.

Action, after all, is story itself.

The importance of action suggests that you should get moving right out of the blocks. Something should happen in the first line of your narrative.

Keeping in mind the importance of action and point of view, the default option for any narrative opening is to begin with the name of the protagonist and to immediately follow that with a strong verb.

You have a thousand ways to begin any story, of course, and the protagonist-verb form of opening sentence may not always be the best. But it does remarkably well in a variety of situations.

While working those actual stories, they learned about story theory, point of view, characterization, and scenic construction. They also learned about verbs.

You don’t have to master every grammatical nuance to write great narrative. But you need to know that you have three types of verbs at your disposal—linking verbs, transitive verbs, and intransitive verbs. They’re your basic tools of action.

When you really want to get the action moving, you steer clear of both linking and intransitive verbs,

We’ve entered the realm of cause and effect, where action has consequences. Transitive verbs often expose motive, too.

Like transitive verbs, active voice advances the narrative by showing why and how human beings affect the world around them. One action leads to another, which leads to another. That’s the essence of story.

Contrary to popular misconception, the term “expletive” refers to a whole class of empty words, not just gratuitous profanities.

Feedback from baffled readers long ago taught me to make sure a final draft made a story’s chronology clear.

“Each scene will have a climax,” says narrative literary agent Peter Rubie, “and one definition of pace is how rapidly a narrative moves from climactic point to climactic point.”

Elmore Leonard revealed one of the secrets of his success when he said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Once you reach one of those climactic points,...

Control over pace is one of the storyteller’s most powerful narrative techniques.

“The paradox is that when you’re in the boring stuff, that’s when you need to speed up and when you’re in the best stuff where things are really moving rapidly, you slow down. The reason you slow down is so that the reader can really feel and process and really enter that scene.”

Part of what gives scenic narrative its power is the way it hesitates just when something important looms, creating what Tom calls “that delicious sense of enforced waiting.”

Exposition—the backstory readers need to understand what’s going on—is the enemy of narrative.

But you invariably need exposition. For one thing, story revolves around motive, and readers need to know why characters do what they do.

Or maybe you need to explain how something’s done so that readers can appreciate its difficulty.

So, given that some amount of exposition is necessary, what can you do to limit the damage it does? First, write no more than absolutely necessary.

The only necessary exposition serves dramatic purposes. It allows the reader to understand why the protagonist must overcome a complication. Or it enhances drama by explaining why the challenge is so daunting.

If you do leave the action line, don’t leave for long.

Secondhand action is fine for a report on a city council meeting. Or in just about any report, for that matter. But the last thing you want in a nonfiction narrative is detachment achieved by filtering all content through some third party. For the great majority of narrative, your aim as a storyteller is to put readers into a scene where they can experience the action as though they were there witnessing it themselves.

Remember that dialogue is not talk but action; it is what people do to each other. —Don Murray

Because we reveal so much of who we are by how we speak, what dialogue does best of all is develop character.

As Joseph Conrad, Janet Burroway, and many others have pointed out, narrative in and of itself doesn’t produce story. Only when narrative combines with motive does it become plot.

Narrative is a kind of back door into something very deep inside us. —Ira Glass

And, through the entire year and a half, Tom and I talked regularly about the most fundamental issue in narrative nonfiction: What does all this mean?

What could be more rewarding than puzzling out the life lessons that emerge from the struggles of our fellow human beings?