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

by Jack R. Hart

As Ted Cheney argued in Writing Creative Nonfiction, this kind of narrative “doesn’t just report the facts—it delivers the facts in ways that move people toward a deeper understanding of the topic.”

As we talked, I recalled my grad-school study of philosopher George Herbert Mead’s “looking-glass self,” the idea that we build our self-identity from how we perceive others reacting to us.

In a fully realized story, the action line—what we call “plot” in fiction—exists to serve the theme.

A literary theme inevitably springs from the writer’s personal values, his or her highly individual understanding of cause and effect in human lives.

Lajos Egri, the playwriting guru, referred to the theme of a play as its “premise,” the foundation on which the whole drama is built.

Thousands of years of human experience have given us just a few basic principles for living a good life, and they’re bound to be a little shopworn. Predictable and obvious, even.

Most other story theorists can come up with a dozen, and in The Book on Writing former Dallas Times-Herald writing coach Paula LaRocque rattled off nearly twice that many: “Some of the obvious theme or action archetypes are quest, search, journey, pursuit, capture, rescue, escape, love, forbidden love, unrequited love, adventure, riddle, mystery, sacrifice, discovery, temptation, loss or gain of identity, metamorphosis, transformation, dragon-slaying, descent to an underworld, rebirth, redemption.”

But, as I’ve been saying, thematic originality is no virtue.

For one thing, a completely original theme would miss what is perhaps the most critical story element of all—universality.

When you think about it, every theme incorporates a lesson. That’s the value added that draws an audience to a story in the first place.

In contemporary art, they are sophisticated and subtle extrapolations of universal patterns. They seek cause, consequence, reason, and order.”

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

Most of us live on the banks of the river, and narrative nonfiction therefore gives us license to write about ourselves—so long as we can find that universal element in whatever has happened to us.

We tell stories to connect with each other. We tell our own stories—sometimes just to ourselves—to make sense of the world and our experience in it.

As a reader and writer, I believe in the power of stories to bring us together and heal.

We all have burdens we must carry through life: grief and disappointments that we cannot change. But we can make them lighter if we do not bear them silently and alone.

I suspect that even fiction writers find that their themes emerge from their material. They start with interesting characters, disturb their tranquility with a good complication, and let ’er roll. The way those characters resolve the complication emerges from the author’s beliefs about how the world works.

“A true theme is not a word but a sentence,” McKee says, “one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning.”

A sentence must, of course, contain a verb, and that’s key to writing an effective theme statement.

sentences built around transitive verbs show causality. And causality is the essence of a theme that tells readers how the world works and how they can influence it.

“Every good premise,” he said, “is composed of three parts, each of which is essential to a good play. Let us examine ‘Frugality leads to waste.’ The first part of this premise suggests character—a frugal character. The second part ‘leads to,’ suggests conflict, and the third part, ‘waste,’ suggests the end of the play.”

Being there and watching. And listening, and smelling, and feeling. That’s immersion reporting. And, although not all narrative nonfiction involves immersion reporting, the technique is a hallmark of the form.

“You’ve got to understand a lot,” McPhee said, “to write even a little bit.”

The approach echoes ethnography, the branch of anthropology devoted to comparative descriptions of the world’s cultures.

We all keep our guard up around strangers. But familiarity breeds trust, or at least indifference.

At the Oregonian, we did a lot of tick-tocks, narrative reconstructions of major news events.

The risks are especially high with narratives that need all the essential story ingredients—a sympathetic protagonist, a complication with universal applications, rising action, climax, and resolution—to work.

Victory really does have a thousand parents, while defeat remains an orphan.

Character drives story, and a narrative writer’s notebook should be especially rich in scribbled observations of physical appearance, facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and all the other elements of direct characterization.

Remember that a story begins when somebody wants something. So reporting for a story narrative should focus on motivation.

For a major project, Jon Franklin conducts what he calls a “psychological interview” that may go on for hours.

We usually want what our friends and colleagues value, or what we think is valued in the social circles we’d like to join. So one way you probe motive is by noting the “status indicators” that Tom Wolfe sees as so revealing.

Because it shows a human being actually expressing personality in the world, nothing reveals character like an anecdote.

My old University of Oregon teaching colleague Ken Metzler, author of Creative Interviewing, supplied the hint that explained why. “To get stories,” he said, “you have to tell stories.”

To get anecdotes, you prime the pump by telling a story—either on yourself or your protagonist—and asking for another.

“You really need to have faith in the power and importance of tiny, tiny moments,” Tom French says. “Newspaper reporters are trained so that we are really good at big moments. But the longer I do this, the more I learn to have faith that in those times when it looks like nothing is happening. In front of me something very important is happening. I just need to learn to pay better attention.”

When it comes to finding that gem, the quality of the setting is far more important than the quality of the stone. And the quality of the setting reflects the quality of your thinking as you proceed through the reporting process. “What does this mean?” you constantly ask yourself? “Why did she do that?” “What does this say about the challenges we all have to face?”

If you keep asking, you’ll keep finding, even if what you find is not what you expected.

Once you learn how to break the world down into the universals of story, you start seeing stories everywhere. Look for a good conflict, and chances are you’ll find a good story. Recognize a good protagonist, and chances are you’ll find a challenge that will interest an audience.

Ken Fuson sharpens his vision by looking for characters with everyday desires. “I really try to narrow the focus down to what does this person want and are they going to get it?” he says. “Are they going to win the game or get the award or give the speech without passing out?”

Tom Hallman focuses on complications, too. Once he spots someone facing a challenge, he sticks close, gambling that he’s found a protagonist who will eventually resolve his complication.

Not all complications have resolutions, but all resolutions stem from complications. So Jon Franklin suggests finding your way into stories from the resolution end of the equation.

A story narrative comes closest to the protagonist-complication-resolution model that most of us have in mind when we talk about a “story.”

Explanatory narratives often lack something as basic as a protagonist.

In a narrative essay the narrator is the protagonist.

A tick-tock is entirely reco...

A vignette is entirely obs...

once you restrict the number of words, you limit the kind of story you can tell.

A short piece of writing lacks the running room necessary to probe the complexities of character.

So a general principle of fiction—that the novel explores character and the short story explores situation—also applies to nonfiction.