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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jack R. Hart
Read between
February 25 - March 28, 2020
As a rule of thumb, I figure about five hundred words as a minimum for creating a scene and the action line it contains.
The arc, steep as it is, can include all the essential ingredients—exposition, rising action, crisis, climax, resolution/denouement.
every true slice of life with a positive outcome says something about successful living.
The story raised all the basic questions about characterization, scene-setting, structure, point of view, and theme.
Point of view was our first issue.
A good protagonist is, most of all, the captain of his fate. For a story to take a form that offers a valuable life lesson, the protagonist must engage the complication, grapple with it through a period of rising action, and ultimately resolve it through his own initiative.
Chesley might provide a flat action line for an explanatory narrative, but the odds were against him creating the arc of a true story narrative. That would require a character capable of significant change.
We could still write a tragedy, a story about a complication defeating a protagonist.
We wanted what Aristotle referred to as a comedy—a story about a protagonist defeating the complication.
I asked Julie to prepare a theme statement. The process was new to her, and she didn’t quite achieve the crisp subject–transitive verb–object form that I prefer.
In Robert McKee’s terms, the protagonist’s “value charge” was taking a major swing in a positive direction.
It was what story theorists call the point of insight, the realization that changes the protagonist’s understanding of the world and sets up the climax.
With that, Julie had completed her narrative arc. Along the way, she’d crafted a complete story, one with an insightful theme, strong scenic construction, deep characterization, and a dramatic action line.
The journey of the fries will simply serve as a spine that holds the piece together, that gives it shape. But it’s a flat narrative line, A to Z, instead of an arc that takes a main character through rising action, a climax, and a resolution.
But every once in a while, the writer stops the action, just pulls the curtain on the narrative. Then he goes off on a little exploration of the subject, an abstract explanation that gives depth and meaning to what the reader’s been witnessing in the narrative. They’re known in the trade as digressions, and they’re the key to making an explanatory narrative work.
Two structural elements drive the twin missions of an explanatory narrative. The action line creates its overall shape, moving the advancing narrative through time and space. It draws readers into the narrative by exploring new places, introducing new people, and creating mild dramatic tension, if only because the reader doesn’t know what will happen next. But digressions provide the actual explanation, placing the action line in some larger context. Action takes place on the lower rungs of the ladder of abstraction, where emotion rules. Explanation takes place farther up the ladder, where
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such markers are known as “star-line breaks.”
One secret to successful digression is to preserve dramatic tension by bailing out of the action line at just the right moment.
Because an explanatory narrative progresses steadily through successive, top-to-bottom sections of scenic action and explanatory digression, it assumes a structure that Michael Roberts, writing coach at the Arizona Republic, likens to a layer cake.
To get the scenic detail, on the one hand, and the larger thematic meaning, on the other, narrative writers must range farther up and down the ladder of abstraction than typical journalists.
To find a good explainer, take a couple of steps back from the case at hand, asking “Why does this matter? Why here? Why now?”1
“Once you’ve eaten with somebody,” Rich said later, “and you haven’t made a total fool of yourself, then you’re okay.”
It’s a form I call the 3+2 explainer—a structure containing three narrative scenes separated by two digressions.
You can use the 3+2 to tackle just about anything.
Some story elements inevitably appear when you describe action. The characters you introduce along the way face problems they must resolve. And scenes, one of the key ingredients in any more complete story, also play a critical role in explanatory narrative.
Shorter explanatory narratives may stick with a principal character. But even those usually don’t pursue a full story structure. We meet the scanner head or the greatest salesman who ever lived not to follow them through a narrative arc, complete with point of insight and climax, but to share a few brief episodes that serve as windows into their worlds.
But nothing says you can’t use an explanatory structure to tell a true story—one that encompasses a complication, change, character development, and resolution.
Action really does explain process.
This is, in other words, an explanatory narrative that explains explanatory narrative.
At its most basic level, a narrative simply describes a sequence of actions. It doesn’t need a point of insight, a climax, or a complication. It can result from observational or reconstructive reporting. It might be book length, or it might unfold in just a few lines.
But mastering the story narrative, the explanatory narrative, the tick-tock, and the narrative profile still won’t give you a narrative for every situation.
A vignette is a single scene, standing alone.
Because they stand alone, vignettes must work harder to offer a slice of life that’s rich in theme, that reveals some important secret to good living.
It’s not a story, in the strictest sense of the word, because nobody changes, nobody has a point of insight, and nobody resolves a complication.
Which makes a decent metaphor for the structure of a bookend narrative. . . . To write one, you bracket a stretch of expository material with two pieces of more engaging scenic action, opening and closing with narrative that has the power to hold the longer, duller content in the center.
The next paragraph constituted what’s called a “turn,” a sudden climb on the ladder of abstraction to address the macrocosm that the opening represented:
All personal essays follow Montaigne’s lead and include a narrative, a turn, and a conclusion.
They’re inductive, in other words, moving from the particular (a deformed child), then rising on the ladder of abstraction (arguing that everything born of nature is part of God’s plan), and concluding with some cosmic truth. (Ignorance moves men to judge rare natural events as unnatural.)
What does the whole episode reveal about the human condition?
The ultimate payoff for a personal essay is when readers follow the writer from the specific to the general, then cross over to a new ladder of abstraction and descend it to the specifics of their own lives.
If you don’t like my suggested structure for a short personal essay, you have plenty of options. You can break the narrative into pieces, inserting intermediate conclusions along the way. You can minimize the narrative and expand the more abstract discussion of the subject. Or you can let the narrative dominate while the cosmic conclusion emerges from subtle literary cues.
An essay, it’s been said, is a way of “taking an idea for a walk.”
When we write, Walt Harrington says, “We learn that the complicated worlds we enter are next to impossible to re-create in words.”
Any reconstructed narrative, even an account by a reliable eyewitness, is an approximation of what really happened,
The most important purpose of nonfiction narrative is to help us cope with a challenging world.
A complete story calls for a protagonist.
A complete story calls for a climax.
A complete story calls for resolution.
Neither can you seek out sources you know will make your point and ignore those who will muddy your theme, a practice known as “casting.”
The only workable route to ethical behavior is working through a process that weighs competing interests, asks key questions, and considers all the practical alternatives.
