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

by Jack R. Hart

But my most valuable education came from working with scores of writers on hundreds of stories. Producing for publication, often on tight deadline, gave me a practical grounding in story that the world’s best graduate school couldn’t possibly match. When I finally retired, I figured it was time to pass along the most useful lessons I’d learned.

Obviously, I’m a huge fan of classic storytelling. But experience has taught me that most subjects are best suited to simple informational writing that makes the key point quickly.

If you want to write successful narrative, half the battle is knowing what you’re looking for. A sharp eye for story comes from understanding that its basic ingredients are universal and learning how to spot them in the real world. If you want to find a great story, look for the ingredients I’ll be explaining in the rest of this chapter. If you want to write a great story, study the techniques I’ll describe in the rest of the book.

Research also demonstrates that we remember facts more accurately if we’re exposed to them in a story, rather than a list, and that we’re more likely to buy the arguments that lawyers make in a trial if they present them as part of a narrative.4

Lajos Egri, who in 1942 wrote an influential guide for playwrights that’s still in print as The Art of Dramatic Writing, argued that character was the driving force in story. Human needs and wants, he said, set stories in motion and determine all that follows.

I’m partial to the story definition Jon Franklin included in Writing for Story, his groundbreaking text on narrative nonfiction: A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.

In any story, principal characters do one thing, then another, then another, and the writer’s recounting of that sequence creates the narrative. At its simplest level, then, a narrative is just a chronology of events. Plot, on the other hand, is clearly something different than mere narrative. A plot emerges when a storyteller carefully selects and arranges material so that larger meanings can emerge.

sympathetic character. The character who drives the story forward is the protagonist, and the protagonist is an active player, the one who takes action to achieve a desire, overcome an antagonist, or solve a problem. So when you’re looking for a protagonist search for the person who makes things happen.

bad-guy protagonists, but bad guys seldom work as narrative protagonists. For one thing, they seldom show us the way things should be done. For another, readers can’t identify with them. And for yet another, readers expect heroic—or at least likeable—protagonists, which is why criminal protagonists in Hollywood movies usually come off as loveable rogues. If you give some sociopath protagonist status in a nonfiction story, readers will invest the brute with positive qualities he doesn’t deserve.

trouble is interesting.” Your protagonist, in other words, needs a problem. Why pay attention to somebody who’s content, who has no reason to act, no challenge to meet, and nothing to teach us about coping with the world?

A resolution. 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. Not every narrative has a resolution.

So I side with Franklin’s preference for winners. As he points out, you can learn something from a negative resolution, but eliminating the things you shouldn’t do—one by one—is a terribly inefficient way of learning about the world. Far better to focus on winning strategies. Each one, after all, is a keeper.

The kind of roman numeral outline that Mrs. Grundy taught you in the fourth grade will work fine for a news report, a thesis, or an instructional book like this one. But it won’t uncover the patterns at the heart of story. I suspect that topical outlines flow from the verbal part of the brain, the speech center in the left hemisphere. 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.

Novelist Darin Strauss says, “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.”

John McPhee, the master of the nonfiction explanatory narrative, obsesses on structure, in part because sketching out a simple blueprint helps him find his way through the thickets of information that sprout as he reports a story. When he’s ready to write, he looks beyond those thickets to his

I’ve long made it a practice to sit down with writers to sketch a blueprint as soon as we had some inkling of a story’s direction. If you run into something unexpected, you can always revise the blueprint—contractors do it all the time. In the meantime, you avoid the time and expense of gathering material you ultimately won’t need. “I

Remember Jon Franklin’s warning about placing too much emphasis on polish. He also notes that your first draft should emphasize the structure—getting the right things in the right places—rather than trying to make each sentence perfect.

The arc passes through the five phases that mark any complete story, each indicated by the Arabic numerals hovering above it in figure 2.2. The first is exposition, the phase that tells readers who protagonists are and gives them just enough information to understand the complications they will face.

what they must understand

To actually begin writing the story, Mark had to address exposition. What did readers need to know about his protagonist? Certain basic facts, for sure.

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.

You launch action immediately and then blend the exposition into it, submerging it in modifiers, subordinate clauses, appositives, and the

The exposition phase of the story is also the place you tease readers into the action line by foreshadowing the dramatic events that lie just ahead. Mark could have done that crudely: “Nancy never suspected that in a few hours her dogs would be dead and she’d be trapped in her house, fighting for her life.” But he wisely chose to be more subtle, writing that:

Readers know full well that when a writer takes pains to tell them a character doesn’t expect the worst, she’s about to get it.

But little mysteries drive the narrative forward. Bill Blundell, former writing coach at the Wall Street Journal, said, “The formula I teach is to tease the folks a little bit in the lead. They don’t mind it. You are simply trying to get them interested.”

one of the most important parts of any narrative arc. Robert McKee calls it the “inciting incident,” and others identify it as “Plot Point A” or “engaging the complication.” Whatever you call it, it’s the event that sets the whole story in motion, indicated on the narrative-arc diagram by the dotted vertical line with the letter A above it.

The complete narrative arc gives rising action, the second phase of the story, about the same weight as the other phases. Rising action, in fact, contributes most of the bulk to most stories. It’s the phase of the story that keeps the audience members in their chairs, and the standard 120-minute Hollywood film might devote more than a hundred of those minutes to it. Rising action creates the dramatic tension that will be released only when the story’s climax leads to the resolution.

plot point, as you might remember from the preceding chapter, is any development that spins the story off in a new direction. Plot Point A, the inciting incident, rips the protagonist out of the status quo and initiates a journey toward the new reality that waits at the end of the narrative arc. Novelist

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.”

The designer should have read Aristotle: “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. Schlictmann loses a key legal motion, and it looks as though his lawsuit will die. Then he pulls something out of a hat, and he’s back in business, his improbable quest renewed.

This rise and fall, of hope and mystery and suspense, is so ingrained in the rising-action phase of a story, that I sometimes sketch it as a curve writhing its way up another curve, each plot point indicated by an X (see figure 2.3).

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.

Your plot, in other words, need not follow the narrative arc.

No matter how experienced you are, you’re well advised to apply KISS anytime you consider extensive flashbacks or flash-forwards. Memento notwithstanding, the storyteller’s usual aim is to keep readers happily lost in story, and jumping out of the chronology threatens that.

All of which moved Tom French to write, “Beware the extended flashback, the ornate flash-forward, the so-called expert dragged forward to ‘explain.’ Stay as close to the action as possible.”

The crisis is the peak of the breaking wave that is a narrative arc.

Count your lucky stars when it does. Having both an inciting incident (Plot Point A) and a point of insight (Plot Point B) means you have a complete story, and that means you have the raw material for a piece of writing with real literary merit.

The climax is simply the event—or series of events—that resolves the crisis. When Frodo destroys the ring of power, he resolves the complication

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.

Keep one thing in mind when you’re writing a denouement: Falling action has drained all the dramatic tension from the story. Readers want to know the answers to a few questions, but the powerful engine of story has shut down, leaving little momentum to carry your audience farther forward. So don’t push your luck. Wrap things up as quickly as possible and leave the stage.

But what, exactly, is point of view? Alas, hardly anybody seems to agree. Novelist Darin Strauss insists that “point of view is simply the workings of the mind of the character who is telling or experiencing the story.” Literary agent Peter Rubie says point of view is “a camera-lens position.” Creative nonfiction guru Philip Gerard says point of view can be either first or third person and varies according to how much access the storyteller has to the minds of characters.

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?

Second person does occasionally show up in narrative, usually as a stylistic device intended to put readers in a scene. In that context, it’s more of a literary device than actual direct address. Jim Harrison sometimes uses the technique to good effect. His memoir Off to the Side is mostly in first person, as you would expect. He writes, for example, that he visited Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, “where I’ve wandered as much as three days without seeing a single other human.” Then he moves south to the Seri Coast of Mexico, and advises readers to:

Philip Gerard calls the first option—the movie-camera approach—the “dramatic point of view.” Because it sticks to an external reality that can be verified by independent observers, it’s the most objective and journalistic of third-person viewpoints. Narratives with the dramatic point of view often are structured as a series of relatively pure scenes, divided typographically and—other than brief bits of necessary background—unsullied by digressions.

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

The essayist Richard Rodriguez pointed out that “the West” was only west to European Americans on the East Coast. To a Mexican, “the West” was El Norte. To the Chinese, it was “the East.”

One of the things that puzzled me most when I started coaching narrative was that journalists, professionals who wrote every day on deadline, often had the toughest time thinking like storytellers. Why should that be? I knew many of them well, and I can vouch for the fact that they had no trouble spinning yarns around campfires or over beers. When a toddler asked for a bedtime story, I doubt any of them perched on the edge of the bed, picked up the morning’s newspaper, and read aloud, in stentorian tones, that “two River City men were killed Wednesday when their car plunged off a Highway 23 embankment and hit a tree, state police said.”