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

by Jack R. Hart

But just what is “voice”? The term can be maddeningly elastic, covering a multitude of techniques. “Voice” is so slippery that when I was a callow reporter I dismissed it entirely, figuring it was another one of those empty abstractions that English-lit professors threw around to flaunt their erudition. Now I know better, but 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.

Stories and stories—a storyteller has all kinds of stories going at one time out of which he hopes he can find one story he can tell at one time.

When I’m running a writing workshop, I usually stop the participants halfway through their first drafting exercise. “Time for a tension check,” I say, explaining that if their necks, backs, and shoulders are tight their writing will suffer. They loosen up, go back to work, and the clatter of laptop keys ramps up a notch or two.

That change in pace is important. A relaxed writer is a fast writer, and fast writers sound more like themselves.

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

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.

They’re still distinctive. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe never strays from his part as the brilliant, detached recluse. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is forever hard-boiled, with a soft center. Ian Fleming’s James Bond lives in a predictable, fully formed world that includes a running flirtation with Miss Moneypenny, a distinctive brand of custom cigarettes, and a recurring faculty for smart-ass comments, perfectly timed.

The purpose of character is to drive story.

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

The experience dates to the ancient Greeks, and probably to performances in caves and around campfires. We’re hardwired to absorb stories by scenes—even our dreams consist of characters moving across a mental stage. Storytelling is not continuous, and never has been. We spin out narrative in a series of episodes. The curtain opens, closes, and opens again.

Scene-setting takes its power from its ability to put us into a story, to let us ride the narrative arc ourselves. We filter the details the writer provides through our own experiences, which is why great storytelling can coax such strong emotions out of us. The facts are the writer’s. But the emotions are ours, as potent as the love, anger, fear, and rage that wash over us when we tangle with reality firsthand.

The most gifted writers are those who manipulate the memory sets of the reader in such a rich fashion that they create within the mind of the reader an entire world that resonates with the reader’s own real emotions. The events are merely taking place on the page, in print, but the emotions are real. Hence the unique feeling when one is “absorbed” in a certain book, “lost” in

David Lean, who created film classics such as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, said that his real breakthrough as a director came when he realized his job wasn’t to re-create reality, but to immerse viewers in a kind of dream. The novelist and critic John Gardner mined a similar vein when he talked about a storyteller’s ability to create a “fictive dream.”

Peter Rubie, the literary agent who wrote Telling the Story, reminds writers to choose scenes that keep the focus on protagonists and their struggles to overcome the opposition that stands between them and resolution of the complication. A good scene, he says, will: • cause a subsequent scene to occur, creating cause and effect. • be driven by the main character’s needs and wants. • explore various ploys by the character to get his own way. • include action that changes a character’s position, relative to the end of the story.

But a print writer needn’t resort to fancy techniques. Just mention the paperweight and the implication is that it will play a part in the action that follows. 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.”

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. And, if we want to get formal about it, we follow the roman numeral outline Mrs. Grundy taught us in the fourth grade. Just about any news story or news feature fits the pattern.

A narrative, in contrast, proceeds through a series of scenes carefully selected to tell the story. One of my all-time favorites is Barry Newman’s “Fisherman,” a Wall Street Journal feature about the odd British sport of coarse fishing. It’s a decidedly blue-collar enterprise, organized in pubs and targeted at the trash fish found in old canals, stagnant ponds, and other water that would instantly asphyxiate a respectable trout.

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. Nothing does more to clarify a story in your own mind. And, as a result, nothing does more to simplify the reporting and writing.

Underneath the boxes designating the scenes, I wrote a few words describing the action that would end the scene with a cliff-hanger, an action portending drama in the next section. The deckhand pushing off the dock. The captain hitting the throttle as he surged toward the bar. The deckhand shouting as the big wave loomed over the boat.

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. Ted Cheney, one of the first scholars to take narrative nonfiction seriously, concluded that “good, dramatic nonfiction openings . . . have life within them, life that moves, that gets somewhere.”

From story theory, we know that the narrative arc first rises when a protagonist engages a complication. So it follows that first lines should knock key characters out of the stable orbits they enjoyed before some comet flashed through their private solar system, loosing forces that will produce irreversible change. Lajos Egri, the playwriting guru, said, “A play should start with the first line uttered.” An ideal “point of attack,” he added, zeros in on a moment where something vital is at stake. That might be: • “exactly at the point where a conflict will lead up to a crisis.” • “at a point where at least one character has reached a turning point in his life.” • “with a decision that will precipitate conflict.”

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.

Breslin made a linguistic point, too. Verbs signify action. And, if you’re going to keep a story moving, you’ll need lots of good ones. That seems like a simple enough order. But far too many would-be narrative writers dilute their impact with flabby verbs and weak sentence syntax. A writer who doesn’t know his verbs can turn the most dramatic events into a snooze. A journalist who documented the long struggle of a wounded soldier described the attack that shattered his body this way:

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, which is exactly what Jan did immediately after the dirt and gravel flew through the window.

Winona jammed what? Her hand. Screams pierced what? The air. We’ve entered the realm of cause and effect, where action has consequences. Transitive verbs often expose motive, too. Winona jammed her hand against the roof to hold herself steady as the car tumbled. Motive is integral to plot. “Literary action,” Jon Franklin said, “involves both physical and psychological movement, usually in combination.”

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.

Once you find a powerful action verb, why hobble it with a leaden auxiliary verb? Action-oriented storytellers steer clear of tenses such as past perfect or present progressive in favor of simple past or present. Instead of writing that “the wind had blown” or that “the wind is blowing” they write that “the wind blew” or “the wind blows”?

Any word that doesn’t advance a story slows it down. Which is reason enough to avoid expletives.

refers to a whole class of empty words, not just gratuitous profanities. Most expletives simply fill out the syntax of sentences. The most common are “there are,” “there is,” “there was,” “it is,” “it was,” and so on. Think about a sentence like “there were two airplanes on the runway.” What’s the “there” refer to, anyway? Nada. It just serves to turn “two airplanes on the runway” into a complete sentence.

I’m not sure why, but we all seem to share a compulsion to describe the beginnings of actions, rather than the actions themselves.

Tom French, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the St. Petersburg Times, says he tries to do just the opposite. “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.”

“You try to minimize all explanation,” Blundell says.

If you do leave the action line, don’t leave for long. Bill Blundell says his rule of thumb is to never digress from the main narrative for more than two paragraphs.

Skilled writers develop a subtle faculty for slipping backstory into main clauses without even alerting readers to what they’re doing.

Bill Blundell calls that the sandwich technique. Action’s the bread. Exposition’s the filling. They work together to make an appealing whole.

At the end of a game, a newspaper sports reporter heads for the locker room to get his quotes. And feature writers often prowl for a good “kicker quote,” a pithy comment just right for a closing line.

Magazine and book writers, as a rule, are more willing to step out with a strong personal voice and an authoritative narrative style, which often gets them away from quoting directly. But that doesn’t mean they use dialogue instead. Much magazine and book content is purely expository, summary narrative that tells you how to find a fishing hole or prune a pear tree. Other than the author’s, it often contains no human voices whatsoever. That’s fine. If my pear tree’s looking gnarly and a master gardener wants to tell me about pruning, I’ll pay close attention to his voice alone. But if you want to tell a true story, your readers should hear your characters talk to one another.

For all its strengths, dialogue does a lousy job of exposition. Savvy fiction writers have long understood that you should never make your characters say something they would already know, as in this imaginary snippet:

Actual human beings seldom explain what everybody involved in a conversation already knows. Sometimes they do voice useful background information, but you’re still well advised to let that pass. Supply the background yourself in your role as narrator. Reserve dialogue for the things it does best.

Because we reveal so much of who we are by how we speak, what dialogue does best of all is develop character. Tracy Kidder captured much of the character of a small-town cop, as well as the daily reality of police work in a tight community, via the ongoing dialogue his subject had with friends and acquaintances:

If you choose to write a nonfiction narrative in first person, you become a character in your own story. So your own conversations with other characters become fair game.

The movies can deliver slam-bang action in vivid detail. But film directors don’t hold all the cards, and in some respects print enjoys a huge advantage. The movie camera only reveals external realties, the things that are visible to an outside observer. But print can explore the terra incognita of the human mind.

Only when narrative combines with motive does it become plot. So

Walt Harrington, the former Washington Post Magazine reporter who’s one of the strictest ethicists in the business, says his simple rule is that he won’t tell you what someone is thinking “unless they tell you what they’re thinking.”

You can do certain things to improve your chances of getting it right. For one thing, you interview as soon as possible after the event, before memories degrade. Tom Hallman used a good deal of internal monologue in a

You also can evaluate your source’s recollection for internal consistency and logical probability, what scientists call “face validity.” You can triangulate one account by interviewing multiple witnesses to an event or multiple participants in a conversation. You crosscheck with documentary sources.

If you’re not absolutely sure about what was said, you paraphrase, rather than pretending you have the exact words by using quotation marks. And you limit your reconstruction to things that happen at dramatic highlights, the relatively rare points in a human life when the experience is so intense that memory kicks into high gear.

Reasonable writers might disagree about how much—if any—internal monologue to allow. But one thing most will agree on is that some sort of attribution should tell readers how you know what you know.