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

by Jack R. Hart

Tom Hallman attributed any internal monologue to the memory of the source. When you’re reporting thought or conversation based on more distant memories, you can attribute with phrases such as “he recalled thinking”...

Reconstructed dialogue is especially suspect, and an ethical nonfiction writer will be extremely leery of putting remembered conversations from long ago inside quotation marks.

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

In a fully realized story, the action line—what we call “plot” in fiction—exists to serve the theme. Theme gives the audience a sense of time well invested.

Or, as Nora Ephron put it, “All storytelling is a Rorschach.”

Willa Cather, a real reductionist when it came to these things, is famous for having said, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

If you buy the notion that only a few stories just keep repeating themselves, then you’re probably ticking off some possibilities. 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.”

Weinberg went on to quote the historian Will Durant, who’s often cited where narrative nonfiction writers gather. Durant wrote: 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.

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.

Nonfiction writers must find their themes in their material. The world delivers the facts, and nonfiction specialists have to make some sense of them. “By meaning,” Jon Franklin said at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, “I really mean the shape of the story and what the shape of the story says. It’s not something that you bring to the story. It’s something that you find in the story and extract from the story.”

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

Because a theme statement is so valuable, the first word I write on any project is always the same. I open a new computer screen and type “T-H-E-M-E.” Then I hit the colon key and sit there for a minute, puzzling over just the right noun-verb-noun structure for my statement. As I write this, the first line on this computer file reads “THEME: Stories wring meaning out of life.”

The crucial part that reporting plays in all storytelling, whether in novels, films, or nonfiction, is something that is not so much ignored as simply not comprehended. —Tom Wolfe

In The Literary Journalists, Norman Sims points out that, “like anthropologists and sociologists, literary journalists view cultural understanding as an end. But unlike such academics, they are free to let dramatic action speak for itself.” When Tom Hallman told Gary Wall’s story, he never once stepped

Cynthia Gorney, a veteran narrative journalist who got her start at the Washington Post, has developed a kit bag of immersion reporting techniques. Gorney, who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, journalism school, says she approaches her reporting by asking questions such as what it’s like to actually be her subjects and looking for the most interesting or surprising aspects of their worlds. She says she answers those questions by: 1. “Breathing their air.” 2. “Quietly observing, hanging around.” 3. “Understanding the rhythm of their typical work.” 4. “Learning their vocabulary.” 5. “Reading their literature”—texts, guidebooks, professional publications. 6. “Finding their gurus.”

One thing you owe your sources, whether you’re interviewing or silently observing, is an up-front discussion that explains the rules of the game.

ground rules are: • On the Record: You can use an accurate version of the conversation without restriction. • On Background: You can use the information for developing your story, but you can’t attribute it to your source, even if you cloak the source’s identity. If you want to publish the information, you must get it on the record from another source, and you must publish with attribution to that source. • Not for Attribution: You can use the information, but any attribution must be to a mutually agreeable cloaked source. For example, if you plan to attribute a quotation to a “source close to the president,” your source must sign off on that description. • Off the Record: You can’t use the information unless you get it on the record from another source and publish with full, uncloaked attribution to that source.

If you record a telephone conversation electronically, be sure to let your source know you’re recording. That’s the honest thing to do anywhere. But if you record secretly in states with a two-party consent statute, you’ll be breaking the law if you don’t.

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. Taking such notes is especially important when you’re observing dialogue—for conveying meaning, the nonverbal cues are often more important than the actual words. During a standard interview, an old reporter’s trick is to ask a question you don’t really care about so that you can jot down details of physical appearance, clothing, and surroundings while the source drones on.

The details build your theory, and your theory guides the search for more details. Once you conclude you’re dealing with a neat freak obsessed with

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.”

Not all complications have resolutions, but all resolutions stem from complications.

To make this approach work, I told Rich, you can’t just follow a route; you have to track a person or a thing. An explanatory narrative requires close-to-the-ground specificity. Readers must visualize particular places at particular times. So if you’re going to follow french fries, you have to track one particular batch of french fries. You have to follow the potatoes in one field on one farm, to the packing plant, to the ship, to the counter of the McDonald’s where they’re ultimately served.

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 meaning holds sway.

If the writer creates a cliff-hanger by pausing when something hangs in the balance, the reader will usually hang around to see what happens when the narrative resumes. Or, as Mark Kramer puts it: “It’s frequently best to digress in the middle of the action, not between actions, because then we remember well and we’re happier to come back.”

A 3+2 Explainer Narrative 1: Introduce the lead character and pose the explanatory question. Digression 1: Provide the necessary background and overall context. Narrative 2: Follow the lead character through the main body of the action line. Digression 2: Complete the explanation. Narrative 3: Bring the action line to a logical stopping place.

A narrative is a chronology with meaning. —Jon Franklin

The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they’re broader than many writers suspect. The important thing is that you stay open-minded. If you have something that will entertain your buddies over a beer, you probably have the makings of a narrative that will sell somewhere. It’s just a matter of finding the form that fits.

VIGNETTES A

vignette is a single scene, stand...

The first master of the personal essay, the sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, argued that the hubris of writing about himself was justified by the fact that his personal experiences offered lessons for the rest of humanity. To teach those lessons, of course, you must first re-create your own experience so that others can share in it. The only way to do that is to write a little narrative.

Newspaper, magazine, and online columns usually run about eight hundred words. Most are think pieces, commenting on some recent event and including standard report-writing devices such as statistics and direct quotations. But eight hundred words provide plenty of room for a little narrative.

Writing nonfiction narrative is like viewing a distant butterfly on an old black-and-white TV. Reality may exist out there, but capturing it with an imperfect recording device fuzzes the outlines, dims the colors, and neglects everything that takes place outside one narrow field of view.

When I write that the spring water is fifty-one degrees, I have measured it with a thermometer. When I write that on a visit to the White House, I sipped La Crema Reserve Chardonnay and ate smoked salmon mousse, I have checked old White House records through the Bush presidential library. When I write that a series of mountains in the Kentucky countryside rises seven hundred, eight hundred, and nine hundred feet, I have checked those elevations on soil conservation maps. When I write that I remember my father and I, as a boy, riding in the car one night singing “The Red River Valley,” as we drove through the dip in Ashland Road just past Virgil Gray’s house, I have relied on my memory of that night and the song but checked with my father to learn that it was Virgil Gray who lived in the house. Then I drove two hours to visit Ashland Road to make sure there really was a dip in the road just past Virgil’s home.

Journalism texts lay down unambiguous law on accuracy. Quote exactly. Spell names correctly. Get the smallest details absolutely right.

An allegiance to veracity, drawing on fact to write truthfully about the real world—and drawing on memory and imagination to show us this world in full color. If you are changing or inventing facts to make a better story, you are writing fiction.

And then Perl and Schwartz carved out a middle ground that I find troubling. “If we stick only to hard, verifiable facts,” they write, “our past is as skeletal as line drawings in a coloring book. We must color them in.” And “coloring them in” includes letting “imagination fill in details we only vaguely remember.” Given the vagaries of human memory, that concession is, to me, a license to write fiction and label it fact. I suspect Perl and Schwartz would disagree, arguing, perhaps, that “coloring in” is a way to get at “emotional truth.”

The issue came to a head after the 2003 publication of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a cliché-ridden memoir that supposedly recounted Frey’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. In 2006 the book earned an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and sold 3 million copies. Then “The Smoking Gun,” a truth-squading Web site, exposed it as a fraud. At first Frey’s publisher, Doubleday, trotted out the idea of “emotional truth.” “Recent accusations . . . notwithstanding,” read a news release, “the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.” Frey himself took refuge in the same argument, telling Larry King that he “stands by the book as the essential truth of my life.” Oprah herself defended the book as valuable regardless of the factual details. But A Million Little Pieces contained virtually no truth, emotional or otherwise. Frey eventually admitted he’d written it as a novel that was rejected by seventeen publishers before Doubleday’s Nan Talese said she’d publish it if he recast it as a memoir. Frey and Talese had reached the bottom of an ethical slippery slope, where the only difference between a novel and memoir, it appeared, was that a memoir sold better. “The Smoking Gun’s” expose sparked a national uproar. Oprah, feeling the heat, retreated from her earlier defense and invited Frey back onto her show, where she savaged him because he had “betrayed millions of readers.” Random H...

Good-faith narrative writers can disagree about how much speculation you can use to flesh out a skeletal action line. But for me the bottom line is that readers should know exactly where you learned what you claim to know. I’m not alone. Contest judges often insist on that kind of transparency, and the Pulitzer board recently rejected a worthy finalist because the writer failed to make the source of her information clear. In 2003 the American Society of Newspaper Editors underscored the concern by issuing by a special statement on attribution when it announced its annual writing awards:

The real route to responsible nonfiction is not absolute accuracy but good faith. You work hard at your craft and do your best to get everything right. You check and double-check. And you never deliberately falsify anything, large or small.

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.”

Several good lists of key questions have appeared in recent years. And, although none does more than skim the surface of all the issues you might face for even one narrative piece, I still find them useful. I’m partial to the list assembled at the Poynter Institute by Bob Steele and Chip Scanlan.