Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction Read online

  There is nothing confusing about this paragraph, but it does invite us to engage with a sinuous idea, and it introduces an author who asks our fullest attention. He expects long thoughts from us. The invitation is clear and frank, and it is delivered with a shrug: accept it if you will.

  •

  You can’t tell it all at once. A lot of the art of beginnings is deciding what to withhold until later, or never to say at all. Take one thing at a time. Prepare the reader, tell everything the reader needs to know in order to read on, and tell no more. Journalists are instructed not to “bury the lead” (or “lede,” in journalese)—instructed, that is, to make sure they tell the most important facts of the story first. This translates poorly to longer forms of writing. The heart of the story is usually a place to arrive at, not a place to begin. Of course the reader needs a reason to continue, but the best reason is simply confidence that the writer is going someplace interesting. George Orwell begins Homage to Catalonia with a description of a nameless Italian militiaman whose significance is unknown to us, though we are asked to hear about him in some detail. At the end of a long paragraph of description, Orwell writes:

  I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

  It seems strange to begin a book with a character who vanishes at once, when the first few sentences suggest that we are meeting the book’s hero. In fact, the important character being introduced is the narrator, who seems a man of great particularity and mystery of temperament. We don’t know much about him, and we want to know more. We’re ready to follow him.

  What happens when you begin reading a book or an essay or a magazine story? If the writing is at all interesting, you are in search of the author. You are imagining the mind behind the prose. Often that imagining takes a direct, even visceral, form: who is this person? No matter how discreet or unforthcoming writers may be, they are present, and readers form judgments about them. Living in an age when authors hid behind the whiskers of third-person omniscience, Thoreau wrote: “We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.” Readers today do commonly remember that. They may remember it to a fault. The wise writer, while striving to avoid self-consciousness, remains aware of the reader’s probing eye.

  The contemporary author Francine du Plessix Gray offers a provocative way to imagine encounters between writer and reader: “A good writer, like a good lover, must create a pact of trust with the object of his/her seduction that remains qualified, paradoxically, by a good measure of uncertainty, mystery and surprise.” The heart of this advice, the tension between giving and withholding, identifies a narrative decision that faces all writers, though in emphasizing Eros, Gray seems to overlook the true romance of writing. The “mystery and surprise” can be genuine, shared between writer and reader, rather than calculated.

  One morning a piece of wisdom comes over National Public Radio, in an interview with a jazz guitarist who remembers working with the great Miles Davis. The guitarist recalls that Davis once advised him how to play a certain song: “Play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar.” The guitarist admits that he had no idea what Davis meant, but that he then played the song better than he ever imagined he could. “Play it like you don’t know how.” Cryptic advice, but a writer can make some sense of it: Don’t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story, or to your train of ideas, or to your memories. Don’t be afraid to explore, even to hesitate. Be willing to surprise yourself.

  And so there is trust of another kind at work. At some point you must trust yourself as a writer. You may not know exactly where you are going, but you have to set out, and sometimes, without calculation on your part, the reader will honor the effort itself. In Ghana, once a British colony, where English remains the official but a second language, they have an interesting usage for the verb “try.” If a Ghanaian does something particularly well, he is often told, “You tried.” What might well be an insult in American English is high praise there, a recognition that purity of intention lies at the core of the achievement. The reader wants to see you trying—not trying to impress, but trying to get somewhere.

  2

  NARRATIVES

  STORY

  For me, finding a story that I want to tell has always depended less on effort and method than on what my college teacher the poet and great translator Robert Fitzgerald called “the luck of the conception.” Luck of this type may begin with a chance encounter, a suggestion from a stranger, a sudden notion that seems like grace descending. I know nothing more thrilling than the arrival of a good idea for a story. The problem is that good ideas seem to arrive on schedules of their own, and are sometimes disguised as bad ones.

  I once had an idea for a book that came from my experience of having bought an old house and having tried to fix it up myself. The constructed landscape changed for me; for the first time I looked at buildings and saw craftsmanship or the lack of it. A few years later, I was able to hire a team of carpenters, admirable craftsmen, who straightened out some of the messes I had made. My idea was to write a book largely about them. Home-building in America would be the general subject, and the story would follow the carpenter-builders on some sort of construction project yet to be identified.

  I tried this idea on editors, agents, writer friends. No one liked it. So I gave it up and spent nearly two years looking into other possibilities. Todd suggested a book about a captain of industry, but I managed to arrange just one interview, on the top floor of a New York City skyscraper. The CEO told me he didn’t think he could afford to be written about, because he didn’t want the world to know how little he actually accomplished. I wrote a few articles about atmospheric chemistry and chemists, but no roads opened onward for me. I went out west, thinking I might write a book on wilderness, but when I tried the idea on Bill Whitworth, at The Atlantic, he said, “Is this just going to be more beautiful writing about beautiful places?” Finally one day I said to Todd, “You know, I’d really like to try to write that book about carpenters.”

  I remember that he looked at me quizzically, as if to ask why I hadn’t told him this before. “Well, do it then,” he said.

  I ended up following not just the team of carpenters but all the principals involved in the building of a single-family house. The research took about a year. And then, my notes assembled and indexed more or less, I retired to my office to try to begin to make sense of what I had observed. I imagine that this moment is much the same for most nonfiction writers. We sit at desks in our offices, apart from the world, gazing at those notebooks stacked on our tables, hoping there are stories in them but once again unsure.

  At those times I have usually heard worrying voices, and partly to quiet them, partly to forget myself, I have started writing in haste, without much of a plan. But this time was different. I actually felt calm. I sat gazing out the window, listening, I swear it, to the book I wanted to write. What I heard was something like the sound of my mother’s voice reading Dickens, for me the sound of an old-fashioned novel. Then I started to write, and I seem to recall that I had been writing quite happily and steadily for about six months when I went to a cocktail party, where a new acquaintance asked me what I was working on. After I told him, he said, “You mean you’re writing a whole book about the building of a house?”

  Ordinarily I would have been upset. But by then I felt sure there was a good story accumulating in my draft. It seemed to be opening in many directions, and I was fascinated by the architect and builders and incipient homeowners, and by the sometimes stormy relations among them. It was a ménage à trois without sexual connotations, a story about craftsmanship and social class, a multidimensioned story. I could probably get this naysayer interested, I thought, but only if I told him the whole thing, and that would take too
much time and effort. And besides, just then, for once, I wanted to keep it all on paper and in my head.

  I tend to worry now when a story is easily summarized and in summary sounds interesting or, even worse, exciting. This may be superstition, but I believe there is one sure dictum about judging one’s material, a cocktail party rule so to speak: it isn’t always a bad sign when a potential story doesn’t talk well.

  —TK

  Every story has to be discovered twice, first in the world and then in the author’s study. One discovers a story the second time by constructing it. In nonfiction the materials are factual, but the construction itself is something different from fact.

  Some writers begin by spending only a day or two making up the barest outline, the barest guess as to the essential elements of their story, and then they start trying to tell it, taking every turn that seems promising. The approach has advantages. It’s like learning a route by driving it rather than memorizing the map. The danger does not lie in making mistakes (it’s good to make them early) but in committing too soon to a promising conception that may be hard to abandon when it proves unworkable. Conversely, some writers deliberate for days, weeks, (months!) on end, until they feel sure of their plan. But you can never know if you understand your story until you try to tell it. There is a middle ground—to proceed with enthusiasm but to leave yourself a way out: to write in blocks of prose without dwelling on where the blocks will go and the connections among them. In the end, you have to try to find the method that works best for you, remembering that most writers do solve this problem and that how one solves it doesn’t matter at all to the reader.

  It helps of course to have an idea of what you are looking for. What, after all, is a story? It is not a subject. A good story may include a great deal of information on any number of topics or issues. It may blossom with implications. It may be a way of seeing a world in a grain of sand. But that grain of sand can’t be just any grain of sand. A story lives in its particulars, in the individuality of person, place, and time.

  There are many archetypal stories: narratives of quest and trial, sin and redemption, identity and self-sacrifice; narratives of the chase, the mystery, the love triangle, the struggle between good and evil; narratives in which trouble is averted, escape is achieved, tragedy happens. Many, maybe most, nonfiction writers go looking for narratives with those silhouettes, and they feel lucky when they find the real thing, because stories out in the world don’t usually turn out as expected. Even a story that has already happened, a story that a writer sets out to reconstruct, isn’t always as dramatic as it first appears. The villain isn’t quite as villainous as he looked in his photograph; the warring parties settle the lawsuit in midtrial; the murder wasn’t a murder after all. Nonfiction writers, especially ones new to the factual narrative, are vulnerable to those sorts of disappointments. “I don’t have a book,” the young writer says when the events don’t deliver the kind of obvious drama in which everyone recognizes a story. But usually what’s missing isn’t a story. What’s missing is a broader way of thinking about what makes for a good story.

  It is a misleading truism that drama comes from conflict. Conflict in stories is generally understood as an external contest between good guys and bad guys. But to say that Hamlet depicts the conflict between a prince and usurper king is (obviously) to oversimplify that rich, mysterious drama, indeed to misunderstand it completely. The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation.

  In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a young man goes to Alaska with a head full of romantic notions about living in the wilderness and ends up starving to death. Told straight up, this story might have made for a ghastly adventure yarn. Krakauer’s troubling and poignant version allows us to see the young man and, through him and his plight, to view afresh the great American subject of wilderness.

  In Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, American doctors and Laotian Montagnard immigrants tangle over their wildly different understandings of a child’s case of epilepsy. This is the central action of the story, an external conflict about a child’s welfare. But the essence of the story resides in the growth of understanding and sympathy between the two camps, with the author in the background learning something too.

  A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr, also relies heavily on an event-driven narrative, the story of an environmental lawsuit. To some of the author’s friends, this had seemed like a dubious premise. Who would care to read a book about another environmental scandal in which the villains were predictable, the larger meanings all too clear? But the events turned out to be a personal saga, not an allegory. The main character was attempting a good deed, but he was also eccentric, driven, and ambitious. As a lawyer, he was willing to take his fight far beyond the legally rational. His character drove him to achievement, and it also landed him in a mess. In other words, A Civil Action and The Spirit Catches You and Into the Wild are all at their deepest levels narratives of revelation.

  Revelation, someone’s learning something, is what transforms event into story. Without revelation, a story of high excitement leaves us asking, “Is that all?” Discovering the deeper drama of revelation is a challenge for the nonfiction writer, especially the writer who has happened onto a cliff-hanger story. And it is an opportunity, also a potential solace, for the writer who has in hand a story that lacks obvious drama but that may contain other important qualities.

  For a story to have a chance to live, it is essential only that there be something important at stake, a problem that confronts the characters or confronts the reader in trying to understand them. The unfolding of the problem and its resolution are the real payoff. A car chase is not required.

  •

  POINT OF VIEW

  From the late 1970s until 2000, I worked with Kidder on five books, all but one of them written in the third person. In at least one of these, Among Schoolchildren, the third person proved imperative. Kidder had taken no part in the proceedings, and his task was to portray a tiny corner of the world of elementary-school education largely as it appeared through the eyes of a teacher. He accomplished this by observation and intensive after-action interviews with the teacher, in which the essential questions were, “What were you thinking then?” and sometimes, “What are you thinking now?”

  The third person was a less obvious choice in some of Kidder’s other books, but he stuck to it, I think, partly out of a love of the neatness and discipline of the thing—stuck with it until the early 2000s, when he wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains. He began his first draft of that book in the third person, but the plan quickly fell apart.

  The central figure in the story, Dr. Paul Farmer, was not (not then, anyway) particularly famous. Yet he was not an ordinary man either. His capacities were extreme, his actions heroic, his selflessness saintly. What he needed—needed as a character, that is—was to be made credible. Larger-than-life figures seem to need life-size translators. Kidder’s initial third-person descriptions of Farmer fell flat. Who was this guy who sleeps three hours a night and spouts pronouncements about social injustice? He seemed otherworldly. He cured the sick, sure, but could you stand to be around him? As we talked about this issue, Kidder insisted that on the personal level, Farmer was wonderful to travel with, courteous and funny and interesting. “And when you get sick, he takes care of you,” Kidder added. But how to make the man as palatable to readers?

  What Kidder realized finally was that he had to be a stand-in for the skeptical reader, he had to present himself as a person of ordinary limits in endurance and sympathy, who could be in the company of a saint and live to tell the tale. Thus Kidder for the first time portrayed himself, registering the discomfort and diminishing skepticism that he had felt while traveling wi
th Farmer.

  In the first section of the book, Kidder arrives at the doctor’s oasis-like hospital in the desperately poor Haitian countryside. He describes Farmer with wary admiration and then takes a long walk with him into the hills, in pursuit of a patient who needs treatment. The doctor, though suffering from various maladies himself, climbs effortlessly. The author flags. But that (though actual) is a sort of stage business. What really matters is that Kidder provides a way for us to hear Farmer, as if his high pronouncements were coming through our own earthly skeptical ears. They reach the summit, have the meager reward of a Life Saver candy, and then Kidder recounts the scene as they gaze down at the impounded waters of a dam that has drowned the land of countless peasants and relegated them to extreme poverty. And Farmer says, “To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill.”

  Kidder doesn’t respond to Farmer, but says to us: “The list was clearly jocular. So was his tone of voice. But I had the feeling he had said something important. I thought I got it generally. This view of drowned farmland … was a lens on the world. His lens. Look through it and you’d begin to see all the world’s impoverished in their billions and the many linked causes of their misery. In any case, he seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, and I realized, with some irritation, that I didn’t dare say anything just then, for fear of disappointing him.”