Writing Tools

by Roy Peter Clark

  Years ago I attended an outdoor concert in which the punk band the Ramones performed in a courtyard adjacent to a Florida retirement hotel. It was quite a scene. Down below, young fans sported turquoise Mohawk haircuts. Up above, blue-haired ladies stared out of windows, thinking the world had come to an end. A young writer sent to review the concert stood in one place for two hours with his notebook in his pocket. I fought the urge to knock him out and steal his notebook. He should have been exploring the territory like a photographer, seeing the event from down in the mosh pit and then up on the rooftop.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read selections of your recent work, paying attention to the distance between you and the story subjects. Look for your tendencies. Do you move the camera around? Or do you settle for a safe middle distance?

  2. Changing camera distance and angle lies at the heart of cinematic art. Watch a favorite movie with a friend, paying attention to the camera work. Discuss how you would describe certain scenes if you had to write them for print.

  3. When out in the field doing research, take a disposable camera or cell phone camera with you. Your goal is not to take publishable photos but to keep your eyes open. Be sure to take photos from different distances and angles. Review these before you write.

  4. The next time you write about an event, change your vantage point. View the scene from close up and far back, from in front of the stage and behind it.

  Tom Wolfe argues that realism, in fiction and nonfiction, is built on "scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative." This requires, according to Wolfe's manifesto in The New Journalism, "extraordinary feats of reporting," so that writers "actually witness the scenes in other people's lives."

  That advice was offered more than forty years ago, but adherence to it still makes eyewitness storytelling seem new.

  BAGHDAD, Iraq — On a cold, concrete slab, a mosque caretaker washed the body of 14-year-old Arkan Daif for the last time.

  With a cotton swab dipped in water, he ran his hand across Daif's olive corpse, dead for three hours but still glowing with life. He blotted the rose-red shrapnel wounds on the soft skin of Daif's right arm and right ankle with the poise of practice. Then he scrubbed his face scabbed with blood, left by a cavity torn in the back of Daif's skull.

  The men in the Imam Ali mosque stood somberly waiting to bury a boy who, in the words of his father, was "like a flower." Haider

  Kathim, the caretaker, asked: "What's the sins of the children? What have they done?"

  This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Anthony Shadid, covering the war in Iraq for the Washington Post, practicing a form of immersion journalism, getting close to the action, capturing scene after bloody scene.

  Scenes can be witnessed or, in fiction, invented, but they can also be remembered, as in this scene from the childhood of Nora Ephron:

  It is September, just before school begins. I am eleven years old, about to enter the seventh grade, and Diana and I have not seen each other all summer.... I am walking down Walden Drive in my jeans and father's shirt hanging out and my old red loafers with the socks falling into them and coming toward me is ... I take a deep breath ... a young woman. Diana. Her hair is curled and she has a waist and hips and a bust and she is wearing a straight skirt, an article of clothing I have been repeatedly told I will be unable to wear until I have the hips to hold it up. My jaw drops, and suddenly I am crying, crying hysterically, can't catch my breath sobbing. My best friend has betrayed me. She has gone ahead without me and done it. She has shaped up. (from Crazy Salad)

  The scene is the basic unit of narrative literature, the capsule of time and space created by the writer and entered by the reader or viewer. What we gain from the scene is not information, but experience. We were there on that sidewalk with Nora Ephron. We are there.

  "As the atom is the smallest discrete unit of matter," writes novelist Holly Lisle on her Web site,

  so the scene is the smallest discrete unit in fiction; it is the smallest bit of fiction that contains the essential elements of story. You don't build a story or a book of words and sentences and

  paragraphs — you build it of scenes, one piled on top of the next, each changing something that came before, all of them moving the story inexorably and relentlessly forward.

  From childhood, we inhale scenes. We experience them from literature and news reports, from comic strips and comic books, from movies and television, from advertising and public service announcements, from our memories and dreams. But all these are mimetic, to use an old-fashioned literary term. They are imitations of real life.

  The best writers work hard to make scenes real. In one of the most interesting moments in dramatic literature, Prince Hamlet (act 3, scene 2) directs the traveling players on how to create scenes so realistic that they will capture the conscience of the murderous king: "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature." Anything exaggerated or "overdone," argues the melancholy prince, takes away from the purpose of dramatic art, which is "to hold .. . the mirror up to nature." The mirror remains a powerful metaphor for the aspiring writer, especially the journalist. The writer's goal is to reflect the world, to render the here and now, so that readers can see it, feel it, understand it. But the job of the writer is not merely to capture scenes and compile them. These scenes, these moments within scenes, must be placed in a meaningful order, a storyboard, a script, a sequence.

  You may think that the most common sequence will be chronological. But scenes can be arranged in space as well as in time, from one side of a street to the other. Scenes can be used to balance parallel narrative lines, shifting from the perspective of the criminal to the cop. Scenes can flash back in time, or look ahead.

  One of the most arresting stories to come out of the Florida hurricane season of 2004 was written by Dong-Phuong Nguyen of the St. Petersburg Times. Set in Pensacola in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, the story records the poignant experience of folks returning to their neighborhood to view the destruction for the first time. It begins from a distance with a simple scene:

  They waited for days in the hot sun behind the patrol cars and sheriff's deputies, straining for any glimpse.

  Because of the danger, authorities blocked their return. More elaboration of the scene:

  They brought coolers and portable chairs. They joked about their fine china. They warned each other about using their hands to sift through the rubble because of the snakes.

  In another scene they confront the sheriff:

  "Why won't you let us in?" they shouted.

  Bulldozers clear debris from the neighborhood, and a sequence of scenes reveals the emotional as well as physical devastation:

  The residents who had just been joking about what they would find walked along Grand Lagoon Boulevard in silence.

  Five houses in, they began to weep.

  Women wailed inside cars. Teenagers sat in the beds of pickup trucks with their hands covering their open mouths.

  The camera moves closer.

  Carla Godwin quietly walked down Grande Lagoon Court as neighbors lifted roofing from bikes and brushed off ceramic plates. "We don't even have a dining room table anymore," she sobbed. "I don't know where it is. It's gone."

  A sequence of tiny scenes follows in this order:

  1. A woman finds a television set in her bathroom. It is not hers.

  2. The woman walks down the street looking for her neighbors, who cry out to her.

  3. Another woman stands in the rubble of her house going through her stuff.

  4. " 'My cat is alive!' one man came screaming from his house."

  5. Another man emerges from his house smiling, strumming his guitar.

  6. A distraught woman is comforted by family.

  7. A woman finds blistered photos of her babies washed up on a neighbor's patio.

  8. A w
oman takes cell phone calls from other neighbors inquiring about their property.

  These are moments of real life, drawn from the news of the day, and ordered by a skillful young writer into a scenic sequence that gives them meaning and special power.

  WORKSHOP

  1. The next time you do fieldwork, pay attention to the scenes you witness. Record these scenes in enough detail that you can re-create them for the reader.

  2. As you invent scenes for fiction, keep your ears open for dramatic dialogue that can help readers enter the experience.

  3. Try an exercise created by Tom French. With a group of friends or students, view an interesting photograph or portrait (French favors Vermeer). Although these images are static, the writer must place details in an order that the reader can follow. Write a scene describing each image, then compare your work.

  4. Learn sequencing from careful viewing of film. Study a favorite movie. Hit the pause button often. Notice how the director lines up the scenes. How is meaning derived from the sequence?

  Some writing tools work best for straight reports and explanations. Others help the writer craft compelling narratives. The author will often need tools to do both: construct a world that the reader can enter, and then report or comment on that world. The result is a hybrid, best exemplified by a story form called the broken line.

  To understand the broken line, think of its opposite, the unbroken line. Most movies are unbroken narrative lines. Frodo takes possession of the ring of power and sets out on a journey to destroy it. James Bond receives an assignment, saves the world, and gets the girl. On occasion, a director will break the line of narrative for some other purpose. In the movie Alfie, the main character stops the action, turns to the camera, and speaks to the audience. These surprise monologues reveal the corners of his character and foreshadow plot complications.

  Writers can draw on dramatic literature and movies for examples of explanatory interruptions of narrative action. Begin with soliloquies in Shakespearean tragedies. "To be or not to be, that is the question" does not advance the story, but reveals Hamlet's indecision. Think of the stage manager who addresses the audience in countless high-school productions of Our Town

  by Thornton Wilder. The narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dressed in a smoking jacket and speaking from his study, interrupts the gender-bending parody of monster movies to teach the audience the steps of the "Time Warp." And — so I've been told — antique porn films occasionally featured a white-coated therapist to comment on the action, providing "redeeming social value."

  That is the secret and the power of the broken line. The writer tells us a story, then stops the story to tell us about the story, but then returns to the story. Imagine this form as a train ride with occasional whistle stops, something that looks like this:

  A master of this technique is Nicholas Lemann, now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Lemann writes books about big important topics in American life: the migration of black Americans from South to North; the tension between merit and privilege in higher education. Wonderful insights and explanations are hung like pearls on a strong narrative string. A story invites us into a new world. Then the writer explains that world to us.

  The pattern begins early in Lemann's book The Promised Land, when the author introduces us to an African American family from Clarksdale, Mississippi:

  During that year, 1937, Ruby saw her father for the first time. After World War I, he had moved back to the hills, living here and there. Sometimes he would write letters to Ruby and Ruth in the Delta, or send them dresses. Now that they were grown, they decided to visit him. They traveled by train and bus to the town of Louisville, Mississippi, where they had arranged to meet him in front of a cotton gin. Their first glimpse of each other was a crystal-clear memory for Ruby into old age: "Oh, my children," he cried out, nearly overcome with emotion, and embraced them.

  Lemann then pulls the camera back and up from this emotional moment. His next perspective, from high atop the ladder of abstraction, draws on history, sociology, anthropology, ethnography:

  Americans are imbued with the notion that social systems proceed from ideas, because that is what happened at the founding of our country. The relationship of society and ideas can work the other way around, though: people can create social systems first and then invent ideas that will fulfill their need to feel that the world as it exists makes sense. White people in the Delta responded to their need to believe in the system of economic and political subjugation of blacks as just, fair, and inevitable by embracing the idea of black inferiority, and for them the primary evidence of this was lives like Ruby's.

  These are startling ideas. They give Lemann's story altitude, a liftoff from the tarmac of scenes and events to a vantage of meaning from the sky. But too much ozone can leave the reader feeling oxygen deprived. Time to land. And so he does. Over the course of the book, the movement Lemann creates, back and forth, back and forth, between narrative and analysis, both instructs and delights the reader.

  While this literary mix makes sense in nonfiction, you can find analogies in great works of fiction going back to the earliest expressions of English literature. The narrative line in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a pilgrimage, but that story is interrupted by the sacred and profane tales told by pilgrims. To many, Moby Dick feels like two books: the tragic story of a crazed sea captain's search for a deadly whale, interrupted time and again by explanations of whaling and the humdrum life of sailors. Even Huckleberry Finn describes a journey down a river, a narrative line with several landings along the way.

  Many newspapers and magazines have miniaturized this movement with a device called the nut paragraph. Any story that begins without the news requires a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a zone that answers the question "So what?" The nut paragraph answers that question for the reader. For more than thirty years, the Wall Street Journal has perfected this technique with whimsical front-page features. Reporter Ken Wells begins a story with an anecdote:

  Emma Thornton still shows up for work at 5 a.m. each day in her blue slacks, pinstripe shirt and rubber-soled shoes. A letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, she still dutifully sorts all the mail addressed to "One World Trade Center," and primes it for delivery.

  But delivery to where and to whom? Why is this anecdote important? The answer requires a little altitude, a movement off the narrative line up to a higher level of meaning, a nut paragraph (in this case two paragraphs):

  Since Sept. 11, as many as 90,000 pieces of mail a day continue to flood in to the World Trade Center addresses that no longer exist and to thousands of people who aren't alive to receive them. On top of that is another mail surge set off by well-wishers from around the U.S. and the world — thousands of letters addressed to, among other salutations: "The People Hurt," "Any Police Department" and "The Working Dogs" of "Ground Zero, N.Y." Some of this mail contains money, food, even biscuits for the dogs that were used in the early days to help try to sniff out survivors.

  The mix of World Trade Center mail and Ground Zero mail represents a calamity for the U.S. Postal Service, which served 616 separate companies in the World Trade Center complex whose offices are now rubble or relocated.

  No reader wants to be fooled by a story lead that promises narrative, only to discover a body dense with information. That is why the writer's movement from anecdote to meaning would be nothing more than a shell game without a return to the narrative line, to the world of letter carrier Emma Thornton. The writer delivers: "Her route in the North Tower has been transformed into a 6-by-6 steel cubicle ... surrounded by tall metal racks of pigeonholes."

  The broken line is a versatile story form. The writer can begin with narrative and move to explanation, or begin with straight information and then illustrate the facts with an anecdote. In either case, the easy swing, back and forth, can feel like clockwork.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read the work of Nicholas Lemann for examples of the
broken line. Analyze his movement from narrative to analysis in books such as The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

  2. Review your recent work. Find missed opportunities where you could have used the broken line.

  3. Read the collection of Wall Street Journal features titled Floating Off the Page. Search it for interesting examples of the nut paragraph and the general movement between information and narrative.

  4. As you review your work, look for examples where you have used the nut paragraph to reveal the higher meaning of the story. Pay attention to what comes after this paragraph. Do you move back to narrative, or are you practicing bait and switch on the reader?

  5. As you read or write fiction, pay attention to the way information and explanation mix with narrative. Notice if facts are blended into the story or framed as separate elements.

  I've seen the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian. At forty-five carats, it is big and blue and buxom, but not beautiful. Smaller gems have more facets and reflect light with more brilliance. The same can be true of writing. In the ideal, the author of a great big novel should not waste a syllable, but he will, and chances are, in an ocean of words, the reader will not notice. The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word. So polish your jewelry.

  Writing with video images and natural sound, Charles Kuralt mastered making each word — each pause — count:

  "I have fallen in love with American names," wrote the poet Stephen Vincent Benet.

  Well, really — how could you not? Not if you've been to Lick Skillet, Texas, and Bug Tussle, and Nip and Tuck, and Cut and Shoot. In California you can travel from Humbug Flat to Lousy Level, with a detour to Gouge Eye.

  Could the good people of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, use some Hot Coffee, Mississippi, to wake them up?

  You can go from Matrimony, North Carolina, to Caress, Virginia — or from Caress to Matrimony.

  I have passed time in Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky, and Bowlegs and Tombstone, Big Chimney and Bull Town. And I liked Dwarf, Kentucky, though it's just a little town.