Storycraft, Second Edition

The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction

Jack Hart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226737089
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Jack Hart, master writing coach and former managing editor of the Oregonian, has guided several Pulitzer Prize–winning narratives to publication. Since its publication in 2011, his book Storycraft has become the definitive guide to crafting narrative nonfiction. This is the book to read to learn the art of storytelling as embodied in the work of writers such as David Grann, Mary Roach, Tracy Kidder, and John McPhee.
In this new edition, Hart has expanded the book's range to delve into podcasting and has incorporated new insights from recent research into storytelling and the brain. He has also added dozens of new examples that illustrate effective narrative nonfiction.
This edition of Storycraft is also paired with Wordcraft, a new incarnation of Hart's earlier book A Writer's Coach, now also available from Chicago.

1

Story

Story is about eternal, universal forms.

—Robert McKee

From the back of a Boston hotel ballroom I watched, intrigued, as Ira Glass cued interviews, modulated music, and led hundreds of writers through the theory that guides his storytelling. I’m a print guy, and Glass is a broadcaster. But at that instant I realized that this dynamo, the creative genius behind National Public Radio’s This American Life, followed exactly the same principles that I did when I chose and edited nonfiction narratives for my newspaper.1

It was one of those aha! moments, a point of insight that suddenly brought together ideas I’d never fully connected. I was experienced at editing nonfiction newspaper and magazine narratives, and I knew that many of the same storytelling principles applied to both. But the insights Ira Glass gave me about storytelling for radio made me realize that similar principles of scene-setting, characterization, and plotting apply no matter where writers tell their stories. The same interesting psychological complication can propel a character through a newspaper series, a radio documentary, a magazine article, a book, a film, a podcast, or an online presentation.

I’m not sure how I’d missed that larger point, but the evidence for it was all around me. I was, for example, perfectly aware of Mark Bowden’s experience at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Bowden, a police reporter, wrote a multipart newspaper series on the American military incursion in Somalia. The internet version of the series attracted nationwide attention, setting the stage for a successful book. Then Ridley Scott turned Black Hawk Down into a major motion picture. Bowden himself went on to become a national correspondent for the Atlantic.

Once I tumbled to the idea that common principles of storytelling apply regardless of medium, I noticed examples everywhere. Newspaper writers such as David Simon, a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun, used the material cops collected on their beats to produce books that shape-shifted into other media. Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets morphed into Homicide: Life on the Street, a hit television show. That, in turn, led to a series of realistic TV series, ranging from The Wire, to Treme, to The Deuce. Best-selling nonfiction books such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit all became successful Hollywood films and launched their authors on storytelling careers that rolled out a library bulging with additional books and films.

I’d seen the same thing happen with long-form newspaper narratives I edited at the Oregonian. Barnes Ellis, a young reporter, teamed up with me on “A Ride through Hell,” the story of an Oregon couple kidnapped by two desperados, and the tale was soon adapted as Captive, a made-for-TV movie starring Joanna Kerns and Barry Bostwick. Tom Hallman wrote an inspiring story about Bill Porter, a disabled salesman. A version appeared in Reader’s Digest. ABC picked the story up for 20/20, and then it reappeared as Door to Door, a TV movie starring William H. Macy.

Clearly, story is story. The same underlying principles apply regardless of where you tell your tale. As Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer winner, says, “All stories have a common set of attributes that are arranged in a certain specific way.”

Anybody who hopes to reach full potential as a storyteller needs to discover those universals. Successful nonfiction storytelling requires a basic understanding of fundamental story theory and the story structures the theory suggests. Ignore them, and you’ll fight a losing battle with human nature. Master them, and you’re on your way to reaching a large and enthusiastic audience in just about any medium.

Story theory began with the Greeks, and we’ve been developing structures consistent with it for millennia. As Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, puts it, “In the twenty-three centuries since Aristotle wrote The Poetics the ‘secrets’ of story have been as public as the library down the street.”

True enough, but that doesn’t mean the secrets of story are widely appreciated or universally practiced. I stumbled through half my career before I found my way to the library and asked for the right books. And over the years I’ve talked with scores of would-be storytellers who were just as lost. They wasted uncounted hours chasing after doomed narrative lines and ignoring topics with huge potential because they didn’t recognize what was passing, unnoticed, right in front of them.

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.

You’ll seldom find every element of story in one slice of reality. But choosing to pursue a narrative isn’t a black-or-white, all-or-nothing, kind of proposition. If you find a situation filled with lots of story elements, you may want to go whole hog, tackling a full-fledged story that, long or short, brings a character through a complete narrative arc. If you have a more limited action line that helps explain an interesting process, you may still have what it takes for a good piece of explanatory journalism. Or a personal essay. Or a vignette. Or maybe you’ll just have enough to drop an anecdote into a more conventional report or news feature.

Or not. If what your audience really wants is unadorned information, straight facts that cut right to the heart of the matter, that’s fine, too. The packaging for a loaf of bread usually carries the baker’s name, a list of ingredients, and not much more.

On the other hand, the wrapper for my favorite bread comes with a two-hundred-word narrative revealing that the baker’s fifteen years in prison “transformed an ex-con into an honest man who is doing his best to make the world a better place . . . one loaf at a time.”

Now, who wouldn’t at least try a loaf of bread with that kind of story behind it?

A STORYTELLING SPECIES

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) showed us that the same deep-seated archetypes lurk in primal stories created by all kinds of cultures. And respected scientific researchers ranging from Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist, to Steven Pinker,2 a linguist, have argued that storytelling has uniformities that suggest an evolutionary basis. Certain systems of organizing information give us an edge, goes the argument, a way of perceiving the world that has helped us survive.

New techniques for analyzing the brain support the notion that we’re hardwired for story. When science writer Stephen Hall created a story in his head during an MRI brain scan, an area the size of a sugar cube lit up in his right frontal lobe. In his report for the New York Times Magazine, Hall labeled that thimbleful of brain, located in the inferior frontal gyrus, “the storytelling area.” It linked with other brain centers, such as the visual cortex. All told, they formed what Hall described as the brain’s “storytelling system.”

Hall’s example hardly qualified as a rigorous scientific study, but it strongly suggested a biology of story. To me, that made perfect sense. The myriad ways we use story to cope with the world make it hard to imagine that narrative isn’t part of our fundamental nature. A legion of brain scientists noticed the same thing. In the twenty years since Stephen Hall slid into that fMRI machine, neurologists, linguists, and other scientists conducted hundreds of studies aimed at exploring how story fits into our nature, what it does for us as a species, and how our biology directs the structure and content of our stories.

Jeremy Hsu recently surveyed that explosion of research and summarized its findings for Scientific American. “Storytelling,” he reported, “is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. . . . People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows, and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.”

The possibility that a biology of story was somehow hardwired into the human brain also would explain research findings that demonstrated that test subjects displayed better grasp of narrative than other forms, that narrative delivered a clearer message to a majority of readers, and that audience members preferred narrative presentations. Research also demonstrated 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.3

Those tantalizing early findings led to an explosion of research activity over the past ten years. (Enter “storytelling brain research” into a Google search and you’ll get over a thousand hits, most citing fairly recent studies.) Among other things, that frenzy of activity has revealed that:

• • Story dominates human existence. “If you start adding up the hours that you spend in imaginary worlds,” Jonathan Gottschall writes, “you get to a pretty astonishing figure. We spend four hours a day watching TV, our children make believe, we spend hours and hours, actually about eight hours per day, lost in daydreams. We dream in stories. When you add all this time up, for me it was a startling conclusion, that humans aren’t really Earthlings. We’re more like citizens of this weird omni-dimensional world called Neverland. We spend most our lives wandering inside imaginary worlds.”
• • Human storytelling has ancient roots. A forty-four-thousand-year-old cave painting discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 2017 showed human-animal hybrids hunting. Maxime Aubert, an Australian archaeologist, says, “This is the oldest rock art in the world and all of the key aspects of modern cognition are there.” He concluded that ability to imagine characters and shape stories fully formed in Sulawesi suggests it “was probably already present in the early modern humans who left Africa and populated the rest of the world.”4
  Or, as Lisa Cron puts it, “Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.”
• • In hunter-gatherer societies, storytelling has clear survival value. Daniel Smith, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College, London, led a rigorous study with the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer tribe. He concluded that storytelling promoted social cooperation, mating success, social status, and sharing, all behaviors with obvious evolutionary benefits.
• • The brain is hardwired for story at an extremely deep level. Even brain-damaged children with IQs ranging between twenty and thirty points can comprehend stories. Daniel Smith says this ability among such children “implies story comprehension is so basic that it survives severe neurological damage.” Smith went on to argue that “the human brain is essentially a narrative device. It runs on stories. The knowledge that we store in the brain, our ‘theory of the world’ is largely in the form of stories.”
• • “Mirror neurons” in the brain echo emotions created by story. In the 1990s Italian researchers discovered that the same areas of monkeys’ brains would light up when they grabbed a nut as when they saw another monkey grab a nut. The brain’s ability to generate true emotion when merely observing emotion-generating events was, researchers concluded, the product of “mirror neurons,” which duplicated the feelings observed in the outside world. the finding unleashed “a flood of mirror neuron research in monkeys and humans.” Marco Iacoboni wrote that movies feel authentic “because mirror neurons in our brains re-create the distress we see on the screen.”5
• • Young children organize their play around storytelling that fits classic narrative forms. Jonathan Gottschall summarizes the research on kids, play, and storytelling by noting that “story is so central to the lives of young children that it comes close to defining their existence.”
• • Character and plot may work together as a story unfolds, but character reigns supreme. Contrary to widespread belief among nonfiction storytellers, the driving force for most audience members is not “what happens next?” but “how will what happens next affect this character I’ve come to care about.”
• • Story is more important to engaging reader interest than writing quality. Lisa Cron looked at the research and concluded that “writing poorly can be far less damaging than you think. That is, if you can tell a story.” A glance at the best-seller lists, which are filled with books by ham-handed and tin-eared writers who are nonetheless great storytellers, confirms the finding.
  It also confirms an opinion two-time Pulitzer-winner Jon Franklin made more than thirty years ago. Franklin argued that writers and editors who devote huge amounts of time to the polishing work at the word, sentence, and paragraph level are missing the chance to make a much bigger impact on readers by focusing on major story elements at the beginning of the writing process.
• • We construct our own identities out of the stories we tell about ourselves. We see our own lives as a kind of narrative, too, which may explain why we’re so fascinated by the narratives of others. Psychologists have studied the way we picture our own life stories. They’ve found, according to the New York Times, that each of us has a kind of internal screenplay, and that “the way we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but also how we behave.”6 Which explains why some psychologists now urge the use of storytelling to reconstruct self-identities in the wake of traumatic brain injuries.7 The notion that we build our self-identity out of stories we tell ourselves has so grabbed the popular imagination that that Jack Goldsmith used it to condemn the way the FBI tapped and recorded his mob-connected stepfather’s phone conversations. As a result of the wiretaps, Goldsmith argued in the Atlantic Monthly, his stepfather was forced to confront the truth of his criminal history, rather than live with the delusions he’d created in his personal stories. The government’s illegal wiretaps, Goldsmith said, did “violence against his [stepfather’s] intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus the power to define and shape his life.”

This small selection of recent research findings confirms that storytelling is even more deeply rooted in our biology than we suspected. Understanding that story has deep foundations in our brains and behavior helps explain why successful storytelling contains so many common elements. Sometimes a finding translates into direct application at the keyboard. (It pays the storyteller, for example, to find topics containing lessons in living that suggest ways of solving common problems.) But more often the research merely teases the storyteller without providing much concrete direction. (When you’re at the keyboard, what value is there in the fact that forty-four thousand years ago humans told stories on the wall of an Indonesian cave?)

Perhaps the most important finding turned up by the recent flurry of research on the biology of storytelling is that two ...