Writing Tools (16 page)

Good work has parts: beginning, middle, and ending. Even writers who achieve a seamless tapestry can point out the invisible stitching. A writer who knows the big parts can name them for the reader, using such markers as subheadings and chapter titles. The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story.

The best way to illustrate this effect is to reveal the big parts of a short and deceptively simple children's song, "Three Blind Mice." Sing the melody in your head. Now try to name the parts. Part one is a simple musical phrase repeated once:

Three blind mice, three blind mice,

Part two builds on that phrase and adds a beat:

See how they run, see how they run!

Part three adds three equal but more complex phrases:

They all ran after the farmer's wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a thing in your life

Part four repeats the first phrase, "three blind mice," closing the song into a tight circle:

As three blind mice?

We remember songs because of their transparent structure: verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, instrumental, verse, chorus. The delightful sounds of songs may veil the mechanics of structure, but the architecture of music becomes perceptible with more careful listening and knowing how to name the parts.

Which leads me to the dreaded O word, the hellmouth of young writers.

Many writers of the old school were required to hand in outlines with drafts of our stories. Such outlines looked something like this:

And so on.

Here was my problem: I could never see far enough ahead to plot what the third part of section C was going to be. I had to write my way to that point; I had to discover what I was going to say. And so, as a survival mechanism, I invented the reverse outline. I would write a full draft of the story and then create the outline. This turned out to be a useful tool: if I could not write the outline from the story, it meant that I could not discern the parts from the whole, revealing problems of organization.

Although I still don't work from a formal outline, I write a plan, usually a few phrases scribbled on a yellow pad. And here's

another tool I learned: an informal plan is nothing more than the Roman numerals required by a formal outline. In other words, my plan helps me see the big parts of the story.

Here's a plan for an obituary of entertainer Ray Bolger, the beloved scarecrow of
The Wizard of Oz:

I. Lead with image and dialogue from
Oz.

II. Great moments in his dance career other than
Oz.

III. His signature song: "Once in Love with Amy."

IV. His youth: how he became a dancer.

V. His television career.

VI. A final image from
Oz.

I constructed this reverse outline from a close reading of Tom Shales's award-winning work in the
Washington Post.

When the story grows to any significant length, the writer should label the parts. If the story evolves into a book, the chapters will have titles. In a newspaper or magazine, the parts may carry subheadlines or subtitles. Writers should write these subtitles themselves —
even if the publisher does not use them.

Here's why: Subtitles will make visible to the busy copyeditor and time-starved reader the big parts of the story. The act of writing them will test the writer's ability to identify and label those parts. And, when well written, these subheads will reveal at a glance the global structure of the piece, indexing the parts, and creating additional points of entry.

In 1994, the courageous American editor Gene Patterson wrote an article for the
St. Petersburg Times
titled "Forged in Battle: The Formative Experience of War." The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Patterson fought in World War II as a young tank platoon leader in Pat-ton's army. His mini-epic begins in medias res, in the middle of things:

I did not want to kill the two German officers when we met by

mistake in the middle of the main street of Gera Bronn.

They somersaulted from their motorcycle when it rounded a corner directly ahead of my column of light armor. They scrambled to their feet, facing me 20 yards in front of the cannon and machine gun muzzles of my lead armored car, and stood momentarily still as deer. The front wheel of their flattened motorcycle spun on in the silence.

This passage introduces a meaty memoir of war. Five strong sub-headlines index the body of the work:

A Man of the 20th Century Lead with the Heaviest Punch From the Georgia Soil Senseless Dying Two Certainties about War

Notice how the reader can predict the structure and content of Patterson's essay from these subtitles alone. They divide the story into its big parts, name them, and make visible a movement of theme, logic, and chronology that readers can perceive and remember.

WORKSHOP

1. Shakespeare's plays are divided into five acts, each divided into scenes. Read a comedy and a tragedy, such as As
You Like It
and
Macbeth,
paying attention to the structure of the play and what Shakespeare tries to accomplish in each of the big parts.

2. Find the longest piece you have written in the last year. Using a pencil, mark it up according to its parts. Now label those parts with headings and subheadings.

3. Over the next month, pay attention to the structure of the fiction you read. Notice the point where you begin to perceive the global structure of the work. After you finish the work, go back and review the chapter titles and their effect on your expectations as a reader.

4. Listening to music helps writers learn the structures of composition. As you listen, see if you can recognize the big parts of songs.

5. For your next story, try working from an informal plan that plots the three to six big parts of the work. Revise the plan if necessary.

Journalists use the word
story
with romantic promiscuity. They think of themselves as the wandering minstrels of the modern world, the tellers of tales, the spinners of yarns. And then, too often, they write dull reports.

Reports need not be dull, nor stories interesting. But the difference between
story
and
report
is crucial to the reader's expectation and the writer's execution. Bits of story — call them
anecdotes
— appear in many reports. But the word
story
has a special meaning, and stories have specific requirements that create predictable effects.

What are the differences between
report
and
story,
and how can the writer use them to strategic advantage?

A wonderful scholar named Louise Rosenblatt argued that readers read for two reasons: information and experience. There's the difference. Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there.

A report sounds like this: The school board will meet Thursday to discuss the new desegregation plan.

A story sounds like this: Wanda Mitchell shook her fist at the school board chairman, tears streaming down her face.

The tool sets to create reports and stories also differ. The famous "Five Ws and
H"
have helped writers gather and convey information with the reader's interests in mind.
Who, what, where,
and
when
appear as the most common elements of information. The
why
and the
how
are harder to achieve. Used in reports, these pieces of information are frozen in time, fixed so readers can scan and understand.

Watch what happens when we unfreeze them, when information is transformed into narrative. In this process of conversion:

Who
becomes
Character.

What
becomes
Action.
(What happened.)

Where
becomes
Setting.

When
becomes
Chronology.

Why
becomes
Cause
or
Motive.

How
becomes
Process.
(How it happened.)

The writer must figure out whether a project requires the crafting of a report, a story, or some combination of the two. Author and teacher Jon Franklin argues that stories require rising and falling actions, complications, points of insight, and resolutions. While novelists invent these movements in a story, nonfiction writers must report them. In the 1960s Tom Wolfe demonstrated how to match truthful reporting with fictional techniques, such as setting scenes, finding details of character, capturing dialogue, and shifting points of view.

Narrative requires a story and a storyteller. In this scene from
Reading Lolita in Tehran,
Azar Nafisi narrates a surprising moment in one of her secret literature classes:

I ask, Who can dance Persian-style? Everyone looks at Sanaz. She is shy and refuses to dance. We start to tease her and goad her on, and form a circle around her. As she begins to move, selfconsciously at first, we start to clap and murmur a song. Nassrin cautions us to be quieter. Sanaz begins shyly, taking graceful little steps, moving her waist with a lusty grace. As we laugh and joke more, she becomes bolder; she starts to move her head from side to side, and every part of her body asserts itself, vying for attention with the other parts. Her body quivers as she takes her small steps and dances with her fingers and her hands. A special look has appeared on her face. It is daring and beckoning, designed to attract, to pull in, but at the same time it retracts and refracts with a power she loses as soon as she stops dancing.

This passage moves me every time I read it. I may be a stranger to the author's gender, religion, culture, country, and political system, yet for the seconds it takes to read these words I am transported. She puts me in that room, where I stand in that circle of Iranian women, seduced by the dancer's charms.

South African writer Henk Rossouw combines story and report to good effect. With a single sentence he moves us to another time and place, and to a desperate experience:

When Akallo Grace Grail woke up, she could feel the cool night air on her face, but she couldn't move. Most of her body was under sand. Where was her gun? If she'd lost it, her commander in the Lord's Resistance Army would beat her up. As she dragged herself out of the shallow grave, everything that had happened that day came back to her.