Writing Tools (23 page)

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 woman 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.