Tag: storytelling

Create a Great Setting for a Story: A Small, Knowable Place

Every great story contains a bunch of basic elements–complex characaters who offer glimpses into the variety of human motivation, action that reveals motivation and conflict, details that offer glimpses that most readers would miss, and more.

To many, the setting offers the container of characters and action. To others, the setting is like an all-present “extra,” which affects the story as much as any character or conflict.

The best advice I ever got on setting came from Mark Kramer, the gifted author and former curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. The trick, he said, is to set the action in “small, knowable” spaces.

Sitcoms succeed when they do just that. Think of the TV-oriented living room in All in the Family or the art/antique-oriented living room of Cosby. Think of the regional branch of Dunder-Mifflin in The Office. Think of the snazzy swingles apartment in Friends.  You get the idea.

The Advantages of Small, Knowable Places

Small, knowable places offer a number of advantages for description:

‘Put Three People in a Room’: The filmmaker Martin Scorsese was once asked for advice on how to write a good scene. His answer: “Put three people in a room.” When you put two or three people in a limited space, you can see their dynamics without complication.

Three people might include two characters plus the knowledge of a third character or issue. In Thomas’s Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, for example, Hannibal Lecter confronts Clarice Sterling with her demons. The setting is Hannibal’s jail cell and the area just outside the cell. The cell contains spare, bolted-down furniture. On the walls are Hannibal’s detailed drawings of European scenes, done in charcoal and crayon. Outside the cell is Clarice and a chair. The cell’s bars separate the two, but the bars seem to disappear as Hannibal baits Clarice about her tragedies and fears.

Contain the Story to Prevent Narrative Sprawl: The storyteller’s ultimate job is the same as a magician’s–to direct the attention of the audience. The storyteller and magician both say, in effect: “Look here, not there.”

The best way to say “here, not there” is to keep “there” out of the picture. So zoom in on the small place and moments that you want to audience to see. Keep the other stuff offstage.

Focusing on “here, not there” can also ratchet the tension. Consider Stephen King’s creepy novel and film Misery. The first tense moment comes when Paul Sheldon drives off the road in the middle of a snowstorm. We see him, alone in his car, and wonder: Will anyone rescue him? Being stuck in that car with Paul–“here, not there”–gets our minds racing about what’s happening out there.

The answer finally comes in the person of Annie Wilkes, a psychopathic fan who takes him home. The bed where Annie puts Paul will be the “small, knowable space” for most of the book. The tension rises as we realize Annie’s sick obsessions. All the time, we wonder: Will anyone figure out that Paul’s missing? Will anyone come knocking on Annie’s door? When that time comes … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Avoiding Distractions: In a small space, the focus is on the characters and their struggle. You can’t get distracted when you place two or three charactersm in a room and have them interact.

Avoiding distractions is especially important when people have their “come to Jesus” moments–when they have to make hard decisions about their values and behavior. It’s hard to make decisions when you;re surrounded by a clamor of competing demands. How many times have you faced a tough call and had to go to a quiet place to focus on the decision?

Give your character a small, knowlable space to act, speak, listen, hesitate, and debate, without distractions. You will be amazed how much it supercharges the other scenes in the story.

Showing the Character Struggle Against Limits: In a small place, you can show the characters struggling against their limits. Most people’s limits are psychological, and a small place provides a great way to isolate those limits.

Imagine, for example, someone getting news of a great tragedy in a small place, like an office. How does she react? First, she has to absorb the news. To gain privacy, she closes the blinds that separate her office from the rest of the workplace. Then zoom in and capture her emotions. Her only connection to the outside world is her phone, so you can focus on how she decides whether to call someone. Finally, you can show her getting ready to leave. Does she try to pull herself together, to pretend nothing’s wrong when she walks through the office door?

We can pay close attention to the character when she’s in a limited space. We don’t get distracted by other people or by the swirl of activity nearby.

Symbolizing Some Larger Aspect of the Story: Small spaces are often rich with clues about someone’s character. On the wall are pictures and mementos from the past, indicators of friends, family, jobs, hobbies. Some artifacts are purposeful–that is, the owner of the space put them there for comfort or inspiration, as well as their usefulness. Other artifacts are accidental leftovers–that is, the owner of the space did not think much about them, but they still reveal the character’s habits and ways of life.

A small space reveals loads about the values and desires of the characters. People inhabit their small spaces differently. Some decorate it, some don’t. Some are elegant, some aren’t. Some display their allegiances (like a school or company or team), some don’t. Show show off their knowledge (with jammed bookshelves) and others their wealth (expensive art and furniture).

Revealing Contrasts Between Characters: In a small space, you can emphasize the contrasts between characters. In a larger space, the characters can look the same. In a larger space, with lots of characters, we see those characters as abstractions. But when we get close up, we see them as one-of-a-kind individuals.

When you see a crowd coming in or out of a subway, everyone looks the same–especially from a distance. It’s just one big mass of humanity. Then when you get inside the train, you can pause and look around. You notice how different everyone is–the Wall Street trader, the tattooed student, the dolled-up department store clerk, the kids on their way to school, the construction workers, and so on. The small space–and the way it suspends time–gives you a chance to look closely.

Revealing Contrasts Inside and Outside the Small, Knowable Place: People act differently depending on the location. A man acts differently in the small, knowable space of his home than in the small, knowable space of his office or club or parents’ home. We can see these people’s different “sides” in bold relief when we put them in different places.

Contrasts, by the way, lie at the very core of great stories. In every great story, characters struggle to reconcile the different demands placed by their different worlds. At home, a parent needs to care for partners and kids; in the neighborhood, she needs to develop networks of friends and helpers; in the office, she needs to work efficiently and professionally, with a minimum (usually) of intimacy. And so on. Place not only reveals character; it also shapes character.

Creating an Extra Character in the Story: In a sense, the setting is the “extra” character of your story, creating possibilities and barriers, just like the flesh-and-blood characters. We see this in sports all the time. Classic venues like Fenway Park (home of the Red Sox) or Bryant-Denny Stadium (home of the Crimson Tide) are packed with attentive, fervent, and loud fans. Some venues give their teams a real home field advantage.

When I lived in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time. The atmosphere was electric, even in a mid-season game where the Sox were losing 7-2. If a Sox player got a hit, the crowd would come to life. Two or three hits and the place had a World Series atmosphere. Sox players fed off the energy. Home gives almost everyone an edge. From 1871 to 2015, teams did better at home in all but one year. The advantage is even greater in basketball, where refs making tough calls get swayed by the crowds.

All this raises a question: How can we find the right small space to focus our action. To begin, let’s look at one of the greatest TV series ever–AMC’s Mad Men.

Case Study: The Elevator in Mad Men

Mad Men set 59 scenes in elevators in the first 85 episodes. Why? Well, for starters, it’s hard to find a cheaper set.  Also, elevators offer terrific transitional spaces; people come and go, introducing or concluding scenes, in elevators. Elevators are public places–but when the door closes, they can turn in to private spaces.

But also, as Mark Kramer pointed out, elevators clear away all the distractions so you can focus on the characters, conflicts, and tension. “It’s the simplest of sets,” the Journal‘s John Jurgensen writes.

Two of the great Mad Men scenes focus on the status of women in 1960s America.

The first scene of the whole series features Peggy, a young woman from Brooklyn headed to her first day of work at Sterling Cooper. She stands, stiffly, as three men leer and cackle. “Can you take the long way up?” one tells the black elevator operator. “I am really enjoying the view here.” It’s a perfect preview of the show’s examination of the system of class and power in 1960. This simple scene also introduces us to the characters we will see developed over the next several years.  We get a good glimpse at their characters–and their room for growth–right away.

The longest ride comes when Don and his former mistress stand together, silently, for 43 seconds in Season 6. Without a word, the two contemplate their failed relationship–and the audience contemplates everything that came before. It was a perfect coda to the story. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says: “I made sure that I had built enough time into the episode that I could let this thing play out to its excruciating end.”

An even better scene comes in “The Beautiful Girls,” from the fourth season. In that episode, Don’s daughter Sally arrives unannounced at the firm, where Don’s secretary Megan comforts her; Peggy meets a Village Voice journalist named Abe, who insults her in a discussion of woman’s place in society; Joan learns that her husband is being sent off to Vietnam, then has a tryst with Roger (which will produce a child) after getting mugged in an alley; Don’s affair with Faye reveals the splits in their personal and professional lives; and, for good measure, the matronly secretary Miss Blankenship dies at her desk.

What better way to cap the scene than to show the convergence of the three main survivors–Joan, Peggy, and Faye–standing in the elevator, silently, after an exhausting day?

These few moments allow us to absorb the whirlwind of activity that happened before. The scene also symbolizes how women–and all of us–are “alone together” to face life’s challenges.

Other Great Small, Knowable Places

So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?

Let’s consider a half-dozen examples from literature:

The ship in Homer’s The Odyssey: At the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus began his long journey home to Ithaca. Odysseus and his crew get off the boat, from time to time. But the ship centers the story.

My favorite scene occurs when the ship approaches the Sirens. It poses a life-or-death challenge. On the one hand, Odysseus wants to hear the transcendent voices of the Sirens. On the other hand, if he listens to the Sirens, he will get seduced and chase them, abandoning his men. At the advice of Circe, Odysseus followes a clever solution. He will have his men lash him to the mast so he can listen without the danger of leaving; meanwhile, his men will fill their ears with wax and pilot the ship beyond the Sirens.

The raft in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: This is the ultimate modern road trip. Huck and Jim escape the constraints of their hope to find adventure on the Mississippi River. Huck and Jim confront numerous dangers along the way–pirates, bounty hunters, weather–but also get to know each other. Huck deepens his appreciation for Jim as a full human being. Quiet time on the raft, freedom from the noise of “sivilization,” allow Huck to get to know his companion.

“There warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” Huck says. “Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” The raft gives them freedom–but freedom of a certain sort. Huck and Jim can barely steer the raft. The currents of the river take charge. That’s a profound lesson in a world where “sivilization” tries to control every thought and movement.

The boat in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago is a pathetic old man with the story begins. After going 84 days without catching a fish, he is considered “salao” by the townspeople. The boy is banned by her family from joining the old man. Then Santiago catches a great marlin and the struggle begins. After three days of struggle, Santiago develops a bond with the fish. But he finally hauls him in and straps it to the side of the boat. Now he must fight off the sharks who smell the marlin’s blood.

Hell in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: No story does such a great job containing a world of emotions in a such small, knowable place. That small space is Hell, and it focuses all the action and dialogue on the characters and their inner lives. Could Sartre have used a larger, sprawling setting? Could he have shown the characters before their death and assignment to Hell? Could he have shown the moments in their lives when they earned eternal damnation?

In this spare place, even the smallest details standout–like the bare lightbulb, which is always on, preventing the three characters from getting decent sleep or escaping the others’ gazes. Such a detail would have gotten lost in a more complex space. But here, it stands out and reveals much about the characters and their situation.

Maybe. But Sartre’s purpose was to reveal the characters–and, especially, his point that “Hell is other people.”

The motorcycle in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Management: Over 17 days, the author traveled by motorcycle from Minnesota to California. The time on the bike allowed him the opoirtunity to take in lots of sites and to muse philosophically. The bike both contains the story and allows contact with the outside, as Pirsig explains:

In a car you’re always in a compartment. … You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

The bike is also an artifact, an object worthy of attention. The bike must be maintained. When something breaks, Pirsig has to fix it. That requires skill. So is it hard? “Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.” That’s the ultimate lesson of this story of a man, his son, and their bikes.

The room in Emma Donaghue’s Room: A woman is held captive in a small room by a kidnapper, where she raises her young boy. To protect her son from the loss of innocence, she pretends the room is a wonderland. Together, mother and son watch the seasons come and go from a small window. They watch TV and read stories. This isolation is cruel but the mother uses it as an opportunity to love and teach her child.

The room offers a fresh perspective on the comings and goings of ordinary life.

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. … I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. … I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

To avoid your story getting spread around, like butter, concentrate the action in small, knowable spaces.

How Do You Decide on Your Small, Knowable Place?

So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society? The limits are endless:

• A room, any room, in a house or apartment.
• A bench or other contained space in an open area, like a park or a plaza.
• An office–especially a small corner or nook.
• A locker room for a sports team.
• A deserted island.
• A classroom, lunchroom, or detention room of a school.

You get the idea. Any place is OK as long as it’s small and contained. And when you have a huge place–think, for example, of the Grand Canyon–be sure to zoom in on a small piece of that space. From that perch, you can contemplate bigger things. Danny Glover explains this idea (in a small space, by the way) to Kevin Kline in the film Grand Canyon.

 

To contemplate big ideas, then, locate yourself in a small space. Use that small space as a perch, a place to get intimate.

The Ultimate Benefit: Plot Your Story With Small, Knowable Places

So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?

Alfred Hitchcock, cinema’s master of suspense, sometimes plotted his films by first describing places. Once he identified the locales, he developed characters and storylines to fit those places. Hitch explains:

Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do. But here’s an idea: select the background first, then the action. It might be a race or might be anything at all. Sometimes I select a dozen different events and shape them into a plot. Finally—and this is just the opposite of what is usually done—select your character to motivate the whole of the above.

Hitchcock built The Man Who Knew Too Much this way:

I would like to do a film that starts in the winter sporting season. I would like to come to the East End of London. I would like to go to a chapel and to a symphony concert at the Albert Hall in London.

Once he had a setting, Hitchcock figured out which characters belonged and what they would do in that setting.

Whether or not you use Hitchcock’s approach, survey all the possible scenes as you develop your story. If you write about sports, consider the stadium, practice fields, locker rooms, bars, and after-hours nightclubs. If you write about the civil rights movement, start with the streets, lunch counters, churches, schools, and jails. If you write the life of a high school, think about classrooms, corridors and stairwells, pizza joints and Saturday night party spots.

Before you go . . .
     • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.
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Daniel Coyle on the Talent Code, Shifting Between Story and Summary, and Chasing the Big Whale

Dan Coyle is a master of three realms in writing–nonfiction narrative, memoir, and analysis.

A contributing editor at Outside magazine, Coyle has tracked the long-running doping scandal in bicycle racing–with both an investigative work (Lance Armstrong’s War) and a ghosted narrative with Tyler Hamilton (The Secret Race), winner of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize. Coyle has also written about the journey of a Little League team in the Chicago projects (Hardball).

In recent years he has become an expert on expertise. His book The Talent Code uses case studies from around the world–Curacao, Brazil, Dallas, and more–to identify how people become experts in fields as diverse as baseball, soccer, classical music, and singing. Based on his expertise of talent development, Coyle serves as a consultant to the Cleveland Indians.

If that book focuses on the best ways for individuals to develop their talent, The Culture Code (released in January), shows how communities like the San Antonio Spurs and the Navy SEAL Team create the shared norms and practices that enable all to thrive.

Coyle and his family live in Cleveland during the school year and Alaska in the summer.

Charlie Euchner: How did you start as a writer? Who were some of your influences?

Daniel Coyle: This will sound unpoetic, but the truth is, it all started with Sports Illustrated. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I used to devour the magazine when it showed up each week in our mailbox. I was drawn by the glamor of sports, but it was the stories by Frank Deford, Gary Smith, and John Underwood that hooked me. Their ability to capture these events and these people on the page struck me as pure magic. A gateway drug, you might say.

From there it as on to the heavier stuff. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, took the top of my head off, particularly in the way he made you see the world in a completely new way. This seemed to me a kind of transformative superpower, and it still seems that way.

CE: Your two “code” books — The Talent Code and The Culture Code — investigate the process by which people master skills and build vibrant cultures. The Talent Code turns on the process of “deliberate practice,” which can be used to master the core skills of any activity. The Culture Code focuses on the habits and mindsets that foster open, supportive, and creative communities. Did these books cause you to work differently as a researcher and writer?

DC: Overall, I’d say that they helped me lose a self-consciousness that is part and parcel of being a young writer. For example: early on, I was absolutely allergic to appearing in my work. I sought to operate purely as a narrative camera, never injecting myself or my point of view into the story. But the more you understand the skill and the relationships at the heart of this profession, the more you realize that our job — our true skill — is to serve the reader, not to go into contortions for the sake of seeming smart. In other words, they helped me realize that this writing game is not all about me.

CE: I have noticed that great writing “yo-yos,” or moves back and forth, between scenes and summaries. You describe scenes to show us real flesh-and-blood people struggling with difficult challenges. Then you shift to background information, to give the reader context and to explain complex ideas. The scenes provide energy and intrigue; the summaries provide essential information to make sense of things. Your two “code” books are models of yo-yoing. How conscious are you about this? And what tips can you offer for the rest of us to do it better?  

DC: That’s exactly how I think of it. You show the surface in the form of a scene, and then you show the inner workings, the principles, the web of deeper connections.  In looking for a scene, you are essentially looking for a great mystery. Great mysteries have a set of qualities: they often good characters who want something. So you look for that — especially the wanting.

For the summary, you need to do a deeper dive — sometimes into history, sometimes into science — to illuminate the systems and connections beneath the story in a new way. The key there is not mystery, but surprise. A good summary section flips your world a little bit — and thus makes you see the original story in a new way.

CE: Twice you have written Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion who was sanctioned for doping in 2012 after years of denying it. Armstrong was suspected of doping — more than suspected, really — for many years. In your books Lance Armstrong’s War and The Secret Race (written with Armstrong’s onetime teammate Tyler Hamilton), you take many routes to the truth. You gather lots of facts, many related and many not related, and accumulate a detailed dossier. When you are dealing with such a secretive and combative subject, how do you discover the essential facts of the story?

DC: It’s interesting to see the two books as a combination. In the first book, because of legal reasons (basically, Armstrong threatening to sue) I had to work around those barriers, even though I had a strong sense that something was going on. In the second book, with Tyler, we could go fully into the secret world, and show everything. On my first journey into that world, I had a lot of off-the-record conversations that I couldn’t use in the book, but which contributed to my POV that this was a really dirty sport. Perhaps as a result, many readers read it and presumed that Armstrong was doping (even though, as was stipulated, nothing had ever been proven).

The second book was like a CIA project. At the time, the federal investigation was unfolding, and there were still threats to Tyler, both legal and otherwise. So Tyler and I went to elaborate lengths to conceal our meetings and conversations. But because of that, we were able to communicate freely and safely, and it led to the book’s unparalleled truthfulness.

CE: Can you identify two or three simple tricks that help you research, interview, or write better?

DC: Build yourself a system for taking and organizing notes. Being able to locate what you’ve written is massively important, especially in nonfiction. It doesn’t matter what the system is, but you should have one.

Interview your key subjects last. I recall someone telling me to interview like a shark: first you circle them for a long time, then you go in. That sounds a little carnivorous for my taste, but it’s true: by talking to everyone around them first, you will increase the leverage, impact, and awareness of each interaction you have with your key subjects.

Practice the craft of outlining. There are times when you should just start writing on a blank page — but there are far more times when it’s useful to spend time going through your material and organizing the story of it all.

End your day by stopping in the middle of a good sentence. That way it’s easier to pick up the following day.

Strive to write the headline/title/subtitle first and invest a lot of time until it’s exactly right. It’s a north star that will guide all your efforts.

Before you go . . .
     • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.
     • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here.
     • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.

Katie Hafner on Writing Technical Writing, Intimate Stories, and the Hard Work of Research

Katie Hafner has spent most of her career in journalism, writing about tech and health care for The New York Times; she has also written extensively for Newsweek and BusinessWeek, among other publications. She is also the author of books on a wide range of subjects.

Most recently, Hafner published Mother Daughter Me, a memoir of three generations of women living together under one roof. At the beginning, Hafner hoped the time together would help resolve old family conflicts like her mother’s divorce, neglect, drinking, and frequent moves. The book is honest and raw and testament to the idea that what doesn’t break, develops a new kind of resilience.

Hafner’s other books explore the origins of the Internet (Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, with Matthew Lyon), computer hackers (Cyberpunk, with John Markoff), German reunification (The House at the Bridge), and the pianist Glenn Gould (A Romance on Three Legs).

For more on her work, visit katiehafner.com.

Charlie Euchner: Over your career, you have spent a lot of time covering tech. But you have also explored some intimate topics, like your relationships with your mother and daughter and the death of your husband. 

Katie Hafner: The vast majority of my writing has been journalistic – not in the least personal — with the exception of my memoir, Mother Daughter Me, and my open letter to Sheryl Sandberg, following the death of her husband. While working on the memoir, I was still doing my straight-ahead journalism, and I’m actually currently working on a novel while also doing stories for The New York Times. I’m not sure that one really helps the other, except that it’s nice to get a break from each. The journalism I do these days — writing about healthcare, with a focus on the elderly — can get get very intense, so it’s nice to go to a different place on a regular basis. Then again, writing memoirs and fiction gets very lonely, so it’s nice to crawl out of that little isolation chamber on a regular basis.

CE: When you delve into a long work like A Romance on Three Legs, or your other books, how do you do it? What’s the process? Besides writing something comprehensive about a topic, how do you spot the details and moments that give your writing something special? 

KF: Well, when you’re writing a book of non-fiction, you really have to let the topic become your Magnificent Obsession. When I worked on The House at the Bridge, my book about Germany, I lived, ate, and breathed post-reunification Germany. I drove a Trabant, one of those two-stroke-engine cars people in the former East Germany waited 20 years to get. With A Romance on Three Legs, I immersed myself in everything Glenn Gould/Steinway for several years, spending a great deal of time at the Gould archives in Ottawa. I really love doing that. Nothing gives me more pleasure than feeling like I know a topic inside and out. And, since journalists get to move from topic to topic, I always get deeply curious about the next new thing. The trick is finding just the right subject in which to immerse yourself. It must be a terrible thing to be bored by the topic you’re writing about.

CE: The hardest and most important thing for all writers is to find a way to be honest and unsparing. That, I think, you achieved in Mother Daughter Me. You dive into the difficulties of your relationships with rare candor, allowing yourself to be exposed as you explore the complexities of family relationships. How do you think about that? 

KF: Unless a writer is honest – particularly about herself – the reader will lose patience, and trust, and eventually interest. Readers aren’t stupid, and they can smell a dodgy narrator from fifty paces. There were moments, when my mother was living with my daughter and me, when I was just terrible to her. And I tried to own up to that as much as possible.

Then there are the more distant memories, some of which are, unfortunately, etched permanently in my mind. Then again, don’t forget that this memoir reflects my recollection of how things happened, and memories can be tricky things. So I consulted with my sister quite a bit when it came to memories of our mother and her periods of drinking too heavily. My sister was extremely detailed in her descriptions. Her memory was razor-sharp.

This brings me to the topic of honesty and “essential truth” versus accuracy. There’s one scene in the beginning of Mother Daughter Me where my mother is the only person in the car with me during a long drive, from San Diego to San Francisco. In reality, someone else who shows up later in the book was in the car as well. In the first draft, I had him in the car, but my editor at Random House thought that was too much in the way of characters to introduce for the beginning of the book. I said to her, “But he was there, and did most of the driving.” To which she said something interesting. She said that if it did not violate the essential truth of the scene (i.e. picking up my mother in San Diego and bringing her to San Francisco to live with my daughter and me), it wasn’t absolutely necessary to have him be in the car.

But here’s the bottom line: My mother disagreed strongly with much of my account, which in some places is quite raw. After the book came out, she rejected me and took actions that inflicted the maximum possible pain on me. Not a happy ending.

CE: In addition to writing at all levels–newspapers, magazines, books–you also have taught writing at Cal-Berkeley. What are the common challenges of writing and teaching? And how are they radically different? In what ways has teaching taught you about the writing process? Did it expose any of your own challenges–and give you ideas to address them?

KF: I’ve taught both journalism and memoir writing, and they are very different beasts. Journalism is a two-limbed discipline: there is the reporting of a story, then the writing. Students tend to be better at one than the other (much as professional reporters are). So I try to help nurture the weaker limb.

I also teach an annual week-long memoir writing workshop at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur. It’s one of the most enjoyable weeks of my year, and also one of the most exhausting. People come to you with their heart (in the form of an extremely personal, often painful life story) in their hands, and you have to be very respectful of that. At the same time, I make it clear that I am not a therapist, I am a writing instructor. Once they understand that, we get down to the business of giving shape and voice to their stories.

I am not one for whom writing has ever come easily, and when I tell students this, it seems to help them a lot with their own writing struggles.

At the same time, I tell students that in order to write, you must read and read, and then read some more. Read fiction, memoirs, non-fiction, biographies, and – above all – poetry. I’m not saying read tough stuff. There’s a lot of Dickens I’ll never be able to get through, and definitely not James Joyce’s Ulysses, or any Proust for that matter. But I adore Angle of Repose and To Kill a Mockingbird and I Capture the Castle, pretty much anything by Anne Tyler, much of Ann Patchett, and all of Joan Didion’s nonfiction. In short, there is no way to become a writer without exposure to the masters. Surgeons don’t just start cutting people open. They watch and watch, see how it’s done, and then they do it themselves. To wit: I live just three hours north of Esalen, so I drive there, and pile about 50 books and a sheaf of poems into my car, and set up a lending library for the week in the workshop room.

CE: Writing, I am sure you agree, is a craft. It’s about building skills and combining them to create a durable and pleasing product. What specific advice have you gotten to hone your specific skills? Can you offer one or two “tricks of the trade” that helps you to carry off projects?  

KF: When writing my first nonfiction book, I made myself write nonstop, without getting up from my chair, for a certain amount of time, even if it was just 20 minutes. I pretended I was on a journalism deadline (when, in fact, the deadline was a year away). Then, after those 20 minutes had passed, I gave myself a five-minute break in which I could do anything I wanted, as long as I got up from my chair: I could go to the bathroom; eat a bologna sandwich; water the plants; dance a jig.

I’m writing fiction now, which terrifies me. So I feel like I have to write in a very confined space. I take 4-by-6 index cards and roll them into – yes — a typewriter, and fill up the cards, one by one. If I don’t have my typewriter with me, I fill virtual index cards in the notes app on my iPhone. I might come away with just 50 words but feel like I’ve just written War and Peace. That’s how hard fiction is for me.

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John McPhee’s Step-By-Step Approach to Narrative Nonfiction

No one in our time has contributed more to nonfiction narrative–stories that are true–than John McPhee. And he has lessons to teach.

McPhee is the writer for The New Yorker and creative writing professor at Princeton University. His books include the Pulitzer-Prize winning Annals of the Former World (a trilogy on geology and geologists), A Sense of Where You Are (about Bill Bradley as a basketball star at Princeton), Levels of the Game (about a classic tennis match between Arthur Ash and Clark Graebler), The Pine Barrens (about the forests of central New Jersey), Encounters with the Archdruid (about three wilderness areas), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (about a New Hampshire craftsman), The Control of Nature (three stories about man’s battle with the natural world), Uncommon Carriers (about water freight), and many more.

His students include David Remnick (Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor of The New Yorker), Richard Stengel (managing editor of Time), Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal and other works), Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and other books), Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), Tim Ferriss (best-selling author and self-hacking guru), Jennifer Weiner (author of Good In Bed and other novels), and many more.

So McPhee knows writing. And, lucky for us, he lays out his techniques in Draft No. 4, part memoir and part writing manual. here are some of the highlights:

1. Selecting and Framing Topics

At the beginning of Draft No. 4, McPhee describes his random way of selecting topics. After years of writing straight profiles for Time and The New Yorker, McPhee decided to profile two people. “Then who?” he asked himself. “What two people?” He considered various pairs who had to work together to achieve their own aims–the actor and director, the architect and client, the dancer and choreographer, the pitcher and manager. Then, randomly, he watched a 1968 semifinal match of the U.S. Open. Something about the players–Arthur Ashe and Clark Grabner–intrigued him. So he pursued it. The result was Levels of the Game, which became the model for analytic sportswriting.

With a dual portrait in the bag, McPhee decided to create a portrait of four people. But how do you organize a fourplex portrait? McPhee decided to identify one main character and show how that character interacts with three others. The lead character, first among equals, would give the piece a unity; the three other characters would reveal a wider range of perspectives and personalities. McPhee pictured his scheme like this:

ABC
D

McPhee decided to write something about the emerging environmental movement. Before finding Characters A, B, and C, he had to find Character D. After casting around for an Aldo Leopold type, he discovered David Brower of the Sierra Club. Now, who could be Dominy’s antagonist? Soon enough he found Floyd Dominy, the U.S. commissioner of reclamation, who had clashed repeatedly with Brower. “I can’t talk to Brower because he’s so goddamned ridiculous,” Dominy told McPhee. So, McPhee said, would you be willing to get on a rubber raft going down the Colorado River with him? “Hell, yes!” Dominy said. With those two characters lined up, McPhee went in search of two more.

Once McPhee finished that piece, which became Encounters With the Archdruid, he continued his quest for more complex portrait structures. “So, at the risk of getting into an exponential pathology,” McPhee writes, “I started to think of a sequence of six profiles in which a seventh party would appear in a minor way in the first, appear in a greater way in the second,” and so on.

McPhee has lots of interests–the environment, sports, politics, technology, the labor process–but they followed his desire to master various structures of writing. He decided how to write before he decided what to write about. Which, of course, is completely backward.

Or is it? As McPhee notes, “The Raven” originated not in Edgar Alan Poe’s fascination with a man’s suffering over lost love but, rather, Poe’s desire to use a one-word refrain with a long “o” sound. So the origin of the poem was the famous refrain: “Nevermore.” With that word in place, Poe had to figure out who would say “Nevermore,” over and over. For that role he selected a raven, speaking to the distraught man.

Alfred Hitchcock did something similar. When brainstorming a film, he identified places he wanted to shoot. So he decided to shoot a scene at the face of Mount Rushmore. After that location, he decided to use a vast farm as a scene. With those and other scenes in his lineup, he had to decide what would happen there. The result, eventually, was the film North By Northwest.  Another time, he decided he wanted to shoot scenes at a London chapel and at the Royal Albert Hall. Those scenes eventually played leading roles, if you will, in The Man Who Knew Too Much. “Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do,” Hitchcock said. Maybe, maybe not. But he did it and it worked.

Whatever the process, the writer starts with a blank slate. The possibilities are as broad as the writer’s imagination and ability to explore. But once he makes a fateful decision–once he picks this structure instead of that structure, this scene instead of that scene, this character instead of that character–the possibilities narrow. Every decision not only excludes certain possibilities, it also increases the likelihood of others.

2. Narrowing Ideas

That’s when things get interesting. Once McPhee picked Floyd Dominy for his four-person portrait, he had to seek out the ideas, events, characters, and conflicts that would make it work. Every decision narrowed his scope. Every decision drove McPhee toward more and more specific topics. Before long he was on that Colorado River with his four main characters, discovering what their time together, on the river, revealed about their character and their causes.

Now we are in the heart of the writing process, which mostly happens before the author has written a single word–research. The author must go out and gather as much information as possible. Inevitably, he will gather far more than he can ever consider using–ten times more, at least. Out of all that information, the author will begin to understand his subject. He will begin to convey impressions about who, what, when, where, and why. Paraphrasing Cary Grant, McPhee tells his students that “a thousand details add up to one impression.”

The author makes countless decisions about what to consider and what to ignore. More-or-less random decisions (focusing on one character or two or four or six characters) give way to decisions about specific people, things, places, events, and ideas. The author is always asking himself: This or that? And: Then what? The materials start to fill notebooks, audio files, picture files. The process develops momentum. Faulkner once said:

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Faulkner was working from his imagination. Nonfiction writers like McPhee draw from their piles of notes. Once they have enough material, they start, like Faulkner, to chase their characters and putting them into actual scenes, summaries, descriptions, and analyses.

3. Research and Interviewing

Before you write a word, you need to gather information, from books and websites, observation and interviewing, daydreaming and structured brainstorming. Then you sort and select.

Research involves not only library/Internet research, but also getting out into the field to observe the real world. That process raises the anthropologist’s dilemma. When you show up to observe people, your presence can affect people’s behavior:

As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spells out the secrets of the secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.

Never worry about looking smart to the interviewee. What matters is getting information, not looking good. “Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box?” McPhee asks.

4. Getting Words on Paper

Everyone, at one time or another, faces the dread of an empty screen with no ideas. McPhee offers a familiar solution: Forget you’re a writer and pretend you’re just an ordinary person trying to explain a topic to a friend or loved one.

For six, seven, 10 hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere. … What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about that block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you were not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine, you whimper, you outline your problem, and you mentioned that the bear has 55-inch waist and a neck more than 30 inches around but could run nose to nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rest 14 hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining and just keep the bear.

Start, then, by venting. Forget about what you want to say. You explain what you would write about if you could. In that process, the words start to flow. The words are not perfect, mind you. But you manage to get words on paper. “Just stay at it,” McPhee says. “Perseverance will change things.”

The trick is to melt the frozen mind. If you have done the research, you have surely something to say. If you’re scared, for whatever reason, your knowledge and insights are out of reach — but they’re never too far below the surface. You can coax them to the surface, sooner or later.

“The mind is working all the time,” McPhee says. “You may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it 24 hours a day – yes, while you sleep – but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until this exists, writing has not really begun.”

To write even a short piece — say, 1,200 to 1,500 words, the length of a typical college paper — requires hundreds of choices, as McPhee notes:

Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than 1 million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: if something interests you, it goes – if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you got.

Whatever you do, get something down on paper. Don’t even think of judging whether it’s good or not.

How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists? And unless you can identify what is not succeeding– unless you can see those dark hunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your pros as it develops– how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?

So spill whatever you know onto a sheet of paper. Once you have words on paper, then you can sort it and decide what deserves to stay.

So: Research, blurt, sort, delete, shift. Rinse, repeat.

5. Start Strong, Finish Strong

Once you begin composing your piece, the most important pieces are the start (known in journalism as “the lead” or “lede”) and the finish.

“The lead, like the title, should be a flashlight that shines down into the story,” McPhee says. “A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.”

The right lead hints at everything, directly or indirectly–not just substance, but style too. Reading the lead is like meeting your tour guide for the first time. She tells you about the trip ahead–what sites you’ll visit, how much information she will offer, what kinds of stories she’ll tell, and, in general, what kind of company she will provide along the way.

The finish might be even more important. It’s your destination. Ideally, it should respond to the question or issue that the lead raises. The finish should feel like the end of a trip. You’ve arrived and you now know much more that you knew at the beginning. Issues that once puzzled you now make sense. Characters who once seemed incomplete are now complete.

In a sense, the lead and the conclusion are always talking to each other as the story or essay proceeds. This dialogue helps you to make decisions for the middle pieces. You can’t talk about just anything and everything anymore. You talk only about what it takes to get from the beginning to the end.

6. Making Comparisons

All communication involves comparing one thing with another, different thing. To learn about a new topic — a simple fact, a concept, a feeling — we need to relate it to something else.

John McPhee’s mastery of the metaphor and simile might seem a stylistic flourish. To be sure, his greatest talents involve his ravenous gathering of facts and insights and his ability to find just the right form to lay out these facts and insights.

But McPhee’s ability to create fresh metaphors and similes reveals–and enables–his sparkling mind. If he spoke in flat and familiar cliches, his thinking would be dull and orthodox. This drabness would be an undertow, pulling down even his best findings.

One of the great joys of Draft No. 4 is the richness of McPhee’s metaphors and similes. A few examples:

• In describing his fascination with oranges, how they’re grown and marketed and the kinds of cultures they support, McPhee describes a habit he picked up whenever his travels took him to Penn Station: “There was a machine in Pennsylvania Station that cut and squeezed them. I stopped there as routinely as an animal at a salt lick.”

• Describing his desire to find the right word, he writes: “At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.”

• On the organizing information into the right structure for a piece: It’s “like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with.”

• To describe a coal train, McPhee guessed at an analogy: “The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sack of American eel.” Once McPhee was satisfied with the metaphor’s aptness, he and his fact checkers had to figure out whether it was accurate. It was.

Metaphors and similes require broad knowledge. Who but McPhee, with his broad understanding of nature, could have come up with the simile of an eel’s air sack? Good comparisons require hard work. They do not just burst into your consciousness, like Kramer at Seinfeld’s door. Which reminds me …

Because they speak to what the reader already knows, metaphors and similes can date themselves quickly. When we use pop culture to evoke an idea, the insight lasts only as long as the pop-cult idea’s currency. A reference to the Jay Z or Kelly Clarkson or Rosie O’Donnell will be meaningless in a year or even a month. Still, if a pop culture reference captures an idea perfectly, use it. Just be sure to explain the image–quickly–so unknowing readers get the reference. (That, of course, can be like explaining a joke. As E.B. White noted: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”)

To get this right, adapt Mark Twain’s dictum–“When you catch an adjective, kill it”–to your comparisons. When you catch a fleeting pop-cult reference, kill it.

Still, McPhee lauds his New Yorker colleague Robert Wright for his use of an old cultural reference — the image on the Quaker Oats box — to describe the scientist Robert Boulding:

As it turns out, there is a certain resemblance. Both men have shoulder-length, snow white hair, blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks, and both have fundamentally sunny disposition, smiling much or all of the time, respectively. There are differences, to be sure. Boulding’s hair is not as cottony as the Oats Quaker’s, and it falls less down and more back, skirting the tops of his ears along the way.

Should Wright have used the Quaker Oats man? You could make a good case both ways. Anyway, if you use a time- or place-specific comparison, add a quick explanation, as Wright does with the Quaker Oats example.

7. Checking Facts

John McPhee is lucky in ways that most writers can never imagine. Like other New Yorker writers, he benefits from an army of fact-checkers. They sift his drafts, like gold panners, to find errors in his work. Often, McPhee will leave it to the fact checkers to find the facts. He uses notations like these to alert fact checkers of gaps in the draft:

WHAT CITY, $000,000, name TK, number TK, Koming.

In this case, Koming for what’s “coming” or TK for what’s “to come.” These notations, as McPhee explains, “are forms of a promissory note and a checker is expected to pay.”

The imperative to catch errors, McPhee argues, is existential. “An error is everlasting,” McPhee says. “Once an error gets into print it will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogues, scrupulously indexed … silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”

Errors can get embedded into the most innocent of constructions. McPhee writes: “The commas … were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the color of Santa’s suit.”

Errors are like rats. Even the most aggressive efforts to exterminate them fall short. Errors elude even The New Yorker‘s vaunted fact-checking operation. Translators of McPhee’s article about the Swiss army identified 140 new errors. Error-busting, then, is a Sisyphean task. Even when you fail, trying is imperative.

8. Finding Voice

Everyone wants to stand out, to develop a “voice”–a distinct way of phrasing, scene-setting, describing, explaining–that sets him apart from other writers.

How do you do it?

To start, ironically, you imitate others. You find writers whose work you admire, and you study the structure and pacing of their work. You notice the way they introduce a topic, build sentences and paragraphs, describe a face or a moment, deploy quotations or metaphors, break down a complex idea into pieces, or transition from one idea to another. You isolate one of those tricks and you imitate it. Then you do it again and again.

Then the magic happens. “Rapidly, the components of imitation fade,” McPhee writes. “What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time.”

Which is like life, more broadly experienced. We find something to admire and align ourselves with it. We practice, practice, practice until it’s fresh and belongs, wholly, to us. In this way connection with others allows us to become who we are.

9. Finishing Touches

Here’s where the writer’s fun begins. After a lot of grinding–hard labor to gather the pieces and figure out how they might relate to each other–you can develop the ideas and characters and scenes with some depth and care. You can find the details that express “the people and the places and how the weather was,” to quote Hemingway.  You can find the words that express the ideas just right–les mots juste.

As it happens, McPhee’s daughters have followed in his footsteps as creatives. Two are novelists, one is an art historian, and another is a photographer. When they get stuck, they sometimes seek advice from each other and their father. McPhee shares this piece of advice he once offered his daughter Jenny:

The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy, I just fling words as if they were I were flinging mud on the wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the eye and ear. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.

And when do you know you’re done? You just know. You run out of questions to ask. When you ask questions, you know the answer before your interviewee can respond. The scenes play vividly in your mind, in the right sequence, almost like a movie.

Nothing is random anymore.

At that point, you’re probably already thinking about the next story.

Postscript: A Personal Note

Many years ago, I got the time wrong for a meeting at Boston University. To pass time, I wandered over to the campus bookstore and found Levels of the Game. In describing a U.S. Open semifinal match, McPhee offers a glimpse not just of tennis and sports and strategy, but of the two Americas. Arthur Ashe was a black who grew up in segregated Richmond; Clark Graebner was a privileged country club kid from suburban Milwaukee. Subtly, McPhee reveals some of the underlying truths of race and class that don’t fit the usual ideological and partisan debates.

I sat on the floor and read until, in a jolt, I realized I had to hustle to my meeting. As I lifted myself off the floor, I knew what I wanted to do for my next project. With just a moment of thought, I decided to give the McPhee treatment to Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, when the Arizona Diamondbacks rallied in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 to beat the three-time defending champion New York Yankees. The game had everything—the sport’s best players and personalities, the convergence of trends that were changing the game, and an emotional undercurrent owing to the 9/11 attacks that happened six weeks before.

While writing that book, The Last Nine Innings, I occasionally returned to McPhee’s work. I read his book on Bill Bradley and long New Yorker pieces on nuclear proliferation, oranges, and geology. I picked apart his work, looking for tricks of the trade that I could use myself. I did not want to be McPhee; only one person can do that. But he is a master of longform narrative, worthy of study and emulation. He is, I suspect, as immersed in both the substance and form of storytelling as anyone alive. I have long envied the hundreds of students who have learned his approach in his creative nonfiction classes at Princeton.

Now, with Draft No. 4, he has invited writers everywhere into his seminar room.

Before you go . . .
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The Clue Where You Sit

Everyone knows about the Type A personality — the driven, impatient, narrowly focused, executive with a bad temper and high blood pressure.

How this personality type was discovered in the 1950s offers a good lesson for writers about paying attention to details. More about that in a few moments.

In Elements of Writing seminars, we talk about the importance of the setting for the story. The setting — what I call “the world of the story” — doesn’t just hold the story. It doesn’t just provide a place for characters to pursue their passions and goals. It plays a kind of character as well. The world of the story establishes possibilities and constraints, just like all the other characters. It establishes values. It shapes what matters to the characters.

To understand the world of the story, I think of Fenway Park in Boston. Say what you will about other great ballparks and stadiums. Rave, if you will, about the newer venues like Camden Yards and CitiField and Turner Field and Miller Park. They’re all terrific. But Fenway Park changes things. It expresses values. When I lived in Boston, I went to a dozen games a season, in good years and bad. My favorite moments came when the Sox were down by three runs in the ninth inning in a game that didn’t matter. The place came alive. Everyone stood and chanted. If the Sox got a baserunner, forget it. The place rocked. It was like seventh game of the World Series in a meaningless game in June.

But all that’s obvious, right? After all Fenway has sold out for 712 straight games, going back to May 15, 2003, when Pedro Martinez faced the Texas Rangers. That’s more than 250 games better than the next best streak in baseball history. Fenway’s appeal is common knowledge. Just read John Updike’s paean from 1960.

To earn your chops as a writer, notice the things that no one else does.

Now, back to the story of the discovery of the Type A personality.

In this account, it was a chair upholsterer who first noticed that a cardiologist’s patients were killing themselves with anxiety. Watch how Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explains the discovery:

When you create the world of your story, find the chair that reveals an important idea. Find the piece of furniture — of the book, piece of art, toy, tshotshke, piece of clothing, window dressing, dish or glass, or other artifact — that helps the reader understand the world of the story.

When I taught essay writing at Yale, students write a different type of essay every other week — profile, action, memoir, idea, parody, review. One of the essays was a complete story about an artifact. It produced some of the best work. Students worked hard to find meaning in objects that could easily be ignored.

Find that artifact that matters. Find the chair roughed up by Type A personalities.

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How to Create Cliffhangers and Surprise

Good writing needs cliffhangers and surprise to excite desire. By stopping the story and leaving a character’s fate in doubt, cliffhangers tease the reader. We want to know what happens next. Will the hero be safe … or get the girl … or track down the criminal … or save the business?

God is my witness. Look at the surprises that fill The Bible. God torments Job, his loyal servant. The father rushes out to greet his prodigal son. Jesus allows a prostitute to wash his feet. Jesus expels the moneychangers from the temple. When skeptics challenge Jesus to display his extraordinary powers, he refuses. These cliffhangers and surprises tease the reader.

To create a cliffhanger, create a situation where a character faces a fateful moment—and then shift the scene just before the character acts. Leave the reader guessing about what’s coming next.

A cliffhanger is a gap in knowledge. You create a problem and give the character a chance to act—but then don’t tell the reader how the character will respond. You create a puzzle and withhold a critical piece of information. You reveal some facts, raise a question, then back off. And as soon as you close one gap, you open another one.

The Idea of the Cliffhanger

The term cliffhanger originated in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, which shows a character named Henry Knight hanging from a cliff for dear life. The suspense intensifies when the hanging man contemplates the whole history of the earth:

Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between the creature’s epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.

We don’t know whether Knight will fall. Pages pass before his rescuer arrives. And at that point, we don’t know whether she can save him. And so we remain, like Knight, dangling.

You can also create a series of mini-cliffhangers. Break away from the action in each paragraph. Tease the reader. Describe one moment, then back away to give background information. Describe the next moment, then break away to provide more background information.

At their best, cliffhangers bring out the complexity of the story. They raise questions, complications, doubts, and possibilities. So when you use cliffhangers, you not only engage the emotions. You engage the mind, too.

Before you go . . .
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The Enduring (And Sometimes Creepy) Power of Fairy Tales

This originally appeared in The Boston Globe on December 30, 2014.

Fairy tales come steeped in gruesome and explicit imagery. In contrast to today’s politically-correct sensibilities, folk stories revel in death, torture, sexual perversion, and betrayal. But one tale by the Brothers Grimm went too far.

In “Playing Butchers,” a man slaughters a pig as his children watch. Afterward, one child says to another: “[Y]ou be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” The possibility of copycats horrified 19th-century Germans. Wilhelm Grimm argued that the story taught a valuable lesson about make-believe and real life. But no matter. The story was cut from the anthology.

In Once Upon a Time, Marina Warner shows that few things in human experience run deeper than fairy tales. In enchanted forests and other fantastical worlds, flat characters live outrageous lives, cutting to the core of human fears and desires. Fairy-tale plots and characters, in fact, feature the tropes that can be found in just about every story we tell.

In this lively, scholarly work, Warner surveys centuries of fairy tales and academic research about them. She ties these tales to virtually every aspect of culture — mythology, art, music, movies, games, and psychology. We need them, she says, to make sense of the world.

On one level, she notes, fairy tales seem childish and unworthy of attention. The basic rules of physics are suspended. Fairies and monsters of all descriptions lurk, using magical powers to seduce, fool, metamorphose, taunt, torture, rape, maim, and kill. Sexuality, jealousy, and revenge animate everyone, even innocent girls bringing picnic baskets to dear old grandmothers. Enchanted trees, streams, and inanimate objects come to life, producing tabloid-style gore.

So much perverse action fills these tales that the characters themselves are not rounded but mere vessels for wild imagination. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.

If fairy tales seem childish, they often embed dangerous adult messages. The more fantastical a story, Warner writes, the greater the opportunity to take on serious issues — and to confront powerful forces without retribution. Dissidents from Christ to Havel understand the power of parables, coded with messages about morality and power. These tales offer “protective camouflage” to speak truth to power. Kings and rich people alike are unmasked as petty and treacherous.

Classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Snow White” all depict evil beings in charge of isolated, enchanted worlds. The victims’ innocence dooms them, until someone comes to the rescue. But even when the world is set right again, the world’s brutality never leaves consciousness. Fairy tales accept that life is tragic, horribly unfair.

On one level, she notes, fairy tales seem childish and unworthy of attention. The basic rules of physics are suspended. Fairies and monsters of all descriptions lurk, using magical powers to seduce, fool, metamorphose, taunt, torture, rape, maim, and kill. Sexuality, jealousy, and revenge animate everyone, even innocent girls bringing picnic baskets to dear old grandmothers. Enchanted trees, streams, and inanimate objects come to life, producing tabloid-style gore.

So much perverse action fills these tales that the characters themselves are not rounded but mere vessels for wild imagination. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.

If fairy tales seem childish, they often embed dangerous adult messages. The more fantastical a story, Warner writes, the greater the opportunity to take on serious issues — and to confront powerful forces without retribution. Dissidents from Christ to Havel understand the power of parables, coded with messages about morality and power. These tales offer “protective camouflage” to speak truth to power. Kings and rich people alike are unmasked as petty and treacherous.

Classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Snow White” all depict evil beings in charge of isolated, enchanted worlds. The victims’ innocence dooms them, until someone comes to the rescue. But even when the world is set right again, the world’s brutality never leaves consciousness. Fairy tales accept that life is tragic, horribly unfair.

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