When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips
• There’s long-form narrative, and then there’s book-length narrative. Both are “long,” but a story that’s 300 pages long is a different proposition, for both writer and reader, from one that’s 3,000 words. • Writers embarking on their first book-length project respond to the challenge in different ways. Some panic, staring blankly at their screen as fine beads of sweat form on their foreheads. Some luxuriate in the expanse of real estate and begin wandering to and fro around their subject, leaving no random thought unexpressed. Some try to take a 3,000-word piece and inflate it to 300 pages.
WEAK STRUCTURE
A story that’s 800, or even 5,000, words can often carry the reader through on the strength of an incredible event, investigative breakthroughs, or even bitingly ironic prose. A “narrative arc” may be unnecessary. But to draw readers and hold them for a full-length book, time-honored structures still work best: introduce a core character or group of characters who have some kind of goal or objective, follow them as they pursue that objective, and tell us how they succeed or fail.
THE BACKGROUND PROBLEM • Background, context, exposition – whatever you call it, getting just the right amount into your narrative is a perennial challenge. It’s a problem in short-form narrative as well, but the bigger the project, the more scope there is for tipping too far one way or the other. Without enough background on a technical subject, readers may not understand vital points of the story. Without enough context to know the larger significance of your narrative, they may not know why they should care. • Some writers, justly celebrated on this site, have a genius for fascinating digressions that are entertaining in themselves and supply essential information that makes the central narrative more comprehensible (e.g., Michael Lewis in “Money ball” on Saber metrics, John McGhee just about anywhere on just about anything). But many writers either dump in too much information or stop the narrative cold in order to deliver it. If you find yourself writing what the British call a “potted history” of World War II, your protagonist’s adolescence, or the development of the personal computer, there’s a good chance you are burdening the story with an excess of background.
THIN SOURCING •
In general, in a book-length work readers expect you to render a subject with more depth than they’d ask of a short article. They count on you to do the legwork on their behalf. This means a narrative that draws from more than one or two sources. If you have a chapter or a long stretch of action whose leitmotif is “Johnson said…. According to Johnson,…” or repeated footnotes to the same secondary source, the reader may feel one person’s perspective is being forced on him because you haven’t done your homework. Granted, in historical or investigative writing you might find yourself having to reconstruct a key event from a single document or the testimony of a lone eyewitness. Note, however, that those would be primary sources. And even in these cases, what makes your account persuasive must be that you have found other sources that corroborate the one you’re relying on.
WOODS FOR THE TREES •
As in “You can’t see the.” Just as it’s important to balance exposition and narrative, it’s essential in book-length nonfiction to deliver specific details while keeping the big picture clear in the reader’s mind – another balancing act that becomes more demanding at book length.
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Those details may be important pieces of evidence that help to make a case, or they may be fine-grained observations of scene or personality that make the story vivid. The best nonfiction coruscates with such details. But one of the problems I most commonly encounter, from history books to exposés, is a manuscript that becomes a torrent of data, streaming past readers in such profusion that they can’t see how it all fits together. The narrative, or argument, is lost because the reader is overwhelmed with bits and pieces.
FACTOPHILIA
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One typical cause of Woods for the Trees (see #4, above) is an excessive fondness for certain facts that aren’t really necessary to the story. I submit as a law of editorial physics that the author’s desire to include a fact in her narrative is directly proportional to the effort she expended to find it out, not to its relevance.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME •
It can also happen that after spending enough time with a person – or more rarely with an organization – to write a book, you come to identify with your subject to the point that your work becomes an apologia instead of the critical inquiry readers expect of a professional author. If you’ve embarked on your book with, say, the explicit mission of exonerating the LAPD, or Roger Clemens, that’s one thing. But if your ostensible mission is disinterested reportage, yet your text is a brief for the defense, it’s a problem.
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There’s a subtler and harder-to-spot version of narrative Stockholm Syndrome, though. It happens when you absorb your protagonists’ frame of reference and forget that your readers may not know the same things or see the world the same way. You may feel the palpable urgency of whether this bill got out of committee, or that petri dish produced a viable culture, but unless you convey that urgency to the reader, your story may feel hermetic and low-temperature.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE? •
The most critical difference between a book and a magazine or newspaper article is that the publisher has to convince someone to part with 25 dollars or more for this story and this story alone, and perhaps more important, to invest several hours of his or her life in reading it. That’s a pretty high threshold. To get across it, you need a topic that is more than merely interesting and a narrative that’s more than well-wrought. You need a story that has a significance beyond itself, and you need to convey that significance to the reader.
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The most compelling books deliver this on more than one level – they unfold events that changed history or society, even if in a small way; and their narratives connect to the reader powerfully. They make us care at an emotional level because we understand the stakes for the characters, and an intellectual level because we see how these events had wider consequences. I frequently encounter a carefully researched, artfully written proposal for a book whose subject is just too narrowly framed or whose emotional temperature is too low for me to feel we can “break it out” – publishers’ jargon for reaching an audience beyond those readers already interested in environmental law, the Milwaukee Braves or the Large Hadron Collider.