STORY

Story is about eternal, universal forms.
—Robert McKee

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

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

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

Once I tumbled to the idea that common principles of storytelling apply regardless of medium, I noticed examples everywhere. Newspaper writers such as David Simon, a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun, used the material they collected on their beats to produce books that shape-shifted into other media. Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets morphed into Homicide: Life on the Street, a hit television show. Best-selling nonfiction books such as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit all became successful Hollywood films.

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to write successful narrative, half the battle is knowing what you’re looking for. A sharp eye for story comes from understanding that its basic ingredients are universal and learning how to spot them in the real world. If you want to find a great story, look for the ingredients I’ll be explaining in the rest of this chapter. If you want to write a great story, study the techniques I’ll describe in the rest of the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hall’s example hardly qualifies as a rigorous scientific study, but it strongly suggests a biology of story. To me, that makes perfect sense. The myriad ways we use story to cope with the world make it hard to imagine that narrative isn’t part of our fundamental nature. As Barbara Hardy, the English literary critic, put it, “We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.”

I’m also not surprised by the scientifi c evidence that most human beings have a better grasp of narrative than other forms, that narrative delivers a clearer message to the majority of readers, and that readers prefer narrative presentations. Research also demonstrates that we remember facts more accurately if we’re exposed to them in a story, rather than a list, and that we’re more likely to buy the arguments that lawyers make in a trial if they present them as part of a narrative.

We see our own lives as a kind of narrative, too, which may explain why we’re so fascinated by the narratives of others. Psychologists have studied the way we picture our own life stories. They’ve found, according to the New York Times, that each of us has a kind of internal screenplay, and that “the way we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but also how we behave.”

Understanding that story is rooted in our brains and behavior helps explain why successful storytelling contains so many common elements. But it doesn’t tell you what those elements are. Or, more importantly, how to create them with the written word.

THE ROOTS OF STORY
Lajos Egri, who in 1942 wrote an infl uential guide for playwrights that’s still in print as The Art of Dramatic Writing, argued that character was the driving force in story. Human needs and wants, he said, set stories in motion and determine all that follows.

We live in a world of scarce resources, whether they be caviar or companionship. So characters who want something usually have to overcome opposition to get it. Wants, in other words, create conflict. “A story is a war,” said Mel McKee. “It is sustained and immediate combat.” Others expand the idea of conflict to include the array of problems that keep human beings from achieving their goals, some of them purely internal. They usually refer not to conflict, but to “complications.”

So, at its most basic, a story begins with a character who wants something, struggles to overcome barriers that stand in the way of achieving it, and moves through a series of actions—the actual story structure—to overcome them.

That’s a succinct expression of what’s generally known as the protagonist-complication-resolution model for story. You see it in various forms. Philip Gerard, who writes both novels and book-length narrative nonfiction, says a story follows when “a character we care about acts to fulfill his desires with important consequences.” Bruce DeSilva, former writing coach at the Associated Press, says, “Every true tale . . . has the same underlying structure. . . . Character has a problem. He struggles with a problem. Most of the piece is about the struggle, and then you get a resolution in the end in which the character overcomes the problem or is defeated by it.”

I’m partial to the story definition Jon Franklin included in Writing for Story, his groundbreaking text on narrative nonfiction:

A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.

Franklin’s definition is simple, yet precise. And it lends itself to more detailed analysis of the key ingredients in story.

A sequence of actions. In any story, principal characters do one thing, then another, then another, and the writer’s recounting of that sequence creates the narrative. At its simplest level, then, a narrative is just a chronology of events.

Plot, on the other hand, is clearly something different than mere narrative. A plot emerges when a storyteller carefully selects and arranges material so that larger meanings can emerge. A plot, says Burroway, “is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional signifi cance.” For Eudora Welty “Plot is the ‘Why?’” Or, as the novelist E. M. Forster famously put it, the narrative is that “the king died and then the queen died.” The plot is that “the king died and the queen died of grief.”

Narrative plus plot, according to this view, equals story.

Plot unfolds as a pattern of cause and effect and winds its way through a series of “plot points,” defined by Robert McKee as “any development that sends the story spinning off in a new direction.” One of the most valuable things I do when coaching a writer is to list the plot points. That gives us what we need to plan the story’s trajectory.

Consider a short breaking-news narrative I once worked on with Stuart Tomlinson, then a police reporter in one of the Oregonian’s metropolitan bureaus. He called my office, excited about what he’d learned, and I asked him to walk me through the story.

A police officer had been sitting at an intersection, watching traffic whiz by. No plot point yet. Nothing had happened to change the ordinary direction of events. Then “a pickup blew by, pushing eighty.” Now that’s a plot point. Once a patrolman sees a vehicle roaring through an urban intersection at nearly eighty miles an hour, his day’s bound to go spinning off in a new direction.
And for this patrolman, Jason McGowan, things were just beginning to get interesting.

The pickup truck smashed into a passenger car, trapping the woman driver in twisted metal (Plot Point No. 2). The pickup driver fled on foot (Plot Point No. 3). McGowan ran him down and asked a couple of bystanders to watch him (Plot Point No. 4) while he dashed back to the passenger car.
It burst into flames (Plot Point No. 5), threatening to incinerate the woman inside. Two more patrol cars arrived (Plot Point No. 6). The police officers used fire extinguishers from their patrol cars to suppress the fire (Plot Point No. 7), but it flamed up again (Plot Point No. 8). One of them rushed into a nearby convenience store and grabbed another extinguisher. Same result (Plot Point No. 9). The woman in the wrecked car moved—she was still alive! (Plot Point No. 10). Firefighters arrived with the “jaws of life,” a device used to pry wreckage apart (Plot Point No. 11). An ambulance whisked the victim off the hospital (Plot Point No. 12), where she later met with McGowan and thanked him for saving her life.

Phew! One plot point after another. And once Stu and I had them identified, we had everything we needed to construct a narrative arc for the story. We knew what to include and what to leave out. We knew the possible starting points for the story, the best material for cliff-hangers and other dramatic devices, where we’d have to shift points of view, and the answers to just about all the other questions that come up when you’re plotting a story.

A sympathetic character. The character who drives the story forward is the protagonist, and the protagonist is an active player, the one who takes action to achieve a desire, overcome an antagonist, or solve a problem. So when you’re looking for a protagonist search for the person who makes things happen.

A conventional police reporter covering Stu Tomlinson’s story would have focused on the victim, writing a report that put her at the center of a standard who- what- where- why? news report. Stu wisely choose to tell the story via Jason McGowan, who had the hallmarks of a good protagonist.
For one thing, he was accessible. Stu knew him from earlier stories and had rapport with him. So McGowan was available for the kind of extensive interview Stu needed to reconstruct the whole story. McGowan also had been in a position to observe the whole series of events that made up the story. Lots of otherwise ideal protagonists pop in and out of a story line, appearing for short periods of active struggle with a problem before disappearing while someone else steps up. In Stu’s story, the other patrolmen who arrived and tried to put out the fire were potential protagonists. So were the firefighters who operated the jaws of life. But none of those witnessed the whole story. True, you can tell a story by shifting point of view through a series of players. But you’re usually better off sticking with one.

Note, too, Franklin’s emphasis on a sympathetic character. Not surprisingly, novices often want to write narratives with bad-guy protagonists, but bad guys seldom work as narrative protagonists. For one thing, they seldom show us the way things should be done. For another, readers can’t identify with them. And for yet another, readers expect heroic—or at least likeable—protagonists, which is why criminal protagonists in Hollywood movies usually come off as loveable rogues. If you give some sociopath protagonist status in a nonfi ction story, readers will invest the brute with positive qualities he doesn’t deserve.

That doesn’t mean you can’t write about bad guys, of course. You just don’t make them your protagonists. Ann Rule, who’s made a lucrative career out of true- life crime fi ction, focused her 1987 book, Small Sacrifices, on Diane Downs, a pathological narcissist who shot her own children.
But Rule chose Fred Hugi, the prosecutor who put Downs in prison, as her protagonist. Not only did Hugi put the monster behind bars, but he and his wife adopted two of the killer’s surviving children, one of them partially paralyzed. Now that’s a sympathetic character.

Jason McGowan wasn’t quite that heroic, but he certainly was a sympathetic character. A handsome family man with young children, he worked fulltime as a fi refi ghter, one of society’s most admired jobs. He did double duty as a reserve police offi cer, another public- service role that cast him in a positive light as he captured the perp and saved the damsel in distress.

A complication. “In literature,” Janet Burroway says, “only trouble is interesting.” Your protagonist, in other words, needs a problem. Why pay attention to somebody who’s content, who has no reason to act, no challenge to meet, and nothing to teach us about coping with the world?

Any problem constitutes a complication, but only certain complications justify a story. You’re probably not going to read much about a woman who lost her car keys, unless that minor irritant leads to something much more consequential. And, in that case, the keys may set the story in motion, but they won’t end up as the complication that drives the story.

Not every complication has to have life or death consequences. We’re drawn to exciting, action-filled episodes like Jason McGowan’s, but quieter stories are often even more meaningful. “The great dangers in life and in literature are not necessarily the most spectacular,” Janet Burroway says.
"The profoundest impediments to our desire most often lie close to home, in our own bodies, personalities, friends, lovers, and family. Fewer people have cause to panic at the approach of a stranger with a gun than at the approach of mama with the curling iron.”

Another way to think about complications is in terms of human wants. Once somebody realizes he wants something and sets out to get it, he sets a potential story in motion.

The bigger the complication, the bigger the story. Jon Franklin likes complications that are “fundamental to the human condition, involving love, hate, pain, death, and such.” Lajos Egri, as you might expect, expresses the same principle in terms of character. A protagonist with great strength of will, he says, who really wants something and will stop at nothing to get it, will
produce the kind of intense conflict that can power a story of great literary weight.

But don’t start thinking that you need an earthshaking complication to write something compelling. Good little complications make for good little stories. Ken Fuson, who was one of the country’s best feature writers during his years at the Des Moines Register, built a career out of subjects like a boy on his first pheasant hunt or an immigrant woman voting in her first election.

A resolution. Resolution is the ultimate aim of every story. The resolution releases the dramatic tension created as the protagonist struggles with the complication. It contains the lesson that the audience carries away, the insight that the story’s readers or viewers or listeners can apply to their own lives.

In a simple yarns, resolutions are purely physical. (The firefighters arrive with the jaws of life and pry the victim out of the twisted wreckage.) In more complex and meaningful stories, a deep and permanent psychological change resolves the complication. Tom Hallman’s “The Education of Richard Miller” followed a coffeehouse barista who, tired of poverty and his own slacker
lifestyle, cut his hair, bought a suit, and took a job in the corporate business world. But life as a hard- working member of the middle class, he soon discovered, demanded far more than he’d ever imagined. Tom tagged along as the former barista learned about competition, ambition, responsibility, and consistency, and he was still there when his protagonist emerged as a new person who could enjoy the rewards of his new life.

You can resolve a complication, in other words, by changing the world or changing yourself.

Not every narrative has a resolution. An explanatory narrative uses an action line to explore a subject, and it requires no resolution to accomplish its purpose. The narrative simply progresses along a flat trajectory, one event after another, with occasional digressions for more abstract discussions of interesting topics that come up along the way. David Grann’s fascinating New Yorker piece about an obsessed New Zealander’s quest to capture a giant squid typifies the genre. The story was about squid, their history, their mystery, and the current state of scientific knowledge about them. The squid hunter’s quest served as a vehicle for exploring the subject. So it really didn’t matter that, in the end, he came up empty-handed.

Narrative essays often begin with a short action line that seldom contains a resolution. The point is to bring readers into the writer’s thought process as he ponders something that happened to him and reaches some conclusion about the meaning of life. I once wrote an essay that opened as I observed one of my sons standing in the lift line at a ski area. Not much happened during the narrative portion of the essay—my son worked his way to the head of the line and climbed on the chair lift. I wasn’t out to resolve an action line, but to make a larger point. We live on after death, I concluded, not only in our genetic legacy to our children, but also in the activities we teach them to enjoy even after we’re gone.

You don’t need a resolution for a vignette, either—your aim is simply to capture a revealing slice of life. When Native Americans returned to fi sh at Willamette Falls for the fi rst time in a century, the Oregonian’s Bill Monroe went out on their rickety scaffolding with them and described their all- night vigil with the huge dip nets they used to scoop up thirty- pound salmon. The goal of “A Night on the River” wasn’t to create and resolve dramatic tension, but to take readers to the falls, where they could experience that extraordinary event for themselves.

Novelists, in contrast, usually want more complete story lines with defi nitive resolutions. Most Hollywood movies contain clear-cut resolutions, too, although the director of an action film may tease his audience with a series of false endings. The Terminator always dies hard, ratcheting up the dramatic tension as he springs back to life and threatens the protagonist one more time.

McKee calls the typical Hollywood ending “closed” because it results in “absolute, irreversible change that answers all questions and satisfi es all audience emotion.” Some critics consider Hollywood endings as simpleminded distortions of life’s inevitable complexities. They prefer what McKee calls “open” endings, which follow “a climax that leaves a question or two unanswered and some emotion unfulfilled.”

Jon Franklin sides with Hollywood, insisting that a real-world complication without a resolution is “worse than useless” to the writer. But accurate, honest nonfiction often lacks the pure protagonist-complication-resolution structure of fi ction. That’s especially true when a nonfiction writer commits to following his subject in real time, as opposed to reconstructing a narrative backward from a resolution that’s already occurred. Ted Conover, a master of the observational narrative, injects himself into some corner of the culture and spends months hanging around watching the action unfold. He started his nonfi ction career riding the rails as a hobo (Rolling Nowhere) and more recently worked as a Sing Sing prison guard (Newjack). “If you’re really blessed,” he says, “you get resolution. But life doesn’t usually work out that way.”9

You’re twice blessed if you find what Franklin calls a “constructive resolution,” a more precise term for what the rest of us call a happy ending. For the Greeks such a resolution made for a comedy, whether it was funny or not, in contrast to a tragedy, which ended with a negative resolution. Those polarities are still represented by the sad and happy masks that signify drama acted out on stage.

The Greeks preferred tragedy, and Shakespeare earned immorality with it. But classical tragedy deals with the really big negative resolutions, fundamental human flaws such as hubris, narcissism, and greed. Some sins are so central to human failure that they can support narratives that end not with a victory parade, but with what the Greeks called “the catastrophe,” a gloomy send-off in which the protagonist dies and the survivors bemoan their fates.

Journalists, freighted with cynicism and used to reporting on victims, often lean toward tragedy, fi nding losers who go down in fl ames more attractive than winners who learn to manage life’s challenges. Once I foolishly agreed to coach a narrative about a prisoner who tried to hang himself in his cell, botched the job, and ended up as a brain- damaged vegetable living out his days in a rest home as an expensive ward of the state. Because of the outrageously high cost to taxpayers, the facts made for a decent news story. But as anarrative, they went nowhere and taught us nothing.

So I side with Franklin’s preference for winners. As he points out, you can learn something from a negative resolution, but eliminating the things you shouldn’t do—one by one—is a terribly inefficient way of learning about the world. Far better to focus on winning strategies. Each one, after all, is a keeper.

I share another of Franklin’s prejudices on resolutions as well. They, he insists, “absolutely and without exception, must be products of the character’s own efforts.” We learn something useful from active players who solve their own problems and who create their own destinies. Their stories are what McKee calls “archplots.” An action line that displays the protagonist as a mere victim, someone buffeted by forces beyond his control, is, in McKee’s terms, an “anti- plot.”

One final note on resolutions: A preference for positive endings doesn’t mean you should avoid telling the stories of protagonists who at fi rst glance seem to be failures. Gay Talese said he always found the locker rooms of losers more interesting than those of winners. But that’s because losing athletes, as well as losers in love, elections, workplace competitions, and the like, must fi nd some constructive way to cope with their disappointments. So the story of a loser can, in fact, be inspiring and positive. We all have to overcome disappointments in life, and we all can learn from the coping mechanisms of others.

THE IMPACT OF STORY
Once you understand the theory of story, you can appreciate the principles of story structure. From there on, a storyteller’s education involves practical specifi cs. You learn how to convey character, action, and scene. You explore point of view, fi nd your own voice, and develop a style. You learn the differences that distinguish narrative forms, and how to report them honestly. Ultimately, you master the craft of story.

For Tom Hallman and me, that long journey began with “Collision Course,” the story of the young mother killed by a drunk driver. Study, experimentation, and practice gave us the sense that we’d acquired the basic tools and had a good sense of how to use them, and we moved into two decades of enormously fulfilling work as a writer- editor team. Then, at the turn of the century, a story came along that gave us a chance to put all that we knew about theory, structure, and craft together in one capstone package.

By that time readers were routinely tipping Tom to stories that fit his distinctive style. One called to tell him about Sam Lightner, a Portland teenager afflicted by a terrible facial deformity. Sam had recently graduated from middle school and faced high school, where appearance, acceptance, and conformity sometimes seem to count for everything. Sam and his family decided to risk
life-threatening plastic surgery to correct his condition, Sam almost died in the operating room, and the family abandoned plans for further reconstruction. Sam ultimately rallied, brought new understanding and acceptance to his condition, and got on with his life.

The family welcomed Tom’s interest in Sam’s story, and he ultimately spent hundreds of hours with the Lightners. He flew across the country with them to Boston, where the surgery took place. He sat in on family meetings, hung out around the house, and was there when Sam registered for high school. The intense reporting produced vivid scenes and a dramatic story arc in a series that unfolded over four days and totaled seventeen thousand words. In 2001 “The Boy Behind the Mask” won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

More importantly, the story touched readers. Thousands of letters, e-mails, and phone calls poured in, a deluge that dwarfed any reader reaction we’d ever experienced. Clearly, “The Boy Behind the Mask” was the most successful piece of narrative nonfiction we’d ever produced. Understanding how and why readers reacted to it promised valuable lessons; so I carefully analyzed the written responses sorting them into categories. They taught me a lot about what gets through to readers, which in turn suggested a lot about writing and editing to maximize those effects. Those were enormously valuable lessons to me, and I suspect you’ll find them useful, too.

The most common responses simply recognized the story’s power to hold attention. Hundreds of readers reported that “The Boy Behind the Mask” created powerful dramatic tension, locking them into the action line. (“I couldn’t put it down,” one reader said.) The reaction testified to Tom’s skill at showing readers how much was at stake and launching action sequences that put them on the edge of their seats as they wondered what would happen next. Any writer who wants to hold an audience must do the same.

Likewise, a compelling story must immerse readers in another world, carrying them away from their mundane daily cares. (“For as long as it took to read an article,” another reader said, “I was oblivious to everything around me.”) Writers accomplish that kind of diversion by combining strong action lines with artful scene- setting, reproducing realities where readers can join the story’s characters. Learning those techniques is an important part of the game, too.

Most readers mentioned their emotional response to Sam Lightner’s story. (“I wept gallons, turned to mush, and felt like a raw nerve after reading the very first installment.”) That testified to Tom’s own humanity. As he reported the story, he was in tune with his own emotional responses, targeted the details that produced them, and collected those details so that he could pass them along to readers. They, in turn, experienced events in their hearts as well as their minds.

Hundreds of Tom’s readers said the feelings the story produced gave them insight that the raw facts would never have generated alone. Others commented on how seeing the world from Sam Lightner’s point of view helped them recognize their common humanity, strengthening their sense of solidarity with the rest of society. (“I saw the world through Sam’s eyes, and in so doing felt intensely many of the emotions that make us all human.”) Still others said that the story put their worries into perspective, making them feel better about their lot in life. (“Next time I sit at a soccer game in knots because my child isn’t getting enough playing time, or feel awful because one didn’t get asked to a big dance, I will remember Sam.”) And some readers said seeing Sam’s successes despite much higher hurdles than their own inspired them to work harder at meeting their own challenges. (“Sam’s story should be inspiration for many, many who are discouraged or who might need some bit of encouragement to go on with life.”)

In the end, what readers seemed most grateful for were the lessons that Tom’s story offered. (“I’ve printed out the story, and I’m going to hold onto it for when my eight-year-old daughter readies for high school and the peer pressure that comes with it.”) Good stories teach, and that essential function must date to the earliest storytellers. Around some primitive campfire, seasoned hunters regaled the young with tales of the chase, passing along understanding of the courage, skill, and tactics it took to bring down a mammoth. Other stories no doubt helped equip new generations with the secrets
of child-rearing, the ways of folk medicine, the customs and values that held fragile groups of human beings together in a cold and threatening world. Diversion, emotion, perspective, inspiration, lessons of life—add all those reader benefits together, and you get a pretty good inventory of the goals you can aspire to as a nonfiction writer. But how do you organize your words to do that? What written forms produce those reader reactions, and—more to the point—how do you master them?

The rest of Storycraft addresses just those questions. It summarizes what I learned by working with Tom Hallman and dozens of other nonfi ction writers over three decades. It’s the book I wish I’d had when I started out, the hardwon lessons that cost so much in time and effort. I’m passing them along in the hope that it will save you both.

They may not win you a Pulitzer Prize, but they almost surely will win you an audience.

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Excerpted from Story Craft with permission of the author, Jack Hart. Published by The University of Chicago Press.