Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

by Tracy Kidder

  Except, of course, there is.

  “The Bell Curve” is of general worth for the issue it raises, and it also has great value for a writer of essays. In discovering the right place to stand in relation to his subject, Gawande accomplishes what every writer must accomplish. In his case, this means that, without removing his white coat, he becomes something more than a “professional.” An essay both allows and requires you to say something more than you are entitled to say by virtue of your résumé alone.

  In one of its modes—humor—the essay sometimes breaks the basic rule of nonfiction. Wit can confer the freedom to fictionalize. Ian Frazier has written distinguished reportage, but he is also a gifted social satirist. In “Thanks for the Memory,” for instance, he assumes the role of Bob Hope, in a parody of the comedian’s vacuous public utterances, recalling a golf tournament: “The payoff was over half a billion dollars, just for me. It’s one of the largest amounts of money there is.”

  The humorous essay often turns on self-mockery, and once you are mocking yourself, the reader is less likely to dispute your right to use hyperbole. David Sedaris, the best-known current master of the humorous essay, came to literary prominence with his “Santa Land Diaries,” an essay that describes his service as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s department store in New York. This piece skewers not only a commercialized Christmas holiday but the overbearing mothers and insufferable children who celebrate it. Does Sedaris overstate when he says that he told a misbehaving child that Santa would come to his house and steal his television and all his appliances? Doubtless so, but the piece rests on the absurdity of its author’s role, the basic facts of which we understand to be true. It’s a subtle balance; the piece would not be so funny if he were “making the whole thing up.” You need to know that real pain was involved. It takes some courage to admit to having been a hired elf. Having done so, you may be forgiven a scene like the one in which Sedaris claims to have used sign language as he said to a deaf child in a loud clear voice: “SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON’T THINK SO.”

  •

  What can you learn from practitioners of the essay, in all its variety? There can’t be many general lessons for a form that depends so heavily on nerve and poise and on having something idiosyncratic to say. Every essayist deals with the same general ingredients—self and experience and idea—but everyone deals with them differently. Good essayists share the ability and the confidence to use the power of their own highly specified convictions.

  Edward Hoagland, although he has worked in other forms, is nonetheless known primarily for his essays. Writing in the 1970s, in a turbulent political season, Hoagland begins “Of Cows and Cambodia” by allying himself with the big stories of the hour:

  During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

  No one gives you permission to write this way. It is like taking a bite of the apple that is the world. You do it. You get away with it. Soon experience entitles you to do it again.

  5

  BEYOND ACCURACY

  FACT

  Some authors admit to having altered facts in narratives that are described as nonfiction. In an endnote to About a Mountain, John D’Agata writes:

  Although the narrative of this essay suggests that it takes place over a single summer, the span between my arrival in Las Vegas and my final departure was, in fact, much longer. I have conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only, but I have tried to indicate each instance of this below. At times, I have also changed subjects’ names or combined a number of subjects into a single composite “character.” Each example of this is noted.

  What has just happened here? We have come to the end of a nonfiction story and now the author tells us that we can rely on the accuracy of almost nothing we have just read. This might be called a literary experiment, and no one wants to condemn experiments out of hand. But writers might consider what they give up when they abandon fact.

  Sometimes legal and moral constraints force a nonfiction storyteller to change a character’s name or in other ways disguise a character’s identity. Most readers will accept such changes, especially if the author announces them at the start. Not intending to change anything, scrupulous reporters get facts wrong sometimes. These departures from fact are different in kind from deliberate alterations that are made for the author’s convenience—for instance, to enhance a story’s clarity or drama. A literary critic would have reason for asking, Is this writer just taking an easy way around the disappointments of reality? To engage the world through what is knowable; to express with clarity the drama and indeed the truth that may be lurking in the facts, within actual and not composite individuals, within real and not fictional events; to find a good story and tell it well while sticking to the facts—for many writers of factual narratives, those are the basic challenges and opportunities of the form. Defining “nonfictional” time in this spirit does not mean that one must always tell the events of a story in the order in which they happened or never assemble events drawn from disparate times. What it does mean is not substituting made-up dates for real ones.

  One large risk of fictionalizing is a loss of faith by both writer and reader. When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it. You the writer might solve your own problem by telling the reader after the fact, “Things didn’t happen quite the way I said, but wouldn’t it be nice if they had.” But such an admission may well leave the reader feeling cheated. Surely most readers come to a piece of writing that is called nonfiction with a reasonable expectation that the writer will at the very least attempt to be faithful to knowable facts. If you violate that expectation, you create a different set of expectations. If you abandon the goal of accuracy, you take on not just the freedoms but also the obligations of fiction. You ask that your entire story be judged by fiction’s standards. John McPhee once put the matter in an opposite way: “Things that are cheap and tawdry in fiction work beautifully in nonfiction because they are true. That’s why you should be careful not to abridge it, because it’s the fundamental power you’re dealing with. You arrange it and present it. There’s lots of artistry. But you don’t make it up.”

  Assume, if only for the sake of argument, that accuracy as to facts is a worthy goal for writers of nonfiction narratives. It is not a trivial undertaking. If you think about the matter, it’s clear that complete accuracy is unattainable. Every story has a history, and the actors and witnesses will all remember it differently—that is, if they’re still alive and willing to talk and haven’t colluded in concocting a sanitized version. As for events that you witnessed yourself, your perceptions may be easier to sort out, but they, too, are bound to be incomplete.

  The impossible but useful goal of trying to notice everything does not of course imply the goal of recording everything. In a job of long-term reporting—listening to the same people day after day, month after month—synoptic notes and voice recordings would leave you with something like the map that Jorge Luis Borges imagines: a map of the world that is perfectly accurate and as big as the world.

  But you do your best. To reconstruct a story, you chase after accuracy—checking one subject’s memories against another’s, looking for the trail of records that you know exists somewhere. And when you witness a story or part of one, you record your perceptions as honestly and precisely as you can.

  BEYOND FACT

  A parable.

  When I was a boy, children were regarded differently. A lot of the time we were not regarded much at all. We were incidental to adult life. I’m sure they
loved us, though of course they didn’t say so. The word “love” generally was reserved in those days for music on the radio. The upside of this was that we children were allowed to see a lot, especially if we shut up. For instance, perfectly respectable people would not think anything of taking a child into a bar. Thus it was that I found myself more than once perched on a stool next to my grandfather when I was four or five years old, having ginger ale as he had what he called a “snort or two.” The bar in my mind’s eye had an elk’s head mounted on the wall. I may have asked my grandfather how the elk’s head came to be there, or maybe he simply took it upon himself to tell me the story. It was quite sad, he said. One day the poor elk had come crashing through the wall, and they had just left him there. “The rest of him is sticking out the back,” he said. “We’ll go around and look at him someday.”

  To me, this little story expresses the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and not in the sense you might think, that my grandfather was a liar. Imagine that the bar is a book. In a novel, the mounted elk’s head is all there is. But in nonfiction, the rest of the elk really is on the other side of the wall.

  —RT

  Nonfiction writers portray actual events and actual people. But no matter how faithful to the facts, what you write can never be co-extensive with what you are writing about. Of necessity things get left out. One might say that the fiction writer leaves things out, too. But while the reader imagines things left unsaid, the fact is that if they aren’t in the novel, they don’t exist. It is an agreeable fantasy, when you come to the end of a novel, to wonder what happened next to the characters. But you know that nothing happened next. The book ends, and the characters end with it. They may live forever in the imagination, but they have no lives outside the novel. In nonfiction characters do have lives. Usually, those lives do go on after the book ends. Those people have lives that were in place before they became “characters.” They have actions and meanings and emotions that inevitably lie outside what a piece of writing can describe.

  All this is obvious. And yet writers of fact forget it at their peril. It is one important source of the moral complexity at the heart of the enterprise of nonfiction.

  One still encounters some people in journalism—in some newsrooms or maybe at the Fox network—who talk of objectivity. They are more or less harmless. Either they are disingenuous or they are dunces, and in either case they pose little threat. We know that as soon as writers begin to tell a story they shape experience and that stories are always, at best, partial versions of reality, and thus objectivity is a myth. More worrisome are people who want to pursue the other line of argument, that “everything is subjective.” Well, of course, everything is subjective, once you get beyond the very barest of facts. Imagine an immutable fact, a corpse lying on the floor, with a visible wound to the head. But the moment you call that corpse a victim, you begin to tell a story, and if you enlarge that to “victim of a senseless crime,” then you have the makings of a plot. So yes, of course, just about everything is subjective. But people who take a particular glee in that idea usually have other agendas. It is only a couple of steps to the idea that all opinions are equally valuable, that because truth is multifaceted, and indeed infinite if you slice it finely enough, then all truth is equally valuable and equally suspect. “If it’s true for you, then it’s true”—that whole quagmire of postmodern nihilism. Subjectivity is for some people a disinhibiting drug. It absolves them of responsibility.

  But subjectivity properly understood is really just another name for thought. Subjectivity simply acknowledges the presence of a mediator between the facts and the truth. That mediator is you, the writer. Acknowledging subjectivity absolves you of nothing. On the contrary, it makes you the one who has to explore the facts, discover what you can of the truth, and find the way to express that truth in prose—knowing as you look for the way to do this that you cannot be complete, that every inclusion implies countless exclusions, that you must strive to do no violence to those facts and those truths that compete for your attention.

  The better a writer is at creating a portrait of someone, the more hazardous the process becomes. If you were writing a feature story for the Saturday edition of a newspaper and you quoted someone saying something mildly embarrassing, readers would know that you had not given them the whole person. But if you devote a book or a detailed and subtle magazine piece to portraying a human being, you are hoping that the reader will read with full imagination and that each detail you mention will resonate in a way that suggests things not actually written. The better you do this, the more the reader is apt to forget that the character has another life. And the truth is, you half want the reader to forget. You strive to give the reader the illusion of a real person, and you have to make sure that the illusion is faithful to the truth as you understand it.

  To do this can lead you into peculiar situations, situations that may even put you at odds with some of the facts. It is obvious that the facts are always more numerous than can be accommodated, and that you have to select among them. Moreover, you have to remember that writing and reading are different from experience, and that the mind has an ability to absorb and to order, simultaneously to see and not to see, and that this is an ability that prose strives in vain to imitate. The mind can accommodate contradictions that a story can’t. Sometimes the only route to truth—to reproducing your sense of the true nature of the events you witnessed—is a detour around a part of the story that distorts the whole.

  •

  At the center of Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren is the teacher, Christine Zajac. A real person, her real name. Dispatches from Kidder suggested that the reporting for this project was not always compellingly interesting. Days could go by without anything dramatic happening. It was a story without news. But it was a story, whose layers of meaning accreted slowly and quietly. Then, one day, something happened that actually was dramatic and seemed at the moment certain to be included in the book. Basically, Mrs. Zajac, a skilled classroom manager and a very likable figure, briefly lost it. The mother of one of the very troubled students in the class had once again failed to show up for an appointment. Mrs. Zajac mentioned this fact to the student, and she did so in front of the class. Afterward, she was properly aghast at herself. If you had been there, it’s the thing you would have talked about that night and maybe for a couple of days afterward. And of course Kidder wrote the scene. But as the book took shape, the scene increasingly didn’t fit. If you had been in the room you would have placed the teacher’s indiscretion in the context of the whole year. But in the book it seemed disproportionately significant. It could be explained, managed for the reader, but no explanation could replicate that mental process by which we simultaneously register and dismiss anomalous information. And there’s a good reason for this: the reader is, however dimly, aware that the author is making choices and feels that if something is there, it is there for a reason. No matter how this scene was placed, it loomed too large—again, the difference between writing and experience. We sometimes think, “If only I could get it all down.” But if you could get it all down, the all would be at once too much and not enough. Finally it occurred to us to ask, “Do we really need this scene at all?” And out it went, without regret.

  But this was not the end of the story. Kidder’s reporting yielded an oppressive wealth of notes, what seemed like a verbatim record of 178 days in that classroom. And the first draft for the book stood at twelve hundred manuscript pages. Two-thirds of it went away. But one scene got larger. It was a moment that was buried in the manuscript and only on reconsideration seemed to resonate with meaning. In the end it became a pivotal moment. It occurs in a section called “The Science Fair,” describing an annual event at which the school’s classes came together and students displayed projects they had made to illustrate one or another scientific principle. Originally it was tempting to play this scene for comic relief, and there was plenty of comedy. For instance, the team of girls whose project was
“food,” for which they displayed “a box of oatmeal, a hamburger bun, a piece of white bread, a carton of milk, two potatoes, and a remnant of iceberg lettuce going brown.” The whole section was at one point a candidate for cutting. But one episode kept nagging. A recalcitrant boy named Robert, a yearlong discipline problem, was truant from the Science Fair. Mrs. Zajac stormed off to find him. What she found brought her up short, and the moment became one in which she had to face her own shortcomings as a teacher and the odds that some of her students were up against:

  She looked at his desk, and then the tightness left her jaw. She let her shoulders sag, and her face turned as red as Robert’s.

  On Robert’s desk she saw a weathered scrap of two-by-six with raggedly cut ends. On each of its longer edges was a flashlight battery, precariously secured to the board by a profusion of bent and twisted nails. A tangle of wires, twisted around other nails, covered the surface of the board. An attempt had been made to tape the ends of the wires to the batteries and to a small light bulb. The bulb had a broken filament. A hammer and some outsize nails lay on Robert’s desk next to his project. He had tried to make an electric light. It suddenly looked like a very difficult thing to do.

  Chris looked at the project and she saw all at once a Robert slightly different from the one she thought she’d known just a minute ago. All year long she had tried to get Robert to take a chance and make an effort. Now he had. He had tried and he had sincerely failed. And she had rewarded him with humiliation.