Consider this opening paragraph, from an essay included in G. K. Chesterton’s 1928 collection, Generally Speaking:
Among those remarkable “Sayings of the Day” that are quoted in the daily Press, I remember a sentence that is quite significant. Sandwiched in between two other epigrams, between Sir Humphrey Pumpernickle’s paradox, “The British Empire must look to Britons for its defence” and the equally arresting bon mot of the Dean of Ditchbury, “True religion includes the desire for truth” — interposed, I say, in the same setting between some such jewels as these, I find a remark that really seems to me to be a text for a philosopher. I have forgotten who said it; but he was somebody of a social importance equal to that of the great men I have named. And what he said was this . . .
Earlier this year we talked about how to generate suspense by giving your readers a sense of what’s to come while preserving some ambiguity about it, then holding back on the revelation as long as you plausibly can. This is exactly what Chesterton does here. The mock quotes from other notables let readers know that what’s coming is going to be equally ridiculous, and that Chesterton is going to have suitable fun with it. But Chesterton holds off the quote itself as long as he can, just to whet readers’ appetites for the big reveal.
Any good essay – or any good non-fiction writing – presents ideas clearly and with a logical flow. But the best essays, the ones that are a pleasure to read and stick with you afterwards, also use techniques you usually think of as belonging to fiction. They essentially treat ideas as characters and tell a story about them.
Just about any long-form piece of nonfiction in The New Yorker makes use of several fictional techniques. Take Eliza Griswold’s recent piece on the future of the coal industry. Note how Griswold starts by setting the scene for her ideas with a description the countryside in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and ties the ideas to an activist named Veronica Coptis. Then, for the rest of the piece, ideas like the economic impact of closing the mines or the relationship between mines and environmental regulations are interspersed with trips back to the setting and Coptis’ life. This not only humanizes the ideas and gives them meaning. It lets Griswold release information to her readers at a controlled pace that would do a spy thriller proud.
Roy Blount once wrote an essay on the contrast between dog and cat ownership. For most of it, he sketches out all the complaints dog lovers have against cats – they’re emotionally indifferent, they’re self-involved, they’re impenetrable. And then, in a surprise that would have been at home in the denouement of any mystery, he concludes that you should really own a cat for all the reasons he’s just listed against them. Cats are like poems – short, perhaps hard to understand, but comforting without being emotionally demanding. “Dogs are like Dickens.”
Then there is this lighthearted essay by a master of the craft, one that’s still current despite being more than 300 years old: Joseph Addison’s 1712 essay on “party lying” – what we today would call propaganda or fake news. First, Addison introduces the good guy – the importance of telling the truth — by referring back to Plato, who considered truth one of the founding principles of the universe, along with beauty and goodness. Bear in mind this would have been even more impressive in the eighteenth century than it is today.
Then, as in all good fiction, he humanizes his bad guy, propaganda. Party lying is immensely popular, a mainstay of the press, and in coffee houses it’s “as fashionable an entertainment as a lively catch or a merry story.” And of course it’s completely harmless, since no one believes the lies any more, anyway. They’re just a way of showing what your politics are. “When we hear a party-story from a stranger, we consider whether he is a Whig or a Tory that relates it, and immediately conclude that they are words of course in which the honest gentleman designs to recommend his zeal without any concern for his veracity.”
Once the adversaries are on stage, the fight begins. Addison gives three subtly satirical reasons why otherwise honest people might feel comfortable lying to support their party. The reasons are couched in the arch elegance (and sometimes daunting sentence length) of eighteenth-century prose, but essentially they boil down to these. It’s not wrong when everybody does it. (“Though the weight of a falsehood would be too heavy for one to bear, it grows light in their imaginations when it is shared among many.”) Okay, it may be technically wrong, but it’s not shameful when everybody does it. (“The scandal of a lie is in a manner lost and annihilated, when diffused among several thousands.”) And finally, it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong or shameful if it’s done for a good cause (“If a man might promote the supposed good of his country by the blackest calumnies and falsehoods, our nation abounds more in patriots than any other of the christian world.”).
I won’t get into the details Addison’s response to these three points (spoiler alert – truth wins), but note that he presents the points in order of increasing strength. The argument that something isn’t immoral when a lot of people do it was self-evidently wrong in Addison’s day and it’s still pretty sketchy today. But the argument that there’s less shame when everyone does it is actually true. And the argument that it’s worth telling a falsehood in order to save the country – a feeling apparently as old as politics itself – is one that a lot of reasonable and honest people might make. By having his main idea face tougher and tougher challenges, Addison essentially gives readers a sense that they are moving forward. He’s taken his arguments and turned them into a story.
So why should fiction writers care about how to write effective non-fiction? Most of us haven’t had to write formal essays since freshman-level composition. Well, even if you’re not, say, a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed, you never know when you might be called on to present a bunch of ideas clearly and memorably, whether it’s in a letter to the editor or a lengthy post on Facebook. And understanding how essayists structure ideas can make you more aware of your own thinking and how it hangs together. I’d like to believe that would come in handy for anyone.
Oh, and the statement that Chesterton put us in suspense over at the beginning? “The Charleston may really be of great practical use in teaching a man to be a good golfer.”
So what non-fiction works have stayed with you — not just memoir or autobiography, but works that explore ideas? Were those writers using fictional techniques without your realizing it? (I’ve even encountered masterful how-too books that made use of surprise.)
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About Dave King
Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.
One non-fiction work popped right to mind: The Living Great Lakes, by Jerry Dennis. It’s a subject near and dear to me, but Dennis taught me more about the beloved lakes of my home state than any single source previous. He delves into history, science, biology, ecology, but it’s all built around a personal narrative, centered on a journey.
Dennis signed on as a deckhand to sail a tallship that had been a museum and restaurant from his home port in Traverse City, MI to NYC via not just four of the Great Lakes, but the Erie Canal! Each aspect of his explorations is initiated and presented alongside elements encountered in the crew’s struggle to sail an aging ship nearly halfway across a continent. It would’ve been a wonderful read without the trove of well-presented – and obviously thoroughly researched – non-fictional information. A great lesson for fiction writers.
Thanks for the tips on essay writing, Dave. I’m up in a few weeks.
I think you could consider this book a case of showing rather than telling. Rather than telling you about the lakes, the author takes you out on them and shows them to you. It’s a case of narrative vs. scenes.
And it does sound like a delightful book.
Thanks for this, Dave. I immediately thought of my favorite nonfiction writers, John McPhee, who could make any subject fascinating, and Jon Franklin, who wrote “The Wolf in the Parlor.”
Both used fiction techniques masterfully.
You’re welcome, Jean. And how so? Can you tell us a little about the techniques McPhee and Franklin use?
Hi, Dave:
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself tagged in a FB post to my wife’s wall on the suitability (or lack thereof) of the Dickens reference to our dog.
This post resonates with an article Lee Child wrote for the NYT Opinion page a while back on suspense. He began by saying his fiction writing career commenced when his TV career ended, due to the invention of a revolutionary device.
He then goes on to discuss how people mistakenly talk about suspense, doing so in terms of what is required to make it, as though one were discussing a recipe for a cake. This was followed by the wonderful observation that the real issue regarding suspense isn’t how to make a cake, but how to make your family hungry.
After which he slyly inserted: Still wondering what that invention was that ended my TV career?
That was the point: Suspense is created by asking a question and delaying the answer, just as Chesterton does.
Thanks, also, for the Addison story. I find myself oddly comforted by anything that reminds me that, as Henry Adams remarked, “Politics … has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
I’m currently working on another writing guide, and the need for clarity and simplicity so often crowds out more inventive techniques. But as I reflected on what you’re saying, I realized one chapter in particular works well precisely because I start with a dramatic challenge — “Let me start with blasphemy: Conflict is NOT the engine of story” — and withhold the identification of what I believe in fact to be the engine of story (desire) for a good many paragraphs. I hadn’t realized I’d done that, though, until this morning once I’d read this post.
Maybe I should pay more attention…
As for non-fiction that touched me like fiction: Bill Bryson’s books do that. And, unsurprisingly, Julian Barnes with Nothing To Be Frightened Of. But also Kenan Malik’s The Quest for a Moral Compass, which tells the story of how our current understanding of ethics has evolved, with a core question always serving as a refrain: If moral truths are absolute, how can we speak of a “history” of ethical thought?
BTW: The answer to Lee’s question: The remote control. It radically changed the audience’s viewing habits. You needed to keep them engaged second by second or they could easily, instantly leave.
Okay, bear in mind I was quoting Blount, not necessarily agreeing with him. I’ve owned both cats and dogs and literally have no dog in this fight.
Thanks for the suspense examples. That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
I do love The Spectator. It is very much a product of the early enlightenment, and you have to get used to the different rhythms of the language. But it does surprise me from time to time with how modern (or, rather, timeless) certain problems are and how sensible his solutions are. (The Spectator was actually written by various authors, but primarily it was Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.) There is a wonderful essay on the importance of investing effort in building a happy marriage — something even more critical in a society were divorce was unheard of. Several essays and mock letters to the editor remind readers that women have brains. There’s even a sensible essay on garden design that describes how to create a winter garden and recommends using local plants rather than exotics because local plants “rejoice in the soil.”
Thanks for this post.
When I think of true-idea stories, The Atlantic magazine comes to mind. I adore the articles about the history of something, like the invention of hair dye.
While I love to write fiction, working as a reporter was much easier. The stories unfolded before me and were practically handed to me. There seems to be a built-in story structure in real life.
The Atlantic is another wonderful source of good non-fiction.
I think humans tend to see the world in terms of stories and have for a long time. I spend a lot of time riveted to the news because I love watching the story unfold.
Very charming post with a lot of good, entertaining examples. Thank you!