Transcription
I'll be teaching narrative nonfiction and history writing for Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop. History isn't just something dead. History is alive. It's with us. It's with us every day, and from the stories of the past and from the personalities of the past, we can take away things that can enrich our own lives. And what I like to do for my students is to teach them to uncover those stories and to also take their own stories and their own experience and to apply them to their writing and to find those angles that they can take not just to to grow their own passion to really set themselves on fire about their project but also to draw other people in to kindle that spark that's going to become a bonfire.
If you're looking for an angle and take with your story, there's a number of tasks you can take: There's always the human interest. "Here's how this thing happened." There's the "just so" story. "Well here is how plastics came to be." There is also the the element of near-misses. Historical near-misses. "This thing was almost so. How did this thing almost not happen?" And then of course there's also the real truth angle. "Here's what everyone thinks happened. Here's what actually happened."
Another question. I frequently hear is well. How do I grab the reader's attention? What is it that makes history - or really any nonfiction - appealing to a reader? Well, history is boring isn't it? Well no, it's not. Think of one of the oldest pieces of literature we have, The Iliad. It starts in media res, right? It's the story of a war. You might think it's boring, but it starts right in the middle of the Trojan War. It pulls the reader in. It starts, as we say, in media res. So, same use of the wrath of Achilles. Why is Achilles angry? Well, because Briseis, the the slave girl that he feels he's earned, a lot of entitlement has been taken away from him, and of course the entire plot starts from there, and the whole thing crumbles. In the same way, if you're gonna start a history of World War II, start with not really even the the invasion of Poland, start with D-Day, and then look backwards. How do we get to this point? And the same thing can be said for anything, including family histories. For stories of education. Really looking at the biggest crux, the biggest plot point, and then how do we move backwards from that? How did we get there? That's how you grab the reader's attention.
But no matter what, we have certain sorts of structures, certain sorts of stories we've been telling each other historically for years and years, and the way we structure reality is inherently through stories, and that by finding the angle, finding the plot, finding the seam, we're able to take that human interest. We're able to take that story, and we're able to give it a universal appeal. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is playing it safe. There's something about narrative writing and narrative nonfiction that is often controversial. It's about things that are in the real world, things that have happened to us, sometimes things that are tragic, or things that are politically fraught. I would say not to shy away from controversy. Not to shy away from having an opinion, because that's also something that draws the reader in. This is something that is applicable to your world. This is something that's going to tell you how to be or how not to be. And nothing grabs someone's attention quite like that.
People often ask me about research, and people are often stymied about How do I do research? Where do I find the sources? Research is something that everybody can do, not just in your local library, not just on the internet, but also interviewing people, interviewing members of your own family, interviewing people who were there. And then of course if you want to get into the academic research and see what other people have written about things, sometimes in very obscure journals, there are ways around those academic paywalls that make the specialized knowledge that it sometimes seems academia keeps to itself and hoards, well there're actually hidden spigots that you can turn on, and if you know just where to turn the spigots, then sources of information, which may seem so specialized and so remote, are actually a lot more accessible than you might think that they are.
The idea of taking stories - real stories; true stories; stories that are sometimes crazier, more out there, more insane than any fiction - and bringing them to people and explaining "This is how it happened," and what's more "This is true": That's my passion. And what I want to do, what I want to bring to my students is that same love of writing and writing history writing any sort of narrative nonfiction. And history being really just one genre, just one tool we can use to write that, be it a history, be it essay writing, be it a story of a political campaign, be it local history, be it the barns of New England, and the history of the architecture of the barns in New England. There's a story in there. It's something that reflects the human experience. And sometimes in the microcosm, we can find the macrocosm - that which is going to be universally appealing to all people.