Transcription
I'm gonna be very focused on my own body, on my own feelings. I'm going to be looking to be transported. I'm going to be looking to care, to fall in love with the characters that you present me with, to be fascinated by the places that you take me to. I want to go on a journey. I want to be entertained, transported, informed, and possibly by the end of it, even slightly changed. But I want most of all to feel. That's why I read.
My name is Ben Rawlins. I'm the author of a book called City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp. That's published by Portobello Books. I'm one of the judges for the new Portobello Prize for Nonfiction, which is a new prize for unpublished writers of narrative nonfiction. The classic definition of narrative nonfiction is that it's a true story, but nonfiction is not only the facts, it's also a story. And with narrative nonfiction, the emphasis is on the word story. So when we consider what narrative nonfiction is and how to do it, we need to closely examine the concept of story. What is a story and how is it constructed?
If you ask a journalist on a newsdesk, story means news, means information, new information. If you ask a writer, whether that's a novelist or a writer of narrative nonfiction, a story generally means a journey of some kind, an emotional journey, which is surprising, informative, transformative, perhaps entertaining, but most of all engaging. The only way you can get a reader to go on a journey with you, because to be read is a privilege, the pages have to turn. So how to make the pages turn? That's the key question. Engaging storytelling is about engaging the emotions, and the emotions are accessed through the senses. So that's why the, the fundamental unit of storytelling is the scene: describing how a place looks, how it feels, how it smells, what's good, what you can hear, how things feel to the touch, and writing dialogue that's real, and bringing to life characters that you can empathize with. This is the goal of emotional storytelling. Rather than simply telling somebody about something that happened, you want to actually take them on a journey and give them an emotional experience. Obviously, the facts are important, but you mustn't let the facts get in the way of the story. The governing logic of the material you have is the story, and you've got to make decisions about structure.
So you might often hear screenwriters, it's a famous phrase for screenwriters to say, "Character is structure, structure is character." And it sounds like a complete contradiction, but actually, if you think about it, it makes sense. And what they're really saying is that your story has its own logic, and you have to find that logic and work out how best to tell it. Real life isn't logical. And, and this is actually where nonfiction and fiction part ways, because it's very easy for a novelist, you just make it up. But for a nonfiction writer, you've got to bend reality into your story arc, and that's really hard. And this is why if you've done a lot of research, you're at an advantage, because nonfiction is about choosing. So you have to choose which scenes to show, which scenes elucidate your story, which scenes fit in the overall arc. So if you've got a lot of scenes to choose from, you're at an advantage.
So in, in real time, events happen in a, in a linear fashion. But story time, or what some people call emotional time, is very different. If you're telling a story which is an emotional journey, you don't need to know everything that happened to all of those characters in between. You just need to know the important moments in that journey, the emotional moments. And maybe if you're, if you wanted to tell a story that doesn't fit in that, in a linear fashion, perhaps you can flip it. Maybe you start at the beginning. Maybe you, sorry, maybe you start at the end, and there's a flashback. Maybe you start in the middle, you tell one person's story, then you tell another person's story. To, to engage a reader, to transport her reader, you have to immerse them in the scene. An immersion requires detail, lots of it.
So, for example, for my book City of Thorns, I spent days interviewing lots of different people about what the weather on a particular day was like, about what they were wearing, about what the terrorists said precisely that moment when they kidnapped you. In order to recreate the scene, in order to bring the drama and, and bring the reader into the, into the picture. I'd have characters describing what had happened somewhere in the past, and then I'd go to that place and sit there. And just like an internet cafe, for example, where a girl got her exam result, so I'd sit and describe the internet cafe, soak it all up, and then I'd write the scene with her in it. Even though I never saw that, but I had talked to her, and she had told me she went to this place and she got her exam results, and she was hoping for a scholarship to Canada to escape the refugee camp. But that never, that didn't happen. She just missed it. So it was a very emotional moment for her, and this is where it happened. So I put those two things together.
Sometimes the facts are not your friend. As a nonfiction writer, you are chained to the facts. But the facts don't go here or there or there. Different, of course, because everybody's got different accounts. In one example, I had two lovers in the refugee camp, and one person's account of their meeting was completely different from the other. The way I handled that in the writing was to juxtapose those two accounts and say, "Well, according to Monday," his name was Monday, "she looked like this, and we met here, and this is how it went." "According to Munna," Munna was the woman in, in this partnership, "it went like this, and he lied, and he was a terrible man, and it wasn't like that at all." And what do you do? I didn't try and attend a definitive sort of forensic court statement of actually what happened. I just presented these two alternatives, which, which is fine, but actually is much more engaging because it, you know, brings you into the conflict between these two people.
It's very important to find a cracking story to tell. But just as you want to move your reader through engaging the reader's emotions, probably that story has to engage your emotions. Has to be something that you care strongly about, you feel deeply about, you have a connection to. And then the, the hard part is to figure out how to tell it. You choose your subject, your angle, choose the characters through whose eyes perhaps you want to tell that story. And then you fall back on the mechanics of story building. And here, there is a wide literature about how to write stories: structure, character, scene, plot, and so on. The mechanics of storytelling is very well discussed, and there are lots of books that can help you do that. One of my favorites is the screenwriters' Bible called Story by Robert McKee. And there's a lot of crossover here between movies, books, whether they're novels or nonfiction, because the, the fundamental unit of storytelling is the scene. And that means that you've got to engage the write, the reader. You've got to draw them in into your world. You've got to transport them. And the, the, the channel through which to reach the emotions of the reader is the senses.
I'm one of those people that believes everybody has a story to tell. And that's, but that's not just about the craft, that's also about the research. So it may be that somebody you meet on the street has a very interesting story to tell. But the only way you're going to find that out is if you're a sympathetic listener and a very good interviewer, and you can get to the important, that would make their, their story come alive. The craft of telling that story. So there are two crafts. There's, there's finding the story, recognizing what are the emotional pivots of a story, what are the pieces that you need. And then the second thing is actually putting that into practice and, and bringing that, that story to life.
One of the hard things to know when you choose your story is what form it should take. When I start on a project, often I don't know whether this is going to be a magazine article or a short piece for the radio, or whether it actually merits a book. And for example, City of Thorns started out as an article for a magazine and ended up being a 400-page book because it drew me in and I couldn't let go of this place. I've started other things which I thought were a book and have ended up being an article. So sometimes, perhaps, if you are going to be guided by your emotions, you have to be prepared to live with the consequences. The subjects you tackle may not turn out to be a book in the end, and that's a very hard thing to know at the outset.
So when you consider how to tell your story, you also have to think quite carefully about the role of yourself. Are you going to insert yourself into the story as an authorial voice? And if so, at what point and how much? Personally, I don't like the word "I" very much. And in City of Thorns, you have a prologue which introduces me and the subject, and then you have 350 pages of stories about other people, seen through their own eyes. And then you have a very short epilogue which again wraps up my role in the book. Some people put themselves in the book much more fulsomely than that, and there's no real hard and fast rule. The main point to consider is the logic of the structure, the logic of the decisions. Are you following the logic of your story? Is this the best way to tell it?
Sometimes you might approach a subject, and I've done this, where I didn't want to put myself in the story, but it made sense that I should be there because otherwise, how would I have known these things? And actually, in my voice, giving, inserting my voice allowed me to say things that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to say. But this is a decision that every writer has to take when you approach the story. And the only thing I would say is that the governing rule should be: obey the logic of the story, not your own vanity to either be there or not be there, because both of those decisions are vain.
An interesting point to end on is how do you end a true story? A novel or a movie might naturally progress to a happy ending. A true story might not. It might not have an ending at all. And if somebody's died, perhaps. But otherwise, how do you actually bring it to a close? When I first started with my book City of Thorns, this was a proposal to tell the story of a refugee camp over three years. And I'd only written the first third. And one of the questions I was asked by an editor was, "How's it going to end?" And I said, "I don't know. We have to go on that journey and see." And in the end, that story ended very inconclusively for most of the, of the people in the refugee camp. It did come to a conclusion for some, in a way, but the horror of living in that refugee camp continues. But the, the story nonetheless had a logic to it, which I had to work very hard to fashion.
So this is a particular challenge of narrative nonfiction, which is distinct from fiction, is that you can't make up the ending. You have to again use your imagination to find a, a moment of pause. It might not be definitive. There might not be a moral at the end of the story. But then you need to find a place that feels appropriate to bring that story to a close.