Thanksgiving Writing Advice
Beginning, Quoting, and Trimming
As fall is in full swing and the holiday season is upon us, we’ve come to the official heavy-hitter nonfiction book season. Why is fall the season of big books based on “real stuff”? A simple, one word answer will suffice: Retail (this is true for big fiction too, but fiction tends to have less seasonality). Cher has a #1 book! Taylor Swift’s book comes out today. People continue to “help” themselves. So with that spirit in mind we’re going to do a little writing advice, nonfiction edition.
1. Begin at the End
This is a classic editor’s trick (<not the sentence I had originally started this paragraph with).
The idea harkens back to high school English class, the five-paragraph essay. When teachers recommended that you start with the thesis and then conclude with the thesis in a slightly different form. I believe the phrase they used, probably not unique to my experience, was “tell them what you’re going to tell them and then tell them what you’ve told them.”
For longer, more complex works of nonfiction this bromide remains only kind of true. The five-paragraph essay is good enough for high school but it is a workmanlike formula and won’t impress or entertain readers. Unlike the formulaic five-paragraph essay, a creative work of nonfiction is less about telling something until someone knows it and more about building a reader’s progressive understanding of a subject, a narrative.
It's very common as an editor to watch writers “write themselves into” an idea. This makes sense when you consider that people often think in a linear progression, building and building until they talk themselves into their strongest point. But also, very often, creative nonfiction writers forget to tell readers why they should care until the end. Here’s an example from solid, well respected nonfiction writer Mark Kurlansky’s Paper— this is how he ends the second chapter of the book:
“For about six centuries paper was an exclusively Asian product. China had outlasted the Roman Empire and was the most advanced civilization in the world. They had developed a society that needed paper and had exported it to neighboring Asian societies. But another advanced civilization was about to come along, and they, too, would need paper.”
Now Kurlansky, no slouch, starts the chapter with a fun, surprising fact that hooks you in a different way: “People were created out of the parasites that lived on the body of the Creator, Pangu. At least, this is what Chinese legend teaches.”
But while keeping this opening he also could have followed the end at the beginning rule and hit readers over the head with the importance and gravity of the subject before getting into the fun details: “For about six centuries paper was an exclusively Asian product. China had outlasted the Roman Empire and was the most advanced civilization in the world.”
2. Excessive Quotes
For any work that uses secondary sources, research, or reporting, it’s important to consider the use of quoted material. There is actually no more powerful move than using a quote, as nothing conveys more authority than “this is a real thing someone said.” Particularly if they are famous— it’s why the internet is littered with misattributed quotes to Jesus, Aristotle, Einstein, and Martin Luther King. But also, if the quoted person is not famous, the old adage “straight from the horse’s mouth” applies just as well. Thirdly, a well time quote can just be a way to “steal” a great line from someone else. This newsletter is getting overstuffed with truisms but here is another one: whatever you’re trying to say, someone has probably said it better.
Mark Kurlansky’s Paper again, the opening sentence, where he nails the use of a quote:
“What do humans do that other animals do not (aside from the curious observation Pliny the Elder in the first century CE that ‘only man has ears that do not move’)?”
Where quotes go wrong, and it’s hard to find a lot of published examples of this (good job, editors), is in their overuse. It follows a principle we talked about with fiction where something strong, when repeated, becomes weak whereas something minor, when repeated, gains strength through repetition. When a writer strings a lot of primary quotes together, it’s usually time to suggest that they paraphrase and trim until just the pithiest, most damning, or awe-inspiring line or two stands alone and can make its maximum impact.
3. “We Know”
A book of nonfiction is often trying to tell a story or make a point to its fullest, but it’s an editor’s job to put the guardrails up occasionally and let the writer know they’ve reached the point of exhaustion. Writing “we know” in the margins is one of the funnier, snarkier ways I’ve heard of an editor letting a writer know that they’ve overstayed their welcome. While there are definitely nicer ways to go about red-pen feedback than this, the essential message is the same: “we know”. The subtext: you’ve said this already 1,000 times, so please cut it. It goes back to the idea that a good, long work of nonfiction is one of progressive understanding rather than telling, telling, and telling. And to all the editors out there (and writers) doing this work of trimming (see what I did there?) their way to better works of nonfiction, we thank you.