I believe that writing is about decisions. It’s a lot of other things, too, but if you don’t have a killer instinct, a willingness to close, you’re stuck in marshmallow-land. Think of those hilariously profane scenes in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, when the salesmen are all talking about the importance of closing, willing it, wanting it, needing it. In a more demure way (and, it must be admitted, in a more private, violent way), writing is the same thing.
Of all the accomplished writers I have met in my days as a journalist or as a shiftless hanger-on at the literary buffet table, none has exhibited a tendency to waffle. You knew that a Marguerite Duras or a Margaret Atwood, for example, did not put up with indecision when it comes to her craft. At a talk recently here in Providence, Michael Ondaatje admitted, wistfully, that he had to off a character beloved by him in writing Divisadero, because, as he said, the character “got in the way of the story.” There is another word for this – murder.
With non-fiction, you cannot, unfortunately, kill off people who get in the way of the story. Yet it, too, is a minefield of decisions to be made. Writers are often thought to be fey onanistic types, arty or scholarly, when in fact they have to be fairly cold-blooded if they want a text to be able to stand on its own. At least if they want that text to be good.
I write a particular form of non-fiction – that is, for the general educated public (who need hardly any prompting to toss a book across the room in disgust), as opposed to that produced by academic research writers, whose readers – fellow researchers and their graduate students – form a sort of captive audience. In my field, Tom Holland and Tim Mackintosh-Smith are, to my mind, the gold standard. There is plenty of dreck out there (William Manchester’s dreadful, error-riddled A World Lit Only By Fire, for example, was the most mystifying non-fiction bestseller of the past thirty years), but what the two cited above show, both Brits (sigh), is a willingness to be decisive – plus a great felicity in style.
Consider the hybrid: a trade book written by an academic. One of the better in recent years was John Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive [sorry about the weird line break below, can't get it to go away]. It's about Iroquois stealing down into 18th-century western Massachusetts, kidnapping the daughters of Puritan worthies, then hauling them up to the horrors of papist Montreal (what’s not to like?). Demos wanted to write for the general reader, and on the whole he succeeded. But his opening is unintentionally comic: “Where does the story begin? Perhaps it is in the old university town of Cambridge, England. In the summer of 1629.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the village of the Iroquois heartland (what is today upstate New York). In the decade of the 1660s.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the Massachusetts town of Dedham. On May 22, 1670.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the “borning room” of a particular house at Deerfield. In September 1696.” Three pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the royal palace, in Madrid, center of the sprawling Spanish Empire. In the autumn of the year 1700.” Three paras later: “To recapitulate: Cambridge (England), Iroquoia, Dedham, Madrid. In short, multiple beginnings, none of them truly ‘first,’ each of them contributing, in one way or another, to the story that follows.”
Well, John, every story is like that, and that’s what the non-fiction writer is for: to make decisions, to relate his or her version of a narrative about the past with a strong voice and point of view (excuse me while I polish my pince-nez), and to perform assault and battery on reality (as opposed to fiction’s Ondaatje perpetrating outright murder). The tale doesn’t have to be freight-train linear, but it also shouldn’t be “watch-me-at-my-craft” cute. Who cares about what writers go through? I don’t want my doctor, scalpel in hand, telling me about his or her bum residency in the south Bronx; he or she, I imagine, doesn’t want me to spoil their leisure reading time with a ten-page opening about my problems in composition.
So, although Demos succeeds admirably in creating his story without the ostenatious self-consciousness of his beginning, I think that his beginning verged on throw-the-book-across-the-room variety.
Others will disagree, or misunderstand my point (isn’t that what language is for?). To state it plainly: it is difficult for academics (whom I admire, truly) to grasp what is needed when writing for the general educated public. Too often they think that, once out of the constraints of the Academy, they are writing for the teen slouched in front of South Park. Don’t kid yourself, that teen is never going to pick up your book, at least not yet. You are writing for educated people who just happen not to be specialists in your field, and who want to be held, informed and edified. And, above all, they do not want be kept abreast of the latest metacontortions of the tale-telling trade (e.g., “none of them truly ‘first,’ each of them contributing, in one way or another, to the story that follows.”)
I could go on, and probably will, but right now I can’t decide….
As someone who used to edit academics for the general reading public, I can agree with your general condescension, Steve, because I know you know that at least a good academic has done his or her research. What academics don't sometimes (to be kind) know is HOW TO WRITE. I have recently, belatedly, decided that what we most enjoy about writing is the writing itself: the syntaxing of our feelings about the subject. In preparing young writers for a life of writing one must have the temperament of an athletic coach to put the young writers through the conditioning that will lead to mastery of skill sets. In the end, writing one's way out of a paper bag is what it is all about. As a free lancer, one pitches a particular bag, then is faced by the task of writing one's way out of it.
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