Repeat. After. Who?

Let’s say you’re writing a story of the seventeenth century, in which, say, Lord Horace Throgbottom loses his right pinkie finger in a Maltese bordello.

If you’re a fiction writer, you might first describe the incident then come back to it later: on your second go round you describe milord’s surprise (or delight), then later the thoughts going through the lovely Lucinda’s mind as she sinks her pearly whites into the soft knuckle, then, even later, the opinion of the guttering candle to witness the scene. Or any other variant of the event, repeated and reinforced.

If you’re a writer in academe, you first question the authenticity of the anecdote, then, having established its plausibility – though not its actual occurrence – through exhaustive cross-checking of the archival material, you might trace instances of digital severance back to… say, the Assyrians, or whoever supplied the first recorded example, according to your graduate students’ research, of such a punishment (or reward), then go on to question the cultural matrix in which Lucinda grew up, its relation to the power structure obtaining in the early modern sex trade, and then perhaps the possible subtextual meaning of this proto-castration in light of Maltese powerlessness in the face of English imperialism. And, for heaven’s and tenure’s sake, what about that old Sardinian gypsy folk song, recovered in the 1920s, with its use of the archaic word for cuticle?

Which is all very fine. Both approaches, that is.

If, however, you are a writer of non-fiction for a general educated audience, you are allowed to tell the story once. You can place it wherever you want and frame it however you want – how this mutilation foiled Lord Horace’s and his twin brother’s shared career as confidence men, for example – but the important thing to retain here is purely formal. You can tell it only once.

The academic can digress, the fiction writer can repeat, but the non-fiction writer can do neither. Writing non-fiction is somewhat like being in a decaying relationship, where one partner says to another, “But you’ve told me that already!” (This, or a variant of this, has been the most frequent editor’s irruption on any book-length manuscript I have handed in). There is impatience with repetition in non-fiction. More accurately, abhorrence.

Why?

Because the compact between reader and writer is contracted over a point of view. If the reader has been told something in a certain narrative way, he or she does not want it to be retold in a different way. What the reader wants is security, not the suspicion that the tale he or she is investing so much time in reading is something that the writer has doubts about. It is non-fiction. Now, the writer may not have doubts about the tale being told (which, I believe, is the sign of a bad writer, and bad thinker), but in no case must the creator of the narrative back out of the project. Yes, there is Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction Posing as Non-Fiction (I’m smiling at you, James Frey), Non-Fiction Posing as Fiction, but what I’m talking about here is the meat-and-potatoes of historical non-fiction narratives for trade publishing.

The challenge, then, for this kind of writer, is to make the story memorable, so that the reader, who might spend weeks intermittently reading the book, recalls Throgbottom’s forlorn finger when the volume is picked up again. By all means, refer or allude to the story (“Like the famous pinkie spat into a Valletta brazier, the Ottoman sultan had lost control, etc. etc.”), but never repeat it. Make sure on your first, and only chance, that you do not blow it. Overdramatization – “like an artery torn from the Sacred Heart of Jesus” – and understatement – “still, he was left with nine others” – are both traps to be avoided, but that is the joy and torment of getting it right.

Fiction is altogether different. As a genre, it is even more concerned with point of view, but I would say that it also addresses the sub- or irrational parts of the mind – the soul, to borrow an archaic cuticle. Non-fiction is basically Apollonian, with a few jazzy sensory things thrown in to captivate. Its success, or failure, resides in the skill and the honesty and the integrity of the writer. But fiction aims to penetrate, or envelop; at its best, it leads us to believe that it is reproducing the way we apprehend, with all the sloppiness and repetitiveness that that implies. I think, in fact, that no good fiction can be produced without the judicious use of redundacy – somewhat like music. I think the hardest thing for a novelist and short-story writer (we’re talking about good ones, of course) is to figure out when and where to repeat, and how. But they have to.

With non-fiction, you are spared that choice. Or should I say that option? Or that decision?

Or something else?