Class 15 - How to Structure Creative Nonfiction

Checking In

This time, we’re moving on to look more closely how to structure literary nonfiction. But we’re going to start by reflecting on and responding to Kathleen Jamie’s essay, ‘Pathologies’

Kathleen Jamie

We’re moving from writing about the self to writing about the world — from memoir to reportage. Your assigned reading was Kathleen Jamie’s Pathologies, a long piece that explores our bodies, the idea of nature, grief, and curiosity — among other things.

What I want you to do is look through the piece again, and then post one line — a sentence or a few words — in the chat from the piece that particularly struck you. Quote it directly, without comment.

When we’ve all done this, we’re going to write for 6 minutes in response to this piece. Remember, this is creative nonfiction. So what we write should be true, and a story, and well-told!

Structure

So let’s talk about structure. How do you structure an essay? Particularly given that creative nonfiction is so very flexible in its format?

One good starting point is by seeing creative nonfiction as a braiding together of questions and fact.

What are facts?

Facts are things like: when somebody is born, what was on the table that morning, what this person said, who entered the room at midnight.

As a nonfiction writer, facts are your starting point. When you look at your subject matter, you have to ask yourself, ‘what is the case?’, or maybe, ‘what is going on here?’ You need to establish the facts, as you best perceive them, with as much clarity as possible. This allows your reader to know what is going on, and what is the case in your story.

Sometimes as a writer, it is tempting to hold facts back to create a sense of mystery. But this is often a mistake. Don’t be mean-spirited with facts. Be generous. Let your readers know what is happening. In practice, this means:

• Build your storytelling out of individual scenes that show the facts you want to talk about.
• Make sure that at every point, your reader has the information they need to make sense of the scene you are writing.
• Don’t be coy with facts for the sake of ‘mystery’. If the reader needs to know something, then tell them.
• Keep your sentences clear: make sure it is absolutely 100% transparent what you are saying, and what you are not saying, and there is no ambiguity.

This may sound a bit disappointing. What, you may ask, about mystery and intrigue? Well, these things matter too. But you need to be the right kind of mysteries and intrigues. And this is where it pays to think more about the questions you are raising in your story.

What are Questions?

To keep readers engaged, you need to provoke questions in their minds. But you have to be careful what questions you provoke. What you don’t want to do is provoke questions through your lack of clarity. If your reader has to ask ‘who is speaking here?’ (this one is very common), or ‘Is he on the llama, or beside the llama’ (this one is less common), you need to pin your facts down more firmly.

The questions that drive your story forward are not questions about what the facts of your story are. Instead they are questions about how these facts relate to each other, what the implications of these facts are, and how these facts came to be.

In other words, the kinds of questions you want to ask are these:

• Questions that look forward (‘What will happen next?’).
• Questions that look backward (‘How did this happen?’, or ‘Why is this the case?’).
• Questions about the connections or the spaces between facts (‘What’s the connection between the explosion and the woman with the umbrella?’).

This interplay of facts and questions gives you a way of structuring your storytelling. Powerful nonfiction storytelling (and fiction too) engages the reader by weaving together facts and questions. This means that the reader keeps finding out new stuff, page by page. But it also means that they are moved to keep reading, prompted by questions like: ‘what next?’, ‘how?’, ‘why?’, and ‘what’s the connection?’ And if you’re skilled in the writing, you can gratify the reader by answering these questions so they can discover further facts.

This braiding of new information and new questions means that your reader is rewarded with new insights, whilst they are continually promised even more insights to come.

As long as you keep giving the readers facts (you can think of them like dog treats), and questions (you can think of these like the anticipation of dog-treats to come), and braid these together well, then you will keep them engaged.

Exercise 1: Questions and facts

This may sound quite abstract. So let’s bring it down to earth. Below is a passage from the brilliant writer Maya Angelou, and her memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1984). It’s just one sentence, but Angelou brilliantly braids together facts and questions. Here’s the sentence:

When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansaw, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.

Read this opening sentence out loud, and then draw two columns on a piece of paper (or a new electronic document). On the left hand side, write “facts”, and on the right hand side write “questions”.

Now write down on the left hand side everything that we know from this opening sentence (it’s a whole load of information when you look closely).

And write down on the right hand side everything that we want to know, all the questions we want answered (and that will keep us reading).

(When you’ve done this with Maya Angelou’s work, find another piece of creative nonfiction of your own choosing (perhaps the piece you did your review on) and repeat the exercise (taking either the first few sentences, or the first page).)

Thinking Through Structure

If you get used to analysing writing in terms of facts and questions, you can see how skilful writers manage to gratify the reader by giving them specific information, while also provoking their intrigue by raising questions in their mind. And powerful writing can continue to braid together fact and question like this until the very last page.

We’re going to try this with the first few pages of Kathleen Jamie’s essay. I want to put you in groups of three or four. In your groups, I want one person to share their screen. And then I want you to go through the first couple of pages, paragraph by paragraph. In each paragraph, discuss:

1. What new facts, or surprising information, does Jamie give us?
2. What questions does she raise in our minds?

Homework

There’s lots more we could say about structure, but these two principles — that you should interleave facts and questions, and that you can tell the same story in may different ways — are a good start. But for the next session, we’re going to be hearing from Michelle Kuo. So I’m going to share the next chapter from her book. This is optional homework. But if you want to read another chapter before Michelle’s talk, then I want to make this available for you.