Even when you’re writing nonfiction, you can be stretching your fiction legs. I did that from the beginning of my writing career. I started in nonfiction, writing features whenever I could and columns every week. The stories were always true, but it was the writing that made them ready to enjoy.
You can do this with your nonfiction writing. If you’re creating a memoir, readers expect the soaring sentences, the power paragraph. You find a metaphor that doesn’t make the writing showy. It just makes the story richer. William Zissner wrote his craft book On Writing Well with this goal in mind. The 30th Anniversary edition has a special place on my bookshelf. I have it in the first slot, closest to the camera, of My Bookcase of Studies, the backdrop of my Zoom calls.
It’s a book about nonfiction, but some spots cover writing skills that apply to either fiction or nonfiction. Look a little closer and you’ll see the colored tabs where I’ve studied something that seemed important enough to teach an author I coach. Editors teach, in order to help authors make the manuscripts better.
The best that Zissner offers in the book is well-displayed in his chapter about writing sports. He shows us how great nonfiction writing can appear, using John Updike’s story of the Hall of Famer Ted Williams as an example. Updike, that short story legend, wrote “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” about Williams’ final game.
“Of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is essentially a lonely game.”
Inside that passage are many things to admire and emulate in your writing. The 39-word sentence punctuated by seven commas. You never lose track of the idea. Then, a six-word chaser. Phrases both surprising and lovely, like “dispassionate mathematics” and “poised men in white.”
I wrote sports for a couple of glorious years at the start of my career. There’s nothing I’ll write about that carries more drama about something that has no lasting impact on our lives. It’s the game that matters, and in the heat of it, the feeling seems as well-suited to war as it does to baseball.
I also got chastised for writing sports alongside theatre criticism. The Pulitzer winner Edward Albee came to a tiny Central Texas university to direct a play. There was even a press conference with him. I asked a question, and part of his reply was “in theatre, even a sportswriter has an opinion.”
The baseball beside Zissner’s book is from a play where I performed, a ball to remind myself that the drama that I studied to create is important to storytelling, too. In every performance of Bleacher Bums, I’d throw that very baseball off the stage and into the “fly” hanging over the audience. I had to track the ball once I threw it, to show the crowd it really was sailing onto the ballfield.
Going artisinal
Nonfiction now looks like it’s under threat of being ghettoized by AI. At some level the chat robots can keep the facts straight. A polished sports column? Beyond any software’s skills. Robots can’t predict the joy, pain, and struggles of everyday lives. Taking our writing into that realm remains the domain of humans.
Artisanal writing, I call it. I spent 20 years toiling in the fields of “functional writing” for newspapers and journals, making my little prison breaks into first-person reports, or “I was here features” or the dramatized pedestrian accident reporting. (Present tense, that one, and I got in trouble with some readers about the form I chose.)
Nonfiction teaches us all to be economical. That’s important to getting read now. It avoids things like the words we spend tracking people’s movements, like “he turned and said,” or the lovely colors of the leaves. Energy around these things does not come from Santa’s magic bag of reader attention. It all has a cost in a reader’s time and retention and admiration. We want readers to admire our work enough to recommend it. Books get into libraries that way. Libraries keep books a long time. Poorer people get to read them there. Isn’t that one important thing that we want, to spread our impact of our stories?
And so we learn to make our dialogue count, as if we had a word limit on the story. You face real word limits in short stories as well as in journalism. You’ve got to want to make your writing shorter to take away a perfectly good scene and push it into the compactor of summary. It’s a pillar of storytelling. Build your career around the rich phrase and the economy of your English. Nonfiction knows the way to erect that structure.
