Nonfiction authors have it easier than fiction writers. While you create nonfiction, you’re rarely lured by the siren song of the scene. Novelists get captured by the delicious dance of dialogue. If they’re succeeding at scenes, we don’t lose the sense of where the speakers are sitting, standing, or moving. We can also see those speakers’ expressions and gestures. The Emotion Thesaurus is an essential book for keeping the viewfinder of a scene full of people you want to watch.
So when you’re working on emotions, then you wanna give me some kind of a physical sensation as opposed to naming them. Right? So when you think about whether you’re confused, or whether you’re scared, whether you’re angry, there are things that bubble up inside of you physically. You use those kinds of things in order to relate to me as a reader.
However. When I watch TV and the movies, I am given nothing but scene. Books operate on a deeper level. Narrative writing, where no one speaks at all and we do not watch action unfold, is your magic carpet of context. Successful novels are full of narrative writing. My beginnings as a nonfiction writer made creating narrative easy for me. I’d worked in the theater before that, so the charms of scene were always there. Helping readers understand the stakes, and why they should care and keep reading: that’s the work of narrative.
Narrative writing can get literary, or just literal. Hemingway was only moderate on the literary scale in his greatest works. Here’s a passage from The Old Man and the Sea.
Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea. He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her.
More literary is Lorrie Moore in A Gate at the Top of the Stairs.
I tried to think of who Sarah reminded me of, though I was sure it wasn’t anyone I’d actually met. Probably she reminded me a of a character from a television show I’d watched years before. But not the star. Definitely not the star. More like the star’s neatnik roommate or the star’s kooky cousin from Cleveland. I knew, even once she had a baby, she would never be able to shake the Auntie Mame quality from her mothering. There were worse things, I supposed.
Narrative like this just doesn’t show up much in movies and shows. The interior life of characters flows out of narrative writing that is used in fiction. Finding ways to make narrative stand in for your scenes is good work when you’re revising, or even drafting a book.
