Zoom in, Zoom out: Why Stories Matter in Academic Writing
Plus: Come write with me! Last call for the 10-day writing challenge and there's still time to apply for the writing retreat!
Apologies - this was previously sent out with the wrong link to the writing retreat info. Link is corrected below, and is here!
My nine-year-old son is writing a novel. It’s set during the Revolutionary War, and our hero, Chris, is a spy in London, sent to destroy King George’s supply of munitions. Spoiler alert - George Washington is also in London, and they have secret meetings on the Thames.
This has led to cool conversations, (courtesy of his amazing English teachers), about point of view. Is it more suspenseful for the readers to know what’s happening to Chris, our wayward spy, and watch helplessly as he stumbles into the fate we see coming? OR, is it more suspenseful to be limited by Chris’s perspective, feeling his anxieties about the wider world? His goal is to maximize the number of cliff hangers the reader encounters, so suspense is very important. Nine-year-olds are the coolest.
Stories in Nonfiction
Like most of you, I mostly dwell in the world of academic, nonfiction editing and writing, so I don’t think about suspense too much. But I do spend a lot of time trying to convince academic writers that our stories matter, particularly in books. Here are three quick ways you can think about telling stories in your writing:
Zooming in: I often read academic writing that feels like I’m driving across eastern Nebraska: no variation in elevation, versions of the same scene for miles and miles. In first drafts, you have to write this way so that you interpret your data accurately and get it all on paper. In subsequent drafts, though, think about places where you can zoom in to provide a lot more detail. Practice by taking the scene you’re most excited about and spend 20 minutes writing down everything you know or can remember. Particularly if you did field work, tell us who you talked to, what you ate, what you were thinking as you were there. If you’re writing history, spend a paragraph telling us the something interesting and textured about the people you’re writing about. Give people names, share funny anecdotes. This takes up relatively little in terms of word count, but provides “good company” to your readers (a phrase Rabiner and Fortunato use in Thinking Like Your Editor). You might not leave all the detail in, but writing it will improve your manuscript.
Zooming out: Academics are nothing if not methodical, and a lot of our work is painstakingly documenting things that no one else has ever bothered documenting before. In the first draft, it makes a lot of sense to write down all of the detail as you’re trying to figure out what is signal, what is noise, and what is fluff. In the second draft, though, see if there are places you can zoom out. If you have five quotes saying the same thing, tell us there’s a pattern, pick the juiciest quote of the bunch, and then footnote the rest. Maybe you can eclipse 5 years in a century. Maybe you can summarize five legislative hearings as one. Zooming out can help us see the forest for the trees.
Following through: Most people write an outline that traces their argument through their manuscript. This is a great thing to do. My suggestion is to also embed your narrative on the same outline, so that you can make sure that the narrative progresses through the entire book, and mirrors or echoes what is going on in each chapter (that you have, in other words, a framing narrative). This looks different ways in different books. Sometimes, you follow a character or set of characters (readers love investing in people). Sometimes, it’s a short vignette at the beginning of each chapter. Sometimes, you watch a bill evolve or a town change over time. But threading it through book intentionally, braiding it with your thesis statement and how it becomes complicated from one chapter to the next, is a great way to make sure your readers are both intellectually and emotionally invested in the book.
Two ways to write together
Free Writing Challenge! This is last call for the ten-day writing challenge, starting next week. We’ll write for ten days, checking in on Zoom and Slack, and then take a break. You can sign up here, and read about how to prep for the challenge here. I for one both need this to figure out what my next big writing project is, and because it’s forcing me to do a bunch of little stuff this week to clear the decks for writing every day to kick off March. Win-win!
May 2023 Writing Retreat It sleeted all day today, which made me even more excited for May 22-26, when it will be warm and sunny and I will be writing with a group of y’all in Atlantic City. Details are here!
These newsletters will be quiet for a few weeks because I’ll be writing a bunch, but I’ll be back after March 10 to tell you how it went!
I'm printing this one out- great tips!