Authors: Tracy Kidder
Things happen in time, and time is crucial in storytelling. Kidder and I once established a rule: you can mess with chronology, but you have to have a good reason to do so. This is one of those empty propositions that can have a good effect, this one as a check against the deliberate scrambling of narrative time, a gambit very appealing to some writers, but frustrating to readers when it is not employed in service of the story
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Our rule was put to the test with Kidder’s
Strength in What Remains.
The book recounts the life from boyhood to middle years of a
man named Deogratias, a native of the east central African country Burundi. The basic story contains many powerful and, at least superficially, improbable events: Deo’s escape on foot, first from civil war and then from the Rwandan genocide; the painful reconstruction of his life and psyche in New York City (Deo slept for some months in Central Park); the resumption of his education (at Columbia University); and ultimately his return to Burundi as an American citizen, intent on helping with the reconstruction of his native country
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Although the events were all in the past, the story was nonetheless heavily reported. Kidder revisited the scenes of Deo’s travail, spending time with him in New York and Boston, interviewing people who had helped him, and traveling with him to Burundi and Rwanda
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All this research in hand, how to tell Deo’s story? This became a problem of both point of view and time. Our solution had two parts
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Kidder’s first draft roughly honored the chronological rule. It had wonderful moments, but as a whole it was unsatisfying. The chronology asked a great deal of the reader. Specifically, it asked American readers to sit still for an account of a painful childhood in a place most had certainly never heard of. (I did not have to imagine this ignorance—Deo was my introduction to the very existence of Burundi.) Another option was to start with the most dramatic moment, the harrowing story of Deo’s escape, but this would have committed the old theatrical crime of starting too high. Where would we go from there? Moreover, the reader wouldn’t have much reason to care about Deo, not having met him in less extreme and more familiar circumstances. Yet another possibility might have been to hew strictly to the order in which Kidder reported the story. This is often tempting and almost always a mistake. At crucial moments the presence of the narrator would have served only to mute the drama. How the narrator
would ultimately appear was a problem to be solved, but this was clearly not the narrator’s story
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With the comfort of a rough draft to remind us that we had a book, that it was just a matter of getting it right, we set about giving the story a new structure. We determined that it would be a good idea to get Deo to New York as soon as possible. But then how would we get him back to Burundi, and where would the narrator be?
It was a summer day on the coast of Maine, the sort of afternoon when weather and season invite you not to be urgent about anything, but we were feeling urgent about this. We sat in silence for some time on the porch of Kidder’s cottage. I found myself sketching out a plan on a yellow pad. After a while Kidder said, “Well, this is all I’ve come up with,” and held up his own yellow pad. I smiled and held up mine. The drawings were identical—four arrows coming in from the left-hand margin, interleaved with four arrows coming in from the right. Kidder said, “We’ve been doing this too long.”
But we were pleased, once we realized that we were indeed thinking of the same thing. In the first part of the book, Kidder would create two alternating chronologies, each moving straightforwardly in time. One chronology would begin with Deo’s departure from Burundi and take us through his time in New York. The second would recount his youth in Burundi, culminating in his narrow escape from war and genocide. This second chronology would end where the first began, and, as it turned out, it could end on a line that Deo remembered clearly, a line that would by that time, with Deo’s sufferings in New York already told, be nicely ironic: with the consular official in the US embassy in Burundi handing Deo a visa and saying, “Good luck in New York.” Some other refinements suggested themselves as we talked. The New York sections would get progressively shorter, the Burundian sections
longer. And it was plain that the narrator had no useful presence: the story would be told in the third person through Deo’s perceptions—that is, it would be told in Kidder’s words mostly, but they would describe Deo’s memories
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I suppose the book could have ended there. But much was left over from Kidder’s reporting trips. The original purpose of these had been to understand and verify Deo’s story, to gather detail firsthand. But the results went far beyond sights and sounds and smells: portraits of the people who had come to Deo’s aid in New York, and Kidder’s observations while traveling in Burundi. In seeing Deo revisit places of trauma, Kidder also witnessed some of its effects. He had the sometimes heartbreaking privilege of watching a man deal with ungovernable, tormenting memories. We wanted to find a form for these experiences, too, for Kidder’s first-person observations. We decided that a prologue would be the best way to establish the fact of a first-person narrator. But many pages told from Deo’s point of view would intervene. How to bring the narrator back? After a while it seemed there was no advantage in doing this other than boldly
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In effect we decided that the story should be told twice. After 145 pages, the reader comes upon Part Two, and the disarming phrase with which the author steps onstage for the first time since the prologue: “I first met Deo in Boston, about a decade after he had fled Rwanda and Burundi.” Part One would be told through Deo’s eyes, Part Two through the author’s. This yielded many benefits. Much that got in the way in the rough draft—the observations Kidder had made during reporting, observations which did not come from Deo—now became useful. And Part Two, in allowing the reader to see how the author reported the story, worked to dispel any doubts a reader might have about the story’s credibility. Most important, retelling the story in
the first person helped the reader see (and in candor it helped author and editor realize) what the book was really about. It was not just about extraordinary resilience and courage, but also about memory and how the mind can work to repair itself after devastating experience. This kind of thing has happened often in our years of working together. More than most writers, I think, Kidder discovers his stories by writing and rewriting them. In this case, finding the story’s structure was the means to finding its theme
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So, a twice-told tale that starts near the end, interleaves two chronologies, and then the second time around is told through a different set of eyes, with a new chronology, which reenacts the author’s research. Not the simplest structure imaginable (and far from the one with which the book began). For all of that, the rule for us continues to hold. Don’t mess with chronology unless you have a good reason
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—RT
The fundamental elements of a story’s structure are proportion and order. Managing proportion is the art of making some things big and other things little: of creating foreground and background; of making readers feel the relative importance of characters, events, ideas. Often this means upsetting normal expectations by finding a superficially trivial detail or moment that, on closer examination, resonates with meaning.
As for order, its fundament is time. Writers profit from knowing when events actually occurred. It is always a good idea to construct a detailed time line and, for some, to write rough drafts chronologically. If you know the actual sequence of your story, all the details dated in relation to one another, you avoid
muddle and misunderstanding, and can write with a feeling of authority, which tends to insinuate itself into prose.
It is especially important to know a story’s chronology if you are tempted to alter it. For the writer, an important tension arises between chronology and deliberate alterations of chronology. As you’re writing, you ought to feel that pull. It challenges you. Do you want to tell parts of your story out of sequence in order to be arty, just to show off? Or do you have reasons that arise from your exploration of the story itself?
Serious narratives offer us good reasons for caring what will happen to the characters. Why those things happen, especially the characters’ motives, is a higher order of question than what will happen next, but most stories lack propulsion if they lack sequence. Telling stories in chronological order has a distinguished lineage in Western literature, which includes, among others, all the classical narratives and most novels well into the twentieth century. One might say that the straight-ahead treatment of time reflects a moral rather than a psychological understanding of the world. In Jane Austen, characters define themselves and are judged by what they do, from present moment to present moment, event by event. We aren’t told that Mr. Darcy is courting Elizabeth because of what happened to him when he was eight years old. Rather, we are asked to believe that he has an essential nature, and that we should be more interested in what it is than in where it came from. This is, after all, the frame of mind in which most human beings spend most of their waking hours.
The straightforward structure is not obsolete, even in our psychological age. Ron Suskind’s
A Hope in the Unseen
dramatizes
the progress of a young African American named Cedric Jennings. We meet him as a student in an inner-city high school in Washington, DC. Jennings has a gift for math, and he has a code of behavior formed by his mother’s faith in him, his own faith in God, and a fierce pride. He is determined to escape the ghetto, and he does, improbably, to Brown University. In high school he is a pariah, scorned for his industry and ambition and what some see as arrogance. Things aren’t always easier for him at Brown, where he is an anomaly of another sort, genuinely poor in a subsociety of mostly middle-class African Americans, passionate in an academic world that values reason and nuance, and religious among secularists. Nonetheless, he ultimately finds his place, and—the psychological engine of the book—he finds a way to adjust and also to preserve the values that got him there. Significantly for students of structure, this book, though abundant in event and detail, could not be simpler in form: a straightforward chronology, with only the smallest detours to account for Cedric’s family history.
Another sort of story might fight against being told this way. Suppose that as you begin to understand your story, you sense that its deepest meanings get lost in the actual chronology, that the truth which lies in the facts depends on one event being presented before another, even though the actual order was the reverse. Doing this can enhance, not distort, a reader’s sense both of the events’ happening in time and of their relative importance. You don’t pretend that the altered sequence was the real one. You find a way to signal that you have changed the order. One time-honored method is to begin in medias res, at a point some distance into the narrative. Later on, you go back and recount
events that came before. It’s a reflexive strategy in movies straining to make banal plots seem unpredictable. But it has better uses.
McPhee’s
Encounters with the Archdruid
is a paradigm of structural complexity. It’s like a piece of fine cabinetry, fussy and great, and great in part because nothing in the writing calls attention to the structure. The book, from the early 1970s, is in essence an extended profile of David Brower, then the nation’s most prominent and controversial environmentalist. The story is told in three parts, each of them an “encounter” showing Brower in confrontation or debate with people who represent for him the forces of environmental destruction.
The final section takes place mostly on a raft trip down the Colorado River. One could scarcely design a more perfect journey through time and space, one in which the surroundings are a locus for the issue at hand, the uses and, in Brower’s eyes, the misuses of dams. The section begins not with Brower but with a portrait of one of his nemeses, a man named Floyd Dominy, head of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, whose life has been organized around the building of dams large and small. At the end of one of his interviews with Dominy, McPhee poses this question to him: “If Dave Brower gets into a rubber raft going down the Colorado River, will you get in it, too?” And Dominy answers, “Hell, yes. Hell, yes.”
This is an extraordinary bit of journalistic artifice. The trip would not have occurred under any other circumstances. It is arranged by McPhee for McPhee’s purposes as a writer. And yet, once it is under way, the event seems utterly natural, thanks to McPhee’s stagecraft.
There are many lessons for the writer in this expedition. One of the central ones is McPhee’s handling of time. The account begins in the present tense: “Mile 130. The water is smooth here.…” The present tense proves all too convenient for many writers. Some use what might be called the melodramatic present in an effort to engage the reader. “It’s 3:00 a.m. and wolves are howling.” Trying to commandeer the reader’s attention in this way usually invites resistance. We find ourselves thinking, “No, it’s actually the middle of an August afternoon, and I’m sitting on my back porch. Just tell your story.”
McPhee inverts the formula. The trip is punctuated by heightened episodes, especially when the party is running rapids. Many writers would employ the present tense here: “Waves buffet the boat, rocks toss us in the air, spray soaks us.” McPhee describes these dramatic moments in the past tense, counterintuitively but with the effect of making the rapids seem all the more daunting: “We went through it with a slow dive and climb and a lot of splattering water. We undulated. The raft assumed the form of the rapid. We got very wet. And now, five minutes later, we are as dry and warm as if we were wearing fresh clothes straight out of a dryer.” He uses the same device in recounting some of the inevitable debates between Dominy and Brower. “Tonight’s fight was about …”