Narrative in Journalism

You can't read a nonfiction piece these days without wading through some hokey narrative context in the first few paragraphs. I blame Malcolm Gladwell's enormous success for the popularization of this trend--he made millions by writing pop psychology books whose chapters began by telling you about how Joe the Farmer always got up at the same time to check on his chickens and so forth, as a way of illustrating some larger point.

Purveyors of all forms of creative nonfiction think their readers want, or even need, to be "told a story." Is this not just a bit condescending? The presumption seems to be that readers are so resistant to receiving any ideas at all, that they need to be gently brought into the orbit of ideas through relating to an everyday character embroiled in some everyday situation. Is this really the case?

There are too many examples to list, but here's a quick one from a baseball Hall of Fame story yesterday on Grantland. I was excited to read it, but that excitement dissipated after the very first sentence: "Charles Bronfman was desperate." Oh no. Was he? I look forward to eventually learning how this obscure person from history's desperation fractionally elucidates the thesis of this piece of writing.

A reason I've stopped reading much fiction is because I don't really care about imaginary worlds--the real world is interesting enough, dense enough to parse. I don't care about characters--I care about ideas, which should be the province of creative nonfiction. But too often the creative part of nonfiction is interpreted to mean storytelling, or setting some traditional narrative context with colorful characters and charming settings.

Storytelling is a neat way to blend the creative with the nonfiction, since the story is based on a real event, but can include any quirky, minor, offbeat aspect of the character's biography. It also follows the bogus rule that writing should show rather than tell, which makes the journalist feel like he is doing the right thing.

But too often it seems like the narrative is a stand-in for the writer's own grasp of the ideas, or at least serves to pad out a thin idea over greater word counts. A story may more "vividly" (though probably not) illustrate an idea than simply describing the idea itself on its own terms, but not more trenchantly or subtly. If you can find a real life character who can be tied to an idea in some minimal way, you don't have to work to understand the idea as much, and you don't have to develop a narrative context of ideas into which it fits--instead you just shove it into the readymade context of the character's life.