Jack Hart

Here’s the idea, I said. What you want is a description that follows a series of actions. It’s based on careful observation. Close to the ground. Lots of specific detail and movement. Ordinarily you’d be following a single person. But there’s no reason you can’t track an inanimate object instead. It could be a ship or a gun or a load of coal. But it must move, and in moving it will inevitably touch a series of characters. That brings the necessary humanity into the yarn. But it’s the movement that matters. That creates the sequence of actions that establishes the narrative, and that’s what gets you to places appropriate to explaining various aspects of your subject.

The writer follows an action line just as if he were writing a true story, one with a protagonist, a complication, and a resolution. Maybe, as was the case with one McPhee narrative, it’s an Army Corps of Engineers officer riding a boat down the Atchafalaya River, inspecting Louisiana flood-control structures as he goes. But every once in a while, the writer stops the action, just pulls the curtain on the narrative. Then he goes off on a little exploration of the subject, an abstract explanation that gives depth and meaning to what the reader’s been witnessing in the narrative. They’re known in the trade as digressions, and they’re the key to making an explanatory narrative work.

The form is also perfect for an issue-oriented film documentary such as Supersize Me or broadcasts such as Frontline or Nova.