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.

One secret to successful digression is to preserve dramatic tension by bailing out of the action line at just the right moment. If the writer creates a cliff-hanger by pausing when something hangs in the balance, the reader will usually hang around to see what happens when the narrative resumes.

An explanatory narrative requires close-to-the-ground specificity. Readers must visualize particular places at particular times. So if you’re going to follow french fries, you have to track one particular batch of french fries. You have to follow the potatoes in one field on one farm, to the packing plant, to the ship, to the counter of the McDonald’s where they’re ultimately served.

The situation carries what Mark Kramer, with admirable academic detachment, calls “high emotional valence.” And, he adds, “the higher the emotional valence, the longer the digression.”

Conversely, a pause that occurs at a less dramatic moment calls for a shorter, less intrusive digression

Most struggle with an outline of some sort before they begin writing. McPhee says outlining is essential to his process. “Going through all that creates the form and the shape of the thing,” he says. “It also relieves the writer, once you know the structure, to concentrate each day on one thing. You know right where it fits.”

Outline for an Explanatory Narrative
Narrative Opening Scene
Digression 1
Narrative Scene 2
Digression 2
Narrative Scene 3
Digression 3
Narrative Scene 4
Digression 4
Narrative Scene 5
Digression 5

Narrative Scene 6
Digression 6
Narrative Closing Scene