{"id":1097,"date":"2013-10-17T14:40:26","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T14:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/10\/17\/full-life-tight-space-consider-narrative-shorthand\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T16:16:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T16:16:44","slug":"full-life-tight-space-consider-narrative-shorthand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2013\/10\/17\/full-life-tight-space-consider-narrative-shorthand\/","title":{"rendered":"Full life, tight space? Consider narrative shorthand."},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n \nAn interesting writing move recently caught my eye in Rosalind Bentley’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/i> profile<\/a> of poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. For lack of a better name, I\u2019ll call it the “narrative overview,” and I now see it everywhere.
<\/span>

In Bentley’s profile, this overview is expressed as a litany of verbless sentences, each revealing \u2014 with brevity \u2014 an important aspect of the subject’s life:
The shorthand of Natasha’s life reads like words plucked from a free verse poem:\u00a0Native Mississippian. Black mother.\u00a0White father.\u00a0Poet father.\u00a0Poet daughter.\u00a0Atlanta and DeKalb public school student. ‘A’ student. UGA head cheerleader. Trauma survivor. Big sister. Decatur resident. Meticulous housekeeper. Proud wife. Exacting professor.\u00a0Historical poet.\u00a0Nobody’s pushover.<\/i><\/blockquote>
This writing move creates \u2014 in a tight space \u2014 the essential elements of the subject’s life story.\u00a0It serves as a bulletin board of items that will be pursued more fully in other parts of the story.\u00a0“Trauma survivor,” for example, signifies the abuse and murder of the poet\u2019s mother by her stepfather.

Coincidentally, I bumped into this passage early in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/i>, by Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, describing the character Melquiades:
According to what [he] himself said…, death followed him everywhere, sniffing at the cuffs of his pants, but never deciding to give him the final clutch of its claws.\u00a0 He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that have ever lashed mankind.\u00a0He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan.<\/i><\/blockquote>
Here, the goal is not to foreshadow events narrated elsewhere in the novel, but to create a quick and colorful backstory that will help us understand the magically realistic actions of the character.

Back to journalism, Tom French included this narrative overview in his feature obituary of Herman the chimp, killed at a zoo in Tampa; a piece that would grow into his book Zoo Story<\/i>:
He was carried across an ocean, installed inside a cage, taught to depend on the imperfect love of strangers.\u00a0 He charmed Jane Goodall, threw dirt at the mayor of Tampa, learned to blow kisses and smoke cigarettes, whatever it took to entertain the masses.<\/i><\/blockquote>
In this case, the author uses the overview as a kind of promise to the reader, a narrative table of contents,\u00a0saying in effect, “Here are some of the cool things that happened to Herman in his life.\u00a0If you want to know more about them, please keep reading.”

Then I came upon Robert Manning’s 1965 piece in The Atlantic<\/i> titled “Hemingway in Cuba.”\u00a0It begins:
Who in my generation was not moved by Hemingway the writer and fascinated by Hemingway the maker of his own legend? ‘Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty,’ as Archibald MacLeish described him. ‘Famous at twenty-five; thirty a master.’ Wine-stained moods in the sidewalk cafes and roistering nights in Left Bank <\/i>boites<\/em>. Walking home alone in the rain. Talk of death, and scenes of it, in the Spanish sun. Treks and trophies in Tanganyika’s green hills. Duck-shooting in the Venetian marshes. Fighting in, and writing about, two world wars.\u00a0Loving and drinking and fishing out of Key West and Havana. Swaggering into Toots Shor’s or posturing in <\/i>Life<\/em> magazine or talking a verbless sort of Choctaw for the notebooks of Lillian Ross and the pages of the <\/i>New Yorker<\/em>.<\/i><\/blockquote>
This move is everywhere, I tell you. And why not?

I suddenly realized its familiarity and utility are almost 2,000 years old, expressed in the Nicene Creed, that act of faith recited in countless vernacular languages at Mass each day by millions of Catholics across the globe. \u00a0I can almost recite it by heart, that Christ was “born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father….”

To use the narrative overview well, realize that it is not, strictly speaking, a narrative at all, any more than the trailer is the movie.\u00a0 Those spectacular or funny moments in the previews of coming attractions are but tiny parts of longer, much more significant and coherent scenes.

So when Rosalind Bentley uses just three words \u2014 “UGA head cheerleader” \u2014 to mark a moment in the life of the American poet laureate, she is not yet transporting us to another place in time, to view a formative scene on the sidelines of a college football game in Athens, Ga. There is no dialogue yet. No revealing details of our poet at an earlier time.

But there could be.\u00a0That’s the versatility of the narrative overview.\u00a0In fiction or nonfiction it can establish a foundation of character and action to be followed later in the story.\u00a0Or it can fill in some informational blanks, building a backstory that will allow the narrative elements to shine more brightly.

Roy Peter Clark <\/i><\/b>teaches writing at the Poynter Institute. His new book is <\/i>How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.<\/i>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting writing move recently caught my eye in Rosalind Bentley’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution profile of poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. For lack of a better name, I\u2019ll call it the “narrative overview,” and I now see it everywhere. In Bentley’s profile, this overview is expressed as a litany of verbless sentences, each revealing \u2014 with brevity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[38],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-roy-peter-clark"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFull life, tight space? 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