{"id":1194,"date":"2014-06-29T21:26:36","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T21:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/06\/29\/reporting-and-writing-historical-narrative-author-adam-hochschild-on-accessible-prose-scenesetting-character-plot\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T20:09:11","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T20:09:11","slug":"reporting-and-writing-historical-narrative-author-adam-hochschild-on-accessible-prose-scenesetting-character-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/06\/29\/reporting-and-writing-historical-narrative-author-adam-hochschild-on-accessible-prose-scenesetting-character-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"Reporting and writing historical narrative: Author Adam Hochschild on accessible prose + scene\/setting + character + plot"},"content":{"rendered":"    \n    <div class=\"  core-block\">\n        <div class=\"block block--core block--core-html mb-5   max-w-screen-full mx-auto\">\n            Several years ago,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/authors\/adam-hochschild\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Adam Hochschild<\/strong><\/a>, the acclaimed author of\u00a0<em>King<\/em>\u00a0<i>Leopold\u2019s Ghost\u00a0<\/i>and other nonfiction narratives,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/news.vanderbilt.edu\/2011\/02\/video-storytelling\/\">told a Vanderbilt University audience<\/a>\u00a0that academic writing doesn\u2019t have to be boring. Scholars of history and science \u2014 theoretically any discipline \u2014\u00a0can use basic storytelling techniques without sacrificing gravitas. \u201cI think that even people who don\u2019t think of themselves as knowing (storytelling techniques) unconsciously do use them,\u201d Hochschild said. \u201cWe use them in conversation every day. We use them often very skillfully when we tell stories to small children, because the only way you can get a child to pay attention is if you can make the character really colorful, if you can make the story really suspenseful, if you can make your listener wonder what\u2019s going to happen next. I\u2019m just saying that you have to apply these techniques in writing as well, and that you can do so in writing that meets the highest scholarly standards.\u201d Watch Hochschild\u2019s talk here or read the transcript, which we ran in four parts: accessibility; scene and setting; character; and plot.<br \/><br \/><object id=\"vandyplayer\" style=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"342\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/asset\/video\/flash\/vuplayer.swf\" \/><param name=\"quality\" value=\"high\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"flashvars\" value=\"&amp;streamer=rtmp:\/\/flash.its.vanderbilt.edu\/lectures\/&amp;file=hochschild_110224.mp4&amp;image=http:\/\/news.vanderbilt.edu\/files\/hochschild1.png&amp;skin=http:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/asset\/video\/flash\/vandy\/vandy.xml&amp;autostart=false&amp;stretching=uniform\" \/><embed id=\"vandyplayer\" style=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"342\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"http:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/asset\/video\/flash\/vuplayer.swf\" quality=\"high\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" flashvars=\"&amp;streamer=rtmp:\/\/flash.its.vanderbilt.edu\/lectures\/&amp;file=hochschild_110224.mp4&amp;image=http:\/\/news.vanderbilt.edu\/files\/hochschild1.png&amp;skin=http:\/\/www.vanderbilt.edu\/asset\/video\/flash\/vandy\/vandy.xml&amp;autostart=false&amp;stretching=uniform\" \/><\/object><br \/><br \/><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/03\/24\/meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch-part-1\/\">Part 1<\/a>, on accessibility:<\/strong><br \/><blockquote>Half a century ago, the novelist and physicist C.P. Snow wrote about how these days we live in two cultures, where scientists and humanists seem to have lost the ability to talk to each other. I think today writers and intellectuals live in a different world of two cultures \u2013 one that has to do with whether you are writing for your fellow specialists or for a wider audience. There\u2019s almost an assumption that writing is either academically rigorous and directed at fellow scholars or that it\u2019s less careful and directed at a wider audience.<br \/><br \/>I encounter this assumption in all kinds of strange ways. A number of times I\u2019ve received letters or emails from people who\u2019ve liked a book of mine and have written me to say \u201chow much I enjoyed your novel.\u201d I always bristle, because even though I wish I were capable of being a novelist, I\u2019m not, and I immediately want to write back and say, \u201cWait a minute! That book had 850 footnotes! Didn\u2019t you see them? I wasn\u2019t making anything up.\u201d<br \/><br \/>People seem to assume that if they find something readable or lively, it\u2019s likely to be a piece of fiction. Similarly, I think there is sometimes an assumption among scholars that your work will not be taken seriously if it sounds too accessible. I\u2019ll give you a curious example. Years ago, there was the famous Masters and Johnson study of human sexuality. I remember that, in an interview at the time, Masters and Johnson said that they had deliberately written their first book, \u201cHuman Sexual Response,\u201d in a cumbersome style so that it would be taken seriously by health professionals.<\/blockquote><br \/><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/03\/28\/meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch-adam-hochschild-vanderbiltpart-2-setting\/\">Part 2<\/a>, on scene and setting:<\/strong><br \/><blockquote>An essential ingredient of any writing that is going to reach out and grab the reader\u2019s attention is evoking where the story that you\u2019re talking about takes place. It\u2019s something worth spending a lot of time figuring out how to do.<br \/><br \/>I\u2019ll give you an example from my last book,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/motherjones.com\/politics\/2005\/01\/bury-chains-interview-adam-hochschild\">Bury the Chains<\/a><\/em>, which is the story of the antislavery\u00a0movement in the British Empire. There\u2019s a crucial meeting that takes place in that book, May 22, 1787, when the first interdenominational antislavery committee was formed in London. It marked a real landmark in the history of human rights, I think, and took place in a Quaker bookstore and printing shop in a little courtyard, which is still there today in London\u2019s financial district \u2013 although unfortunately the printing shop is not \u2013 called George Yard.<br \/><br \/>I was trying to evoke this moment, time and place, and trying to describe what the scene was like. We know what happened at the meeting, because we have minutes that were taken, but we don\u2019t have a description of the scene. However, there are building blocks that you can use to put together a scene like that. I spent a lot of time scanning newspapers of the time. I began to see advertisements for other businesses in George Yard. There was a pub there. I saw an ad from a fellow who gave dancing and fencing lessons. These were some of the things that took place right in this little courtyard where the printing shop was. I could not find a description of this particular printing shop, but there is a vast amount of material on what 18th-century British printing shops looked like \u2013 and also a great many paintings and drawings. I spent some time studying books on the history of printing.<\/blockquote><br \/><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/04\/05\/adam-hochschild-vanderbilt-narrative-history-part-3\/\">Part 3<\/a>, on character:<\/strong><br \/><blockquote><a href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/king-leopolds-ghost-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-116580\" alt=\"king-leopolds-ghost\" src=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/king-leopolds-ghost-1.jpg\" width=\"140\" height=\"215\" \/><\/a>The next key ingredient in the trio I mentioned is character. Telling history through a set of characters is by no means the only way to do it, but it\u2019s certainly a powerful one. What works for me is finding a network of characters who, in one way or another, are connected to each other, and trying to evoke a period of history or a story of something such as the antislavery movement through that networked group of characters. I think that\u2019s a powerful form of storytelling because, here again, life itself unfolds this way. Each of us is at the center of such a network. A variety of people have connections to each of us, and many of them have intricate connections with each other.<br \/><br \/>Of course, playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters tell their stories in the same way. It\u2019s never a succession of characters who have no connection to each other that we meet in a movie or play or novel. They\u2019re members of the same family, or they\u2019re friends, or they fall in or out of love, or they\u2019re rivals.<br \/><br \/>So I always go looking for such characters, for some way of finding a web of people through which I can tell a story. My book\u00a0<em>King Leopold\u2019s Ghost<\/em>\u00a0was about King Leopold II of Belgium and his conquest of the Congo, the brutal system of forced labor that he imposed there, and the extraordinary opposition to this system that created the first international human rights campaign of the 20th century.<\/blockquote><br \/><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.niemanstoryboard.org\/2011\/04\/11\/adam-hochschild-vanderbilt-narrative-storytelling-part-4-plot\/\">Part 4<\/a>, on plot:<\/strong><br \/><blockquote>The final ingredient is that of plot. How do you unfold a story, and how do you unfold it in a way that is going to hold the reader\u2019s attention? Here, I think the essence is the withholding of information. Keep people on the edge of their seats. Keep them wondering what\u2019s going to happen.<br \/><br \/>That line, \u201cmeanwhile, back at the ranch\u201d comes, of course, from the clich\u00e9 of the Western movie, where something happens: the stagecoach is robbed, and the villain grabs the heroine off of the stagecoach, galloping off into the desert with her tied to his saddle. And then you switch to another line of action, leaving the moviegoer wondering. \u201cMeanwhile, back at the ranch,\u201d something else is going on.<br \/><br \/>This is the oldest technique in storytelling, switching back and forth between different strands of a plot. Every Shakespeare play does this. Every TV soap opera does this. And so I\u2019m always looking for those \u201cmeanwhile, back at the ranch\u201d moments, when I can leave the story hanging at a suspenseful point, when people are wondering what\u2019s going to happen next.<\/blockquote>\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Several years ago,\u00a0Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of\u00a0King\u00a0Leopold\u2019s Ghost\u00a0and other nonfiction narratives,\u00a0told a Vanderbilt University audience\u00a0that academic writing doesn\u2019t have to be boring. Scholars of history and science \u2014 theoretically any discipline \u2014\u00a0can use basic storytelling techniques without sacrificing gravitas. \u201cI think that even people who don\u2019t think of themselves as knowing (storytelling techniques) unconsciously [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[43],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-adam-hochschild"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Reporting and writing historical narrative: Author Adam Hochschild on accessible prose + scene\/setting + character + plot - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/06\/29\/reporting-and-writing-historical-narrative-author-adam-hochschild-on-accessible-prose-scenesetting-character-plot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reporting and writing historical narrative: Author Adam Hochschild on accessible prose + scene\/setting + character + plot - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Several years ago,\u00a0Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of\u00a0King\u00a0Leopold\u2019s Ghost\u00a0and other nonfiction narratives,\u00a0told a Vanderbilt University audience\u00a0that academic writing doesn\u2019t have to be boring. 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