{"id":663,"date":"2010-10-21T20:16:52","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T20:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/10\/21\/tracy-kidder-narrative-nonfiction-darcy-frey-harvard-writers-at-work-part-1\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:53:26","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:53:26","slug":"tracy-kidder-narrative-nonfiction-darcy-frey-harvard-writers-at-work-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/10\/21\/tracy-kidder-narrative-nonfiction-darcy-frey-harvard-writers-at-work-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracy Kidder in conversation with Darcy Frey, part 1: "Anyone who writes for a living and doesn\u2019t admit to being very lucky is almost certainly insane""},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Last week, veteran writer Tracy Kidder offered his reflections on narrative nonfiction a public conversation with current Nieman Fellow Darcy Frey. Part of the Harvard Writers at Work<\/a><\/em> series, the talk took place in a packed campus auditorium and was co-sponsored by the university’s Shorenstein Center<\/a><\/em>, where Kidder is a fellow this fall. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his book \u201cThe Soul of a New Machine<\/a><\/em>,\u201d\u00a0Kidder has more recently written about humanitarian titan Paul Farmer (\u201cMountains Beyond Mountains<\/a>\u201d<\/em>) and the surprising story of Deogratias, a refugee from Burundi (\u201cStrength in What Remains<\/a>\u201d<\/em>). Frey, who interviewed Kidder, won a National Magazine Award for his own narrative writing and is also the author of “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams<\/a>.<\/em>” These excerpts from their discussion have been lightly edited for clarity.<\/em><\/span><\/em>

\"\"<\/a>Frey:<\/strong> We have all these different terms: The poster says \u201cliterary nonfiction.\u201d \u201cNarrative nonfiction.\u201d My workshop is called \u201ccreative nonfiction.\u201d Sometimes these classes are called \u201cthe literature of fact.\u201d So, I wanted to start out with some definitions about the kind of work that you do.

I ran across a funny quote from John McPhee, the high priest of this genre, in an interview that he gave to the Paris Review<\/a> a couple months ago, when he was asked what this kind of work is, and he said, \u201cNonfiction \u2013 what the hell? That just says this is nongrapefruit we\u2019re having this morning. That doesn\u2019t mean anything. You\u2019ve had nongrapefruit for breakfast. Think how much you know about that <\/em>breakfast.\u201d

That\u2019s a negative or a nondefinition of the genre. Maybe we can start by trying to craft a positive definition of it. So my first question to you is, how do you define the kind of writing you do, and how does it differ from both traditional journalism and traditional nonfiction writing?

Kidder:<\/strong> I\u2019m confused by the terms, of course. When I first started thinking about writing nonfiction, the term that was current then was \u201cthe new journalism,\u201d which was also inaccurate, because it wasn\u2019t exactly new. I worry about the term \u201ccreative nonfiction.\u201d One of the nice things about his kind of writing… when I was first trying my hand at it in the early 1970s was that it didn\u2019t really have a proper name. It wasn\u2019t part of the academy; no one was teaching courses in it. In a way it was kind of nice, because you could sort of make it up as you went along. There was a wildness to it, or at least you could flatter yourself into thinking that.

They all worry me, but literary journalism worries me only because it takes a long time to know for sure what really deserves to be called literature. So it sounds a little pretentious, or at best premature, to slap that term on it. But what I think all these terms are trying to suggest is that the literature of fact, or factual writing, nonfiction, that there can be more to it. To signify a kind of nonfiction writing in which not only the information but the writing is important.

For me the essence of it is really storytelling, and of course, the techniques of storytelling never belonged exclusively to fiction. Surely there is no single means of understanding the world. I have great respect for people who write theoretically. I\u2019ve learned a great deal from them; I steal from them all the time. But maybe because of my deficiency, which is that the moment I start to generalize, all I can think of are the exceptions — and maybe through early training, all the Dickens my mother used to read to me, I understand the world best through stories. So this is just one little piece of writing. I think they\u2019re all invaluable to us, all the forms of nonfiction. I\u2019m not sure that you really want to define them any more narrowly than that. Is that all right?

Frey:<\/strong> That\u2019s fine with me. It\u2019s funny, because the highest praise now for works of nonfiction is to have someone on the back of your book blurb you and say, \u201cReads like a novel,\u201d which is this nondefinition, although it does give a sense that certain elements of fiction \ufeff\u2013 a dramatic scene-by-scene construction of a story, a sort of breadth of thought and feeling and an attention, as you said, to language and authorial voice — [are] being welcomed into the world of nonfiction.

Kidder:<\/strong> When someone says \u201creads like a novel,\u201d what you want to know as the author who\u2019s presumably being praised is, which novel? One of the things that Tom Wolfe said, I think his main point was that a lot of modern fiction had abandoned the old role of fiction, the former role, the role that people like Thackeray, Dickens and Balzac and all those people played, which was the role of social commentary, and that this had almost by default fallen into the hands of journalists. I think there\u2019s some truth to that.

Frey:<\/strong> And if we could go off on a huge tangent here about issues of authenticity and accuracy, because when you read \u201creads like a novel,\u201d you want to know, yes, what novel, but you also want to know if it’s true. One of the things that\u2019s attractive as a practitioner of this kind of writing is that you do take some of the aesthetic elements of fiction, but they are married to the factual authority of journalism, and thereby the genre gains something from that kind of marriage.

Kidder:<\/strong> Yeah, quoting McPhee again, no one makes rules for everybody, but I certainly have my own rules, which is if I call it nonfiction, I can\u2019t make up characters, I can\u2019t make up dialogue, I don\u2019t make up facts. That doesn\u2019t mean you have to tell your stories in the order in which they happen. Or, as the editor whom we have shared across the years likes to say, the worst sin is to tell the stories in the order in which you found them out, which is tempting sometimes.

Frey:<\/strong> Which is I think one of the reasons why, as we were talking before, you open a travel magazine, and every travel narrative begins, \u201cAs my plane broke through the ceiling of clouds on the way to X airport,\u201d and then the narrative continues in the order in which the travel writer received the information.

In terms of the stories that you\u2019ve told in your books: You\u2019ve written about public education, you\u2019ve written about carpenters and homebuilders and architects building a home, a nursing home, a doctor in Haiti, a young medical student in Burundi. Subject-wise, you range all over the map. How do your book ideas come to you, or how do you go out into the world looking for them?

Kidder:<\/strong> I don\u2019t have an effective procedure for this. I wish I did. I have no right to complain about anything. I\u2019ve had a wonderful run of luck as a writer. And incidentally, anyone who writes for a living and doesn\u2019t admit to being very lucky is almost certainly insane. But the one thing I do find difficult \u2013 and I must say my family has found it even more difficult \u2013 is trying to find the next thing to write about. I haven\u2019t done it the same way twice, it seems to me. The idea for \u201cThe Soul of a New Machine\u201d came to me from my editor, Richard Todd. The next book was my own idea, to write about the building of a house. And then my editor\u2019s wife suggested that I write about an elementary school teacher \u2013 she was one at the time.

What were the other ones? I was looking around for another book and wandered into a nursing home and met these two old guys who interested me. Who else? I wrote a book that\u2019s largely about a small town cop. I met him at the gym. He\u2019s this bald, very loud fellow, very friendly, and at a certain point, he said, \u201cYou don\u2019t remember me, do you?\u201d I said, \u201cNo.\u201d He said, \u201cI arrested you five years ago.\u201d And then I did remember him, but he had hair back then and now he had none at all.

The reason I remembered him was because he had stopped my wife for speeding later that day, but he didn\u2019t give her a ticket. And then I discovered the reason he didn\u2019t give her a ticket was he really hated to give women tickets because he really sincerely hated to see women cry. Although there were refinements to this, because if a woman was already crying by the time he got to her window, he figured, \u201cWell, she\u2019s already upset, I might as well write her up.\u201d This guy was hilarious, but at a certain point he said to me, \u201cCome out and ride around with me. I\u2019ll show you a town you never thought existed.\u201d This was the very peaceful, very prosperous looking town of Northhampton.

I ran into Paul Farmer completely by accident in Haiti when I was down there doing a story for The New Yorker about American soldiers, and I met Deogratias, my latest victim, on a visit to Paul Farmer.\u00a0…<\/span>

Frey:<\/strong> In all your books, though the reader gets the sense that you were able to get enormous reportorial access to your subjects, whether it was a team of computer engineers or Chris Zajac, <\/span>the teacher in \u201cAmong Schoolchildren,\u201d or Paul Farmer of Partners in Health. Do you make it very apparent at the beginning of your projects just how much time you want with your subjects and how ever-present you\u2019re going to be for the next year or two in their lives?

Kidder:<\/strong> I hope \u2013 I think \u2013 I know I\u2019ve gotten better at this. Maybe I should go back to “I think” I have, but I do try to warn the prospective subject about the things that could happen based on things that have happened in the past. I do explain that this is likely to be a pretty large invasion of privacy. And I do this in part because I now know quite well how much better it is for someone to say, \u201cNo, I\u2019d rather not do that\u201d when there\u2019s nothing invested on either side and there\u2019s likely to be no hard feelings, than a year down the road when it might be much more painful \u2013 it would<\/em> be much more painful to have to abandon the project. I have thought of it sometimes as reading people their Miranda warning: \u201cAnything you say may be used against you in my book.\u201d

We used to ask people to sign releases. These releases were a joke. I don\u2019t know any court in the country where they would have stood up, because they essentially said that I can say anything I want about you, including any bad things, and in return I\u2019ll give you a free copy of the book in which I do it.

I don\u2019t do that anymore, but I do try \u2013 I really do try as hard as I can to scare people off. Some subjects are sophisticated, and others are not at the beginning.

Frey<\/strong>: One of the things that struck me so much about \u201cAmong Schoolchildren\u201d when I read it was the density of detail in this book. So this is an account \u2013 a largely chronological account of one year in the life of a single fifth-grade classroom. The teacher, Chris Zajac, and 25 or so 10-year-old students.

Kidder<\/strong>: I think it was 18.

Frey:<\/strong> Eighteen \u2013 starting from September and going through to June. I remember I read one passage and I went back to look at it, and wanted to read it out loud, because when I encountered it for the first time as a young reporter\/writer, I tried to put myself in your shoes, in the shoes of the reporter, and tried to imagine what you must have done to get this level of factual detail in order to then write this passage. So this is just a quick passage about a young boy named Clarence, who ends up being one of the two or three main student protagonists in the book, and Chris is the teacher. Tracy writes,
Clarence was a small, lithe, brown-skinned boy with large eyes and deep dimples. Chris watched his journeys to the pencil sharpener. They were frequent. Clarence took the longest possible route around the room, walking heel to toe and brushing the back of one leg with the shin of the other at every step \u2013 a cheerful little dance across the blue carpet, around the perimeter of desks and along the back wall, passing under the American flag, which didn\u2019t quite brush his head. Reaching the sharpener, Clarence would turn his pencil into a stunt plane, which did several loop-the-loops before plunging into the hole.<\/em><\/blockquote>
It\u2019s just such a wonderfully vivid and visual description. I imagine you probably saw Clarence do that a thousand times in the course of the year, but at some point you saw it the first time you put it in your notebook, or you trained yourself to gather that kind of level of quotidian detail knowing that a year, two years from then, when you were sitting down to write, you were going to need that kind of texture in order to write a fully realized scene.

Kidder<\/strong>: I just remembered something. I often put these things behind me and forget. I spent 178 days in the classroom. There\u2019s 180 days by law of school in Massachusetts. I missed two days \u2013 one I played hooky, and the other I was sick. A lot of the time I had a desk, right near the teacher\u2019s. I think after a while, the kids just thought of me as a big fifth-grader. I realized somewhere along the line that the great danger to a writer, a journalist, whatever I was \u2013 a reporter \u2013 in that situation was generalization. You could summarize a day in a page or two of notes, perhaps, but without the details, it wouldn\u2019t have much importance.

That\u2019s one of the reasons my attempts to read widely on the history of education were sort of \u2013 why that seemed such an arduous thing to do. That is all institutional history. The actual history is unknowable, because it\u2019s taken place in these virtually hermetically sealed classrooms for centuries now, or certainly since the 19th century. So I tried to write down everything that I saw. You know, this little community was pretty complicated. Children that age get up to a lot of different things. It was fortunate that I did that, though. I do remember a very important thing that happened in the course of this year that I didn\u2019t realize was unfolding, but when I went back to my notes, I had what I needed. I hadn\u2019t understood what they meant at the time. I just think that\u2019s part of the job. It varies from time to time. Maybe I could talk a little about taking notes.

When I was much younger, I think I was inclined to write notes about what I was thinking or feeling, and I don\u2019t bother with that very often now, although I don\u2019t turn away from anything in note-taking. No one else has to read it, I just write everything down, but what I\u2019m mostly looking for are what people say, what I hear, what I smell, what I feel tactilely. Concrete information seems of the utmost importance, and not the self-reflective stuff, which is \u2013 if you have this really terrifically detailed record of, say, a year in the life of a classroom, or something even more complicated, you also have really powerful memory stimuli. You will remember how you felt, and you can always make some notes about that later on in the day. I always go over my notes whenever I can after a day of note-taking.

Frey:<\/strong> Is there a difference between the many kinds of stretches of narrative in your books? One distinction I think is, in some of your books, \u201cAmong Schoolchildren, \u201cHouse\u201d and \u201cThe Soul of a New Machine,\u201d you were there and present for the things that you\u2019re describing, the proverbial fly on the wall. In the later books, the last two books, \u201cMountains Beyond Mountains\u201d and \u201cStrength in What Remains,\u201d there are long stretches in which you need to recreate a subject\u2019s past history. I\u2019m wondering if the reporting project is different when it\u2019s unfolding before your eyes and when you\u2019re hearing someone tell something about their history from five, 10 years ago that you then have to render in scene?

Kidder:<\/strong> I think everything I\u2019ve written has required some recreation of something, but you\u2019re right, some more than others, particularly my last book. I don\u2019t know \u2013 yeah, you have to do it in a different way. I guess it was most problematic \u2013 if you\u2019re thinking about Paul Farmer\u2019s past, well, I was able to go talk to his mother, all of his siblings. I searched for some old girlfriends and friends, and so on. I also had the wonderful Ophelia Dahl to fill me in. So I had a really wide range.

My last guy, Deogratias … in a way the constraints of that reporting drove the way I wrote that book, to a larger degree than most others. The reason for that is that a lot of what he told me, the most significant things, couldn\u2019t be verified. I could check dates and certain things that were simply facts, but there was no one to talk to. For instance, there\u2019s one moment in his life where he was saved at the border of Burundi and Rwanda border by a woman whose name he never knew. I mean, there was no way in the world I was ever going to find her. but dragging that story out of him \u2013\u00a0which I\u2019m afraid would be a pretty accurate description of what I did \u2013\u00a0was arduous, but it was really pretty much his story… In addition to that, I went back to all the stations of his life, both in New York and in Burundi and Rwanda, and I was able to verify everything in New York through the people who had helped him and had taken him in.

Frey:<\/strong> One of the fascinating things about the structure of \u201cStrength in What Remains\u201d is that the second half of the book in a way is an explanation for the way the first half of the book is reported and written. We can talk about that in a moment when we talk about structure, but there are long stretches in \u201cStrength in What Remains\u201d \u2013 I\u2019m thinking of the long narrative stretch where Deo is fleeing the civil war in Burundi and finding his way to the Burundi airport and getting on a plane to New York and another stretch where he\u2019s living essentially homeless in Central Park and other places in New York.

There is a moment-by-moment quality to those stretches of writing. We see the park bench that he sleeps under, the actual statue in Central Park that had an effect on him. You are liberal in terms of giving the reader a window into his internal thinking, and I\u2019m just sort of curious what kind of reporting it takes to be able to with confidence assume the internal thoughts of your characters.

Kidder:<\/strong> Well, in that case, because I was going to acknowledge it, as you say, in the second part, ultimately I felt justified in doing that. … I just told that story as he told it to me, although he told it to me in many, many different pieces, my words, but I hope an accurate rendition of the story as he told it to me. Of course when he told me that story, most of what he told me, the most recent stuff he was telling me was 12 years old, a lot was that far back and some was even farther back.

So of course it suffered from the usual additions and deletions of memory, I\u2019m sure \u2013 I just don\u2019t know which ones. I came to feel that none were deliberate. There\u2019s a great writer named A.J. Liebling, whom some of you may have read, who used write for the New Yorker. He\u2019s not read enough nowadays, in my opinion. A very funny writer, and he liked to write about small-time con men, and one of his favorite characters was named Colonel Stingo, who called himself \u201cthe Honest Rainmaker.\u201d At the end of one of those stories \u2013\u00a0I may have the words wrong, but I think the sentiment I\u2019m pretty sure of \u2013 he had been checking out one of Stingo\u2019s preposterous stories and at the end, he said, \u201cSo the story was, in its entrails, true, which is what counts.\u201d

And I felt that way about the first half of that book. Proof is a funny thing, but going back with Deo to these stations of his life, particularly in Burundi and Rwanda, I became absolutely satisfied that this story was in its entrails true. It was kind of a nightmarish journey, not so much for me as for him.

[For more, read part 2 of the conversation between Kidder and Frey<\/a><\/em>, in which Kidder discusses structure, point of view and why he came to embrace writing badly.]<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, veteran writer Tracy Kidder offered his reflections on narrative nonfiction a public conversation with current Nieman Fellow Darcy Frey. Part of the Harvard Writers at Work series, the talk took place in a packed campus auditorium and was co-sponsored by the university’s Shorenstein Center, where Kidder is a fellow this fall. 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