Craft of Narrative Nonfiction
How to Write History that Gives Life to the Past
Lessons from Isabel Wilkerson’s research and writing process for her book The Warmth of Other Suns
In her book Caste: the Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a new vocabulary to talk about race relations in the United States, the vocabulary of caste, of hierarchy, dominance, boundaries, and untouchability. By framing the issue as an aspect of the caste system, the book forbids us to look away from the associated injustices and inequities. She says, “Caste, because it hasn’t been applied to the United States, allows us to see ourselves differently. It doesn’t allow you not to see the structure of a thing, and it’s time to look at the structure.”
As insightful as this book is, she wrote an equally, in my opinion, more, insightful and delight-to-read book about a decade ago: The Warmth of Other Suns, on the Great Migration of the African American people in the twentieth century, which won dozens of awards and made it to the best books of the year list of every major publication. Before that book, she used to be the Chicago bureau chief for the Washington Post, and won a Pulitzer for feature writing in 1994, for her profile of a boy from the south side of Chicago and her reporting on the psychological impact of the Midwestern floods of 1993.
Among the champions of narrative non-fiction, Isabel Wilkerson holds a special place for her mastery of the elements of the craft and her ability to fuse those elements with a kind of historical analysis that is characteristic of academic historians. In The Warmth of Other Suns, through careful visual detailing, distinctive characterization, and immaculate narrative structuring, she draws the reader into the world of the African Americans leaving the American South for the cities of the North. And I believe the process through which she achieves that effect holds lessons for aspiring narrative historians.
Be attentive to the gaps in history.
In one of her lectures for the book, Isabel Wilkerson said that the people who moved from the South to the North were asylum seekers like any, but they were doing so within the borders, as citizens of the country. There were 6million people who made the journey; the event took place over 55 years; it changed the demographics and culture of the country, yet it was one of the under-reported events when it took place and there never was enough historical research into it.
In her second book, Caste, she frames the issue of violence against Black Americans as an extension of the caste system, as violence against the untouchables. The violence of slavery, the waves of vigilante violence during Reconstruction, incidents of violence such the Ocoee, Florida Massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, South Carolina the mass shooting at a Black church in 2015, and the murder of George Floyd and the many other instances of violence perpetrated by the police, the connective tissue of caste joins them all and makes visible what is common to all but never made explicit in writing or theorizing.
These are instances of unrecognized history. As writers interested in narrative history, we have a responsibility to articulate and verbalize what’s not yet recognized. We have to document what’s been undocumented. And we have to initiate dialogue on issues people have decided to remain silent about.
Determine the number of narrative threads.
The Great Migration, as the name suggests, was massive in scale. But for the narrative to work, Isabel Wilkerson needed a handful of protagonists.
A narrative thread is one distinct element of the plot. It can be defined as a character’s share of the plot, the parts of the story told from the perspective of an individual character. And most of the stories have multiple characters, so more than one narrative thread.
Without the narrative threads, or plot threads, as they are sometimes called, your history book would be like any other academic history book — informative, rigorously researched, but dry — something more effective at putting the reader to sleep than making them identify with the protagonists. And your goal is to make your reader identify with the protagonist, see a part of themselves in your protagonist’s being.
Isabel Wilkerson settled for three people. Because there were three major migrant streams: One was up the east coast, another one down to the mid-west, and one out to the west.
And to make the scale of the migration palpable, she decided to have protagonists who had made the journey in three different decades of the twentieth century — one from the 30s, one from the 40s, and another from the fifties — and who had began the journey from different regions with different destinations in mind. She describes her decision making process as:
“I decided on three persons and three streams. I realized that one person, one story won’t be able to capture the massive nature of the migrations.”
With each thread, she narrated the experience of the character during their time in the South, before they had made the decision to leave, and their experience through and after the journey.
Knock on every door.
Isabel Wilkerson interviewed 1200 people in her search for the three leading characters. Interviewing people, listening to as many stories as possible enriches your understanding of the historical event and experience you want to write about. The stories provide you with details you won’t get to any other way. Those details help you achieve more granularity while writing scenes. You can figure out from the meteorological data what the temperature was on a day when someone made the journey, but what the interviews add to your understanding is how it felt to walk 20miles in that temperature.
For this book, Isabel Wilkerson identified every probable place her ideal subject would visit, that was every place old Black people would visit, and she showed up there. She describes her dogged hunt for people and stories as:
“I went to senior centers and AARP meetings, to quilting clubs and to the various state and city and town clubs that represented the southern cities and towns that the people had originally come from. There are Mississippi clubs in Chicago; there are Louisiana and Texas clubs in California; and there are Baptist churches in New York where everyone is from South Carolina.”
Interviewing can also be used as a method for cross-checking facts and for filling in the holes in a story. If you have a cohort of people who had made the journey together, then you can interview all of them to verify the claims made by each of them. Or when your primary sources are people with fragmented or hazy memory of the experiences decades past, it’s useful to reconstruct the complete story, or as close to completeness you can get, by piecing together the accounts of multiple sources.
Find characters who are open and candid.
When Isabel Wilkerson decided to write the history of the Great Migration through three protagonists, the challenge for her was to select the three protagonists from a sample of 1200 people.
Other than the geography and time, given the complicated nature of the issue of migration, she had to consider other factors and devise some working criteria. She chose people whose stories would complement and counterbalance each other.
The protagonists were also from different socioeconomic backgrounds: Ida Mae was the wife of a sharecropper from the south, George Swanson Starling was a surgeon, and Robert Pershing was a railway worker.
“Access is everything in narrative nonfiction. We have to find individuals through whom to tell the story.”-Isabel Wilkerson.
As a narrative writer, you are always in search of the perfect protagonist. Because that’s the idea of a narrative; that’s where the narrative arc comes from — from the hero who slew the dragon. You want a protagonist who has not only been the subject of a crisis but who has also returned victorious from that crisis.
And there lies another of the quintessential narrative nonfiction challenges: Determining the factual accuracy of the claims made by your potential characters. Because in everyone’s dreams they have slain a dragon. You have to identify and eliminate the people who are overselling their stories. And how to do that? Listen carefully and figure out how honest they are about their flaws, failures, and mistakes. For her book, Isabel Wilkerson says:
“I needed people who were open enough and candid enough about their strengths and flaws.”
Select characters with distinct voices.
The book Warmth of Other Suns is actually multiple books folded into one. First you have the detailed, almost biographical, account of each one of the character’s life and journey. Then there’s all the stuff from the archives— the meticulously collected and organized historical and demographic data — that could have been a book in itself.
Apart from that there are the smaller anecdotes, inter-woven with the main narrative, stories of the “secondary people,’’ as Isabel Wilkerson calls them, people “who would have been the runner-up candidates for the protagonists’ slots.”
With all that stuff in place, it’s probable that the reader would get lost in the thicket. But that doesn’t happen, because as a reader you have the characters to take you through the narrative. Though each character’s narrative thread is intertwined with threads of the other two characters, that doesn’t affect the continuity of the narrative, because of the distinct voices of the characters, which, as Isabel Wilkerson says, a person reading the book would be “able to discern from hearing or seeing a single comment from them,’’ guides the reader through the complexity.
Don’t overdo preliminary research.
If you are a journalist or an academic, it’s easy for you to sit at a desk in a library and read the published literature on any subject that’s of interest to you. You’ll always have some basic ideas about your subject; nobody ever starts with a clean slate.
Reading those papers and books in the library has two probable negative effects. With too much careful attention, they would lead you into academic debates over causes and consequences, over evidence and interpretation. With too little careful attention, you would imbibe the biases and prejudices of the writer or researcher. You would be accepting their conclusions and opinions as truth. And you want neither of those.
Isabel Wilkerson warns:
“If you go in with a preconceived idea or too much information, you might miss something, because it doesn’t sound as fresh or as new to you, because you kind of know it already.”
There is also another element to this philosophy. These kinds of projects take years or decades to come to fruition; it took Isabel Wilkerson 15 years to complete the book. And for a writer to persevere through that long period, there needs to be an eternal supply of motivation.
A sense of discovery, of finding out something novel, some insight or information previously unknown, always gives the brain the dopamine hits it needs to persist.
And when you follow the story on the ground, from people to people and place to place, much like a detective, you get that positive reinforcement, that motivation to persevere, to embed yourself further in the world of the past.
Put the people first.
When I started thinking about writing this piece, after reading the book, the thing I was most impressed by was the quality of archival research Isabel Wilkerson had done while working on the book. I’ve a weakness for the big picture, for scholarly accounts, so that explains that.
But when I read and listened to her interviews, I realized, though the archival work was phenomenal, she regarded the interviews and the stories shared by people as more valuable. In her words:
“The people come first, and then the archives, because the people would not always be there, but the archives would.”
There are logistical and financial challenges to interviewing. We have to meet people at their homes, workplaces, and in some cases in old age homes and care facilities. That involves prior scheduling and traveling. Add to that the cost of recording those interviews, transcribing them, and storage — you’ll be amassing gigabytes of information, organizing it will be hard, and cloud storage will cost you money.
In spite of it all, you should put the people first. People are like living archives, their memories as invaluable as any document or record, and they will speak with you unlike those documents from the archives.
Be empathetic to your subjects.
There is often an unacknowledged power differential between the journalist and her subjects, especially if the reporter is working on social issues like public housing, drug abuse, hunger and malnutrition, and poor working condition. It’s often the case that the reporter is from the upper-middle class and the subject is poor or from the working class. The reporter, with access to a publication — a national or international media house — certainly has more social capital than her subjects.
Though the exchange between them is not entirely zero-sum, the reporter is generally the net beneficiary. The subject shares with the reporter something private to her, making her vulnerabilities public in the process. The reporter, sometimes, brings the subject’s story to the attention of NGOs and civil society groups, which doesn’t necessarily translate to a change of fortunes for the subject. The reporter also wins awards for outstanding reporting, feature writing, and a slew of other journalism awards that make for a good CV. So, the least the reporter can do is to show kindness and empathy. In Isabel Wilkerson’s words:
“Empathy is balance to power. Power without empathy leaves you with manipulation — a horrible thing.”
But this advice also comes with a caveat: The reporter has to remember that they are not trained social workers, and their intervention could do more harm than good. Then, it seems, empathy is the middle ground: Neither indifferent to the pain and suffering, nor overly interventionist.
Blend genres.
Walter Benjamin said, “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”
Journalists aren’t novelists; they are in the business of truth. But literary journalism, as narrative nonfiction is called sometimes, aspires to place them at equal standing with novelists.
Works of nonfiction are often written in a style and tone that’s informative and explanatory. There is a question, a puzzle, a contradiction, a problem that ideally shouldn’t be, a glitch in the matrix, and it’s the journalist’s mission to investigate the underlying cause and explain the intricacies of the workings of a system to the reader.
Similarly, academics have their style and tone. They have their abstracts and thesis sentences. They optimize their writing for their peers in other university departments, not for the average Joe. And their jargon often seems to obfuscate rather than add to the understanding of the reader. Be it sociology, anthropology, or economics, writings coming out of all domains of social science share these traits.
I’ll argue the Warmth of Other Suns is a “great work of literature,” in Walter Benjamin’s definition, because it’s neither journalistic nor academic, though it’s based on primary and secondary sources with roots in those writing traditions. And with that Isabel Wilkerson proves that narrative nonfiction can blend and mend genres.
Identify and get to the core of the story.
When I was reading The Warmth of Other Suns, I understood that in spite of all the complexities and contextualization, the decisions of the people who migrated, and what had gone into those decisions, was at the heart of the book.
Isabel Wilkerson interviewed many people who were the children of these migrants, and it was fun for her to listen to their stories. But in her opinion, these children were disqualified from being protagonists of the story because they were not in the driving seat, their parents were. They were the children sitting in the lap, and the decision to leave was never their. She says:
“If there was any one thing that was motivating me, that I wanted to bring to life, it was what it took for them to leave.”
As narrative nonfiction writers attempting history writing, we have to identify what is it really we are trying to explore and examine. And we have to sift our material through that filter to differentiate what is of secondary importance from what’s at the core.
Read the literature of the era you are writing about.
We have to treat the past as strange and unfamiliar. Reading the literary works of an era would help us understand the themes that dominated the thoughts of the storytellers of that period and the literary tastes of the people who read them.
Isabel Wilkerson describes her process as: “I spent time in the world of that moment. I read books that came out in the 1930s, John Dollard and Hortense Powdermaker. I read work from economists in the 1910s and up, looking at the language that was used by writers and by scholars of the day.”
One of the distinguished literary works of that era, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, also influenced the structure and the themes of The Warmth of Other Suns. The story of the novel, of people leaving the Dust Bowl in masses in hopes of better jobs and wages in the fruit orchards of California, unfolded in parallel with stories of the first wave of migrants of the Great Migration.
Reading the reports published by economists, sociologists, and demographers will deepen our understanding. How many meals people ate in a day? What kind of fuel they used? How good was their sanitary and waste management practices? What was the state of infrastructure and what farm implements they used?
And in a case like this where Race is involved, you would learn a lot about people’s biases and prejudices by closely reading their opinions on the issue.
An author speaks with authority.
In one of the interviews, the interviewer asks Isabel Wilkerson whether she intended “the voice of God’’, the Biblical Tone, in which her book seems to have been written.
Non-fiction books are fact-based, evidence-based. And so is historical narrative non-fiction. There is interpretation in history; history is never purely descriptive. But there is logic to that interpretation, some form of reasoning that can be put into words and defended in a debate. That’s the whole rigor part of things.
Through that rigor, through the hundreds of hours spent in archives, and through the thousand of pages of notes taken from books, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, the writer’s voice would mature into the voice of an authority.
In political science, authority is defined as power with legitimacy. A person with authority is someone with the capacity to justify their actions. And a writer becomes an author when she can justify the claims she makes. Isabel Wilkerson says:
“It’s interesting that the word author can be found within the word authority. You only have that authority when you’ve done the research.”
When we are doing narrative history, where we have characters, who are active participants in the way the story is told, in contrast to the regular academic history in which people act only as sources and not as drivers of the narrative, it’s probable that the writer’s voice would get mixed up with the voices of the characters.
But sometimes, it’s also the case that the writer develops an unique voice as a result of fusion of all those voices. It’s interesting that for Isabel Wilkerson, the voice of the anthropologists who studied the communities of people from where people were leaving, the voice of the economists who studied the changing dynamics in the destination northern cities, and the voices of the all the writers and speakers who commented on the issue, also influenced her voice as the author. She says, “It all gets inside you, and you distill it, and out comes your own voice almost in a new language.”
Always Over-report.
In non-fiction writing, you are going to base your stories in facts. And those facts come from documentary research and interviews.
Don’t hesitate to over-report, to hoard as many cabinets of documents as you can when doing archival research. The personal diaries and letters you read, the government records, the railway schedules, the local news reports, the pamphlets and periodicals, the photographs from library collections, the artifacts in museums, the maps and demographic tables from archives, everything you read and evaluate should make it to your notes, and your initial reports.
Afterwards the task is one of selection and elimination: Which of the facts are essential to the story you are trying to tell, and which aren’t? Isabel Wilkerson says:
“There’s a lot on the cutting room floor when you do this kind of work — as well it should be. Not everything you get needs to go in, and not everything you get is the reader going to be interested in.”
In the first many months, or years, you would be in confusion over many aspects of the book. You would have your notes and initial reports, but you wouldn’t know how to make a coherent narrative out of them.
There would be many questions: Which character’s perspective to tell the story from; which events in the character’s life are pertinent to the central themes or arguments of the book and which events are not; which events from their life you need to include for characterization; which of the events you should recreate as scenes to power up the narrative, etc.
How does one make these choices? Because you’ll feel the temptation to include everything. But that can’t, and shouldn’t, be the case. Remember the one of the previous lessons? Getting to the core of the story? You have to have clarity about which of the arguments and themes you have are important and should be included in the history you are writing.
Structure? Make the best use of what you have got.
The book is structured in a way that the reader is made to move along the characters as they make their journey. Though the journeys of the three characters are separated by time and space, the reader meets them at the same stage of the journey at a time. Isabel Wilkerson describes that as:
“The goal was to have the reader with each individual character at the same point in their lives regardless of the year or the place it was occurring.”
Apart from that, there are also inter-chapters, a special innovation to accommodate the explanatory academic material — on issues like Jim Crow and the history of rioting — to add context to the experience of these individuals. In Isabel Wilkerson’s words:
“These are ordinary people as part of an extraordinary seismic change in American history. And in order to understand the seismic nature and importance of what they were doing, there needed to be this counterweight that would put in context what they were doing.”
As nonfiction writers, we have to adhere to the facts that we have obtained. Unlike fiction writers, we’re dealing with actual facts and real people, and the material we have is from them and from our archival research. It’s up to us to think about how to structure the narrative and how to organize the material, where to begin and where to end.
There will always be limitations, like the limited scope of the experience of your chosen characters. Constraints could also come as unavailable historical records for a particular year or a region or as an absence of documentation on an issue relevant to your project.
Every book will have its unique structure, but we can always gather volumes of material on the subject of our choice. And that’s a good thing in the way that it broadens the range of options available to us, but it also can be overwhelming — the paradox of choice — which leaves us with ourselves to learn how to make the best use of what we have. And I can only imagine it’s going to be hard work. That’s why Leslie Chang advises being willing to abandon your plans.
Don’t think about the big stuff.
As a non-fiction writer, when undertaking such a project — an investigation into a historical event that involved the decisions of millions and continued for half a century — we would certainly feel the crunch of imposter syndrome.
In the first few months of a project of this scale, we would only see an endless list of tasks in front of us, and the thought of quitting would seem more attractive then. But we have to remind ourselves what first sparked the curiosity in us, the inciting incident, so to speak; what were the questions that sent us down the path.
The strategy she suggests is to focus on the immediate stuff. The entire project can be compartmentalized into sub-projects, based on the phase of the research and writing, or depending on the number of characters and periods. And those sub-projects can be further divided into smaller activities.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s words:
“Something this big can seem so daunting when you’re about to begin it that the only way to do it is to do it in small steps. Otherwise you would never do it — it would be too overwhelming.”
It’s similar to the study strategy of chunking, in which the student divides the study material into smaller sections and attends to manageable chunks of work at a time. We for sure have to work on our task management skills.
Aim for immersion.
One of the reasons novels are so popular is that they successfully take the reader into the fictional world with clever use of visual and emotive language. Narrative nonfiction aspires to accomplish that exact effect. The journalistic or academic way of dry factual presentation, and analysis, is not best suited for influencing people at such a deep level that they would be motivated to take action.
Narrative nonfiction doesn’t always have a goal of moving people to action or changing their opinions. But what it can do is make strangers better understand the thought process behind choices and actions of individuals — the protagonists of the story.
By immersing the readers in the story, by making the story visceral, Isabel Wilkerson makes the reader truly understand the conditions the migrants were fleeing when they decided to leave the South and the stakes and costs involved in that decision to migrate, and the process of migration. In her words:
“That’s the power of building a narrative that draws readers or viewers in, so that they feel they are these people.”
- Write to me at: prasadforpublish21@gmail.com. Connect with me on Facebook. On Twitter, I’m @atriontwitr.
Sources:
- Isabel Wilkerson’s contributions to the Telling True Stories (2007, Nieman).
- Isabel Wilkerson On the GBH Forum Network, YouTube.
- Isabel Wilkerson at the John Adams Institute, YouTube.
- Isabel Wilkerson at the University of North Carolina, YouTube.
- Isabel Wilkerson at Yale University, YouTube.
- Isabel WIlkerson on Fresh Air, NPR.
- Isabel Wilkerson at the Boston University, YouTube.
- Isabel Wilkerson on NiemanStoryboard.
