Telling the Story
Writer John McPhee taught his students at Princeton to visually outline their stories.
You may have seen the news that the famous biographer Walter Isaacson—he wrote Steve Jobs’ bio in 2011—has just released a book on Elon Musk. It got a ton of press and more than a little savaging by critics who felt he went easy on Musk. I haven’t read the book and have no opinion on it, but I did stumble across an interview he did with Kara Swisher, and that I can recommend.
It’s billed as a “showdown” with plenty of contention—which anyone who has listened to Swisher would expect. In fact, it’s a fascinating discussion between friends on the nature of storytelling. I loved it because it revealed something readers aren’t aware of, or at least something they may not consider as they’re reading.
Nonfiction narratives don’t exist out there like buried objects waiting to be unearthed. Writing a book about Elon Musk or, say, Rob and Kurt Widmer requires decisions about: what factual details to include; which information to exclude (by far the more difficult task); which themes give the story emotional resonance; and how to piece the information together so that it creates meaning for the reader. You may not realize it, but when you begin to read a story about any person, you have an agenda. You don’t want a recitation of the kind of inert facts you’d find on a Wikipedia page. If you’re going to invest 10 minutes or 10 hours in an article or book, you want drama, themes, and a narrative arc. You want to know what makes the person tick, or what makes the subject, if it’s not a person, unique and interesting. Facts are just one piece, and alone they don’t make a biography.
As a writer, when I confront any possible subject, I’m looking to find something unexpected, interesting, and compelling to convey. This is true whether the subject is a person, a phenomenon, or a business. Brewery biographies are a good example. Unless we’re talking about a very old, traditional brewery, the bare facts don’t deviate much. Go to any “About” section on a brewery’s webpage and you’ll usually find a variation of it: the founder’s nascent love of beer, their difficulties launching a brewery, their devotion to craft and quality, and products that are unlike anyone else’s. That’s a story, and it’s not wrong. It may even be very important to the people who work at the brewery.
Any writer will listen as the owner describes these details. They’ll take notes and try to understand the basic facts. But if the writer is clever, they’ll have a different agenda. They’ll be thinking: is there anything here that makes the brewery unusual or interesting? What’s different about this brewery? Instead of building a narrative around the facts the owner provided, they’ll use them in support of the story they’re telling. It will also be a true story—but a more interesting one that gets at deeper truths.
Kara Swisher has been writing about tech for decades and knows Musk well. The “showdown” she has with Isaacson isn’t about the facts of his life, it’s about how to present them. Kara would have written a very different book than Walter. Hearing them debate their approaches exposes this rare sausage-making behind biographies. If you are at all interested in the way to think about and tell stories, it’s an instructive 90 minutes.
Melinda Sue Gordon © Universal Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
What To Leave Out
I will leave you with one final, controversial example: Oppenheimer. (Many spoilers ahead.) Christopher Nolan’s recent opus has been greeted with nearly universal acclaim and should dominate the Oscars this year. Nolan is one of the very best directors working today, and scene by scene, it’s a breathtaking movie. Cillian Murphy gives a spectacular performance, and the section involving the first nuclear test is going to join the Hollywood pantheon of great scenes. Taken as a whole, however, the movie is a mess and a failure.
Robert Oppenheimer’s life is literally too big to film. He was an exceptional physicist; he was a communist; he led the Manhattan project and beat the Nazis and Soviets to nuclear bombs; he regretted the use of his technology; he was a womanizer; he got sucked into a bureaucratic conflict with a petty man and that conflict damaged both. Nolan based his movie on the book American Prometheus, and it’s possible the authors sculpted those facts into a coherent story (the book ran to 721 pages). But even with three hours to work with, Nolan couldn’t capture the scope of such a full, contradictory life
He tries. He begins by trotting very quickly through Oppenheimer’s early life, glimpsing but not developing his bona fides as a theoretical physicist. The middle section, where he leads the Manhattan project, is the meat of the movie, and it’s great. After the first bomb test, the movie’s timeline fragments and quickens as it introduces his trauma following the Japanese bombings and post-war life. We’re in important territory here, but it doesn’t last.
The last act of the movie concerns the fight between Oppenheimer and a minor figure named Lewis Strauss. A few critiques mention the problem here—it deflates the narrative and turns the movie into a bureaucratic procedural. But far worse than that, it reveals that Nolan, also the writer, refused to make the hard choices that would have given us insight into this titanic figure. Scientists come in all stripes. Sure, Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project, but this movie wasn’t about the Manhattan Project. It was about Oppenheimer. So to go back to the question every good writer should ask: what makes Robert Oppenheimer unusual and distinctive? Not only doesn’t Nolan answer that question, but he completely steps on the work he’d done shaping what looked like an excellent answer to the question. Oppenheimer’s ambivalence about his life’s work is the heart of the story—at least as Nolan presents it for two-thirds of the movie.
People may love the movie as it is, but were Nolan the writer he is a director, they would have loved a better version of the movie more.
For anyone who has read this far, I appreciate your indulgence. The very existence of this post shows I don’t always follow my own advice. Writers work in little silos and never get to discuss their process, but this seemed like a timely subject. So I wrote this one to get it off my chest. Special apologies to Nolan fans. 🙂