Chapter 82: Under Pressure

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

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This week I am returning to a class I have not taught in several years and I am as nervous as I am excited. Teachers should be nervous the night before class begins. (My mother, who taught elementary school for 50 years and was the undisputed G.O.A.T. of the classroom, was always nervous the night before Day 1, right up until she retired at 78. If you have a teacher who is not even a little scared before the first day of class, find a new teacher.)

The class is an introduction to narrative nonfiction. It’s a seven-week course in which students try their hands at telling stories based not on imagination but on reporting. In a sense it is not so much an introductory class as a re-introduction to the way they have thought about, devoured and written stories long before they ever applied to graduate school. 

Over the years – okay, decades – I have taught over 1200 students, a large enough sample to have concluded that most come to journalism school already knowing how to write but not how to write in the ways expected of journalists. Unaware, or unpracticed in the forms of journalism – see previous chapters for my dim view of journalistic form and convention – they struggle to find a balance between telling stories as they always have and the sometimes arcane ways the field demands of them.

While narrative journalism offers the chance to write as they once did – and took pleasure in – many students, schooled from an early age to do what is necessary to please the teacher (hint: Write. More. Words.), find it difficult to be given what feels like too much latitude. 

Tell me what you want me to do, they all but ask. 

I tell them that I will not give them a form to follow because if I do then only the bravest, most arrogant and foolhardy among them will be able to resist the siren call of doing what they believe will win my approval.
In theory, my new class offers students the prospect of a fresh start after the rigors of the core reporting class they have just completed; a new blank page to fill. That prospect is as thrilling as it is terrifying. My job is to see if I can make them fall in love – or at least in a serious case of like – with telling true, compelling stories. Not articles or heaven forfend, papers. Stories. Beginning, middle and end (though not necessarily in that order) propelled by a single question planted in the reader’s mind: what happened next?

Over the years I’ve changed how I teach writing; I’ve written in past chapters about having students write weekly reporting memos, which allow them to gain ever more control of their stories while, in effect, writing without being self-conscious about writing. But, with the gift that comes with time and distance, I now see that I did not necessarily frame the approach quite right.

Instead, I spoke about the capacity of stories to transport us, about narrative journalism drawing on its analog in fiction by bringing to stories a sense of drama and tension, of stories built upon scenes and character. All correct. And yet, there was something that felt missing, a quality that might allow students to approach the reporting and writing of their stories differently. A subtle difference. But perhaps a significant one.

So it is the spirit of anxiety preceding the first day of class, let me confess that last night I dreamed so vividly of how to introduce the idea of what narrative nonfiction means that I woke up, the dream still racing my head, crept out to the kitchen, searched for a pencil and on the back of a Voters Guide/2022 scribbled one word: pressure.

I do not mean pressure on the writer; writers feel too much already and adding to it feels cruel and counterproductive. Rather, I mean pressure on the characters in their stories. We as readers experience this pressure as we read and respond to it – perhaps by turning away when the pressure feels too great, or allowing ourselves to be pulled along when the pressure feels palpable but manageable.

Let me make clear that I am not redefining storytelling. Instead I am reframing the experience of how we nonfiction writers tell stories by using a different word, and with it applying a different meaning to the experience of writing and reading. Drama and tension, I believe, are the results of pressure. Were I a mathematician I might try to devise a formula: circumstance+character+pressure=drama.

People like to experience pressure. Vicariously. It’s why we go to the movies, read novels, watch TV, listen to podcasts and follow sports to such an extent that we can barely contain our anxiety as the clock ticks down and our team is trailing but poised to take the lead. It is not merely an approximation of pressure; it feels real. So it is that when characters in stories face perils, we are alongside facing them too. If they die we are heartbroken and turn to friends and loved ones to commiserate; but I loved him and they were so good together.

We want storytellers to provide these experiences, to allow us to feel emotionally what is not, strictly speaking, happening to us. Stories give us a respite from the very real pressures we carry with us and whose outcomes can, in fact, alter our lives. We want storytellers to jerk us around, toy with us, manipulate, torment, tease, thrill, and hurt us. We want them to apply pressure to people we feel we know so that we can look on and, if we like them, hope for the best. 

A novelist friend once told me that the trick to his work is to get his characters up and moving. And in the course of doing so he quite deliberately begins moving them in directions where they will encounter pressure. The pressure will force them to react, and those reactions will propel his story.

Journalists, by dint of their training and culture, are trained to gather and present information, as well as to persuade, present arguments, and offer points of view. Some of us are skilled at playing at the heartstrings. And while we are adept at identifying points of pressure in characters' lives, we do not always embrace the idea that we have the power to apply that pressure as we choose, to achieve an effect, to connect not just intellectually with readers but emotionally. 

The trick, of course, lies in knowing how, sensing when it’s time to ease off the throttle and when to floor it.

My first, pre-class assignment was to have each student share on a doc a story that they loved. A link, a title, the author’s name, how they discovered it, and why they loved it. One student wrote to ask what kind of story I meant because she didn’t want to do the assignment wrong. I assured her that that was not possible, that whatever she chose would be fine because she loved it.

Tomorrow I will come to class and we will talk about the stories they chose. I am eager to hear why and eager too, to see whether in the reading they found themselves experiencing the pressure applied by the writer to the characters, and whether discomfiting as it might have been it made the experience better.

It is 6PM, the night before. I’ll continue tomorrow…and let you know. 

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Class ended 25 minutes ago and what made it terrific was not just the range of stories the students posted, but the ease, grace, and authority with which they explained their choices. These kids can write – even though at the moment they are not feeling all that good about their writing. Ah, youth.

Everyone of them nailed it, and when I asked how long it had taken them to write these 150 or so words, most said 10 to 15 minutes. No surprise there: they possess the writing skills; after all they’ve been doing it for 20 years. It’s the reporting that lags, and right now feels so out of whack with their ability to write. 

We then turned to the stories they chose, and lo and behold, there it was: pressure. In each instance there was a moment, a scene, when a reporter had observed a character under pressure:  spilled coffee on a subway car; holding forth with agonizing self-regard in a bar; a voyage to the bottom of the ocean. Each writer made the pressure feel vivid, and as a result succeeded in so effectively transporting a student to that moment that they had fallen in love with a story.

Next week the students come in with scenes achieved through their own reporting. I wonder whether they will spot the pressure and how they use their already strong writing gifts to capture it.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.