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A Guide to
Writing History
and Other
Serious Nonfiction
STEPHEN J. PYNE
H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2009
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen J. Pyne
Packing Prose 1
Part I. Arts
Notes 301
Index 309
Packing Prose
on’t think I invented any of these tangled-up con-
D
glomerations of wood, leather, rope, and metal thing-
a-ma-jigs herein described in my crude way. . . .
There’ve been adaptations and whimsical changes,
and maybe fancied improvement, but mainly it’s
what has been used from the shadowy long gone
procession.
—Joe Back, Horses, Hitches, and Rocky Trails
craft that can turn their theses and narratives into litera-
ture.
This curious omission places beyond the pale of taught
writing whole realms of serious nonfiction that do not rely
on reportage or segue into memoir. It dismisses scholarship
based on archives and printed literature. It ignores writers
who do not make themselves the subject, overt or implied,
of their work. It relegates texts in the field of history, in par-
ticular, to the status of unlettered historiography or unan-
chored prose. They exist only as conveyers of theses and
data or as naïve exposition.
This book is for those who want to understand the ways
in which literary considerations can enhance the writing of
serious nonfiction. In their search for new texts to decon-
struct, literary theorists have in recent years seized on non-
fiction to demonstrate literature’s critical primacy over all
kinds of texts. It’s time for historians, especially, to reply.
History is scholarship. It is also art, and it is literature. It has
no need to emulate fiction, morph into memoir, or become
self-referential. But those who write it do need to be con-
scious of their craft. And what is true for history is true for
all serious nonfiction. The issue is not whether the writing
is popular, but whether it is good, which is to say, whether it
does what it intends. Here are my thoughts on how to make
this happen.
The point is to get the goods to camp; the craft lies in pack-
ing those pieces securely; and the art consists in moving
that ornery mob along. Writing, after all, begins as a verb.
A good guide will furnish lots of examples and demand
endless exercises. See, then show. Study, then do. The ex-
amples vary in scope and intent. Particularly for a book
about books, some samples need space to develop; not ev
erything need be, or should be, distilled into Emersonian
epigrams. While the excerpts presented here come from
real sources, they mostly reflect my own tastes and thus are
biased toward history. Still, in the end, there is no substitute
for writing; and no writing for practice can compete with
writing toward a genuine project, which argues for getting
into what you want to do as soon as possible. Even appren-
tice work should be real work.
So get on the trail. Reading about writing isn’t writ-
ing. And remember the wisdom of fabled packer Joe Back:
when you come to the end of your rope, “Tie a knot in it and
hang on.”
Part I
Arts
chapter 1
In the Beginning, Words
In which we sample some texts and consider why they
might belong with literature, and where, for that
matter, serious nonfiction might belong
My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth
Scott was born in 1766, grew up on the Virginia and Car-
olina frontiers, at age sixteen married an eighteen-year-
old veteran of the Revolution and the Cherokee expedi-
tions named Benjamin Hardin IV, moved with him into
Tennessee and Kentucky and died on still another fron-
tier, the Oil Trough Bottom on the south bank of the
White River in what is now Arkansas but was then Mis-
souri Territory. Elizabeth Scott Hardin was remembered
to have hidden in a cave with her children (there were
said to have been eleven, only eight of which got re-
corded) during Indian fighting, and to have been so
strong a swimmer that she could ford a river in flood
with an infant in her arms. Either in her defense or for
reasons of his own, her husband was said to have killed,
not counting English soldiers or Cherokees, ten men.
This may be true or it may be, in a local oral tradition
inclined to stories that turn on decisive gestures, em-
broidery. I have it on the word of a cousin who re-
searched the matter that the husband, our great-great-
great-great-great-grandfather, “appears in the standard
printed histories of Arkansas as ‘Old Ben Hardin, the
hero of so many Indian wars.’” Elizabeth Scott Hardin
had bright blue eyes and sick headaches. The White
River on which she lived was the same White River on
which, a century and a half later, James McDougal would
In the Beginning, Words 9
Ours is a good age for nonfiction, and the case for it, al-
ways solid, is strengthening. To some extent this reflects,
particularly in America, the recession of literary fiction,
which seems unconcerned with anything but itself. But non-
fiction has its own claims, too. Explaining why the Atlantic
was trimming back on fiction, Cullen Murphy, its departing
editor, wrote: “In recent years we have found that a cer-
tain kind of reporting—long-form narrative reporting—has
proved to be of enormous value . . . in making sense of a
complicated and factious world.” What had once been the
peculiar domain of fiction was passing more and more to
nonfiction. Elements that had once been “standard” in seri-
ous literature—like “a strong sense of plot and memorable
characters in the service of important and morally charged
subject matter”—“[are] today as reliably found in narrative
nonfiction as they are in literary fiction. Some might even
say ‘more reliably’ found.” Revealingly, the scandals of con-
temporary fiction tend to involve novelists who are passing
off fiction as nonfiction (the most notorious recent exam-
ple is James Frey’s Million Little Pieces, but comparable reve-
Art and Craft 13
Those ways are the art and craft of writing. They, not fic-
tionalizing, are the true acts of literary imagination.3