Hello and welcome to this week’s A-B-C of Writing True Stories newsletter.
What is your true story really about? That might seem a strange question, given you’re telling a story about real events.
But asking yourself why you’re telling your story is an excellent way of finding the power at the heart of it.
Finding the universal in the specific
The poet W H Auden once said: “A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”
I’ve always found that a great summation of this point: it doesn’t matter how localised your story is, find the universal and you will touch people anywhere.
I was conscious of it writing The Jigsaw Murders.
My book is about a Lancashire doctor who murders his wife and his children’s nanny and disposes of their dismembered bodies in a Scottish ravine. Forensic scientists from Edinburgh and Glasgow against the odds solve the mystery, and the doctor is tried in Manchester.
Very specific, and localised.
Yet it’s really about the power of determined people working together to overcome any obstacle.
Moneyball is about baseball but really it’s about how an underdog can be a winner in the right circumstances. H is for Hawk is about a goshawk but it’s really about a grieving woman’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her father.
It doesn’t matter what your story is about, the milieu, the characters. What’s important is the universal message at the heart of it.
Tell the bigger story through the smaller one
I was prompted to think about all of this after reading an interview with the American journalist and author Jonathan Eig, whose best known book is the fabulous Ali: A Life.
Eig talks about how he came to write his first book, about a baseball player. His comments are really insightful:
My first book was a biography of Lou Gehrig, the great Yankee first baseman who died at the age of 36 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I was a huge Yankee fan growing up. I'd never thought about doing a book on Gehrig. And I'd never thought of myself as a sportswriter.
But it came to me almost like a great gift. But it's a gift that's based on what you do as a writer. You read other things and you try to learn from them or steal from them.
And I was reading Seabiscuit, the Laura Hillenbrand book, and just loving it, and marveling at how different it was from most other sports books that I'd read. And I was expressing this to my wife. And I was deconstructing it.
And I was saying, here's why it works, because it's not really a sports book. It's about the Great Depression. It's about these characters who you are rooting for.
And the sports part is just the background. It's really just the action that keeps the pace going. And the other thing is that she had all these old newspaper clips to work with.
And sportswriters are covering these events. And she can go back and read the sports coverage from 60 years earlier. So what you need to do is find a sports book that's not really about sports, where it had a lot of coverage, like Lou Gehrig. There's a story that's not really about baseball.
It's about a man dying in his prime. And it just rolled off my tongue before I was even thinking about it. I had never plotted out how could I do a book about Lou Gehrig. It just came out of my mouth over dinner with my wife one night.
And as I was saying it, I said, wow, that could be good. I wonder if anybody's already done that. And then I looked it up and saw that nobody had done it, or nobody had done it well.
And I began researching Lou Gehrig's life. And the first thing my wife said is, how do you get to be his biographer? Don't you need permission? And I said, I don't think so.
I'm just going to keep trying until someone tells me I can't. The idea was important. But also giving myself permission to do it and not thinking of a reason not to do it, that was equally important.
Eig used the same storytelling approach in his book about Muhammad Ali and also in The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution.
This latter book not only tells the story of the invention of the contraceptive pill, but uses this specific tale about a group of determined and stubborn people to explore the much larger one of social, cultural, sexual and political change. It’s not hard to see why Eig’s book has been optioned for television.
You can listen to Jonathan Eig in full here.
Mantra
In 2019 I attended the excellent Well Told festival of longform journalism at Goldsmiths in London.
During a panel about pitching longform ideas to commissioning editors, Stuart McGurk of GQ magazine said: “Tell the subject through the story is always the mantra.”
I think that’s a really good mantra.