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THE FIVE RS OF NARRATIVE WRITING
How should we think about writing narratives? In this chapter, I use Lee Gutkindâs notion of the five key ideas central to the practice of creative nonfiction to discuss the basic thought processes associated with this style of writing for qualitative inquiry.1 For beginning writers, this chapter provides an orientation to practical issues fundamental to crafting nonfiction narratives. For more experienced writers, it offers a refresher course in the rudiments of narrative representation and evocation, framing, reflexivity, and âthick description.â2
How I Came to the Narrative Epistemic
I, like so many others, developed my narrative roots by reading outside of the academy. I read novels and poetry, drama and investigative journalism. I, too, was frustrated by the lack of compelling stories coming out of my discipline (at the time) as well as by the general lack of respect for narratives within my scholarly community. There seemed to be a need for a bridge between what I was reading outside the academyâcompelling storiesâand what I was reading in my scholarly journals and books.
I was strongly attracted to academic literatureâgreat ideas, interesting theories, inspired applicationsâand the ongoing conversations about them. I was also dismayed by the tough going that characterized much of the prose that was used to write theory and report on practice. Why couldnât a research-based form of inquiry also be a compelling narrative?
That was when I decided to supplement my academic training in rhetoric and communication studies with work in creative and biographical writing. My first exploration into that parallel world was in a nonfiction-writing graduate class, where I was introduced to the idea of ânew journalismâ under the heading âcreative nonfiction.â
Lee Gutkind, founder of the Foundation for Creative Nonfiction, defines creative nonfiction as:
He explains that creative nonfiction emerged in the 1960s and 1970s under the banner of ânew journalism,â which was an experiment in genre that infused investigative reporting with structural and stylistic techniques borrowed from fiction, drama, and poetry. Gutkind calls creative nonfiction âthe literature of reality,â4 and credits Gay Talese5 as one of the earliest and best practitioners. Talese described his writing as an attempt to get at âthe larger truth,â which is, Gutkind observes:
The above definition and description of creative nonfiction has everything in common with what I call ânew ethnographyâ7: By new ethnography, I mean âcreative narratives shaped out of a writerâs personal experiences within a culture and addressed to academic and public audiencesâ (Goodall, 2000, p. 9).
Later, in Writing the New Ethnography, I hit on the same themes that Gutkind stresses: a focus on meaning; the skills of an investigative reporter; the importance of attention to language; the use of techniques for storytelling borrowed from fiction, poetry, and drama; and, finally, the centrality of analysis based on careful research, reading, and reflective thought.
So why am I advocating that qualitative writers take as a model âcreative nonfictionâ for crafting narratives?
There are five very good reasons. Read on.
Real Life Stories: Representation, Evocation, and Framing
The focus of any good narrative is its accurate rhetorical representation and rich evocation of what happened (or what is happening) in a particular time and place. To make both of these work as good stories and good scholarship requires framing. Weâll begin our exploration with an examination of these three key concepts that shape and inform writing about real life stories.
Representation
Representation is never a simple matter of transferring âtruth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truthâ from lived experiences to the page. Of course, the people named (or given pseudonyms) are those of real people,8 and the events depicted are events that really happened, but beyond those fundamental elements of reporting are important questions of language and perspective.
Language is a Partial Representation of Reality
Finding the ârightâ words is difficult because wordsâsymbolsâdo not have a one-to-one relationship to reality, nor are our choices of word usage ever neutral. When we use symbols to represent our lived experiences, descriptions of persons and events, and evaluations of meaning attributed to them, we select from an array of language possibilities those words, images, and sounds that best capture our perspective on the whole of it. We construct a truth, but not the only truth. We represent reality; we donât reproduce it.
This is an important consideration for writers, because it encourages us to become reflective about issues of representation as well as sensitive to nuances of word choices and images. One way to demonstrate awareness of the representational problematic is to include your thoughts about those language challenges in the story. Another option is to include the views and voices of those others who are represented in the text, either as dialogic partners to the construction of meaning or as commentators on what you have written. Of course, neither of these methods fully resolves the constant challenge of representation, because whatever method you select will itself be made in language. There is no âArchimedean languageâ capable of fully revealing truth. The best we can do is, first, accept that our representationsâhowever richly imagined and imaginatively renderedâare always partial and never complete. Second, armed with that knowledge, we must continue to question our choices and search for better ways to make known those concerns in the body of the text.
Perspective Always Reflects a Partisan Point of View
How do we learn to see things in one way, and not another? Where does our capacity for critical interpretation of experience come from? Why is it that we can be profoundly struck by the insights of writers whose stories open up worlds we never knew existed?
The answer to all of these questions turns on issues of representation that center on perspective. We learn to see things in one way and not another because we are born, reared, and acculturated in a particular way and not in another. How we learn to see and interpret the world is therefore a product of where we come from and who we are. As a Western white heterosexual male of a certain age, child of relative privilege, and product of an elite education, I have a perspective shaped and informed by those accumulated facts of my life. I am, as my cultural studies colleagues put it, âraced, classed, aged, gendered, and abled,â and where I âstandâ in relation to all that I see, feel, know, and experience is shot through with those markers of cultural and biological identity.9
Perspective, therefore, is never neutral and always partisan.
Why is this important? It is important because there is no such thing as an âomniscient narrator,â any more than there is an âimmaculate perception.â10 I see and interpret meaning with full membership in all of those biological and cultural groups and am rendered partisan because of them.
So are you. So is everyone.
Well, then, how should an understanding of partisanship in perspective inform narrative nonfiction? There are a variety of textual strategies used to identify oneâs standpoint, from outright statements such as: âI write as an Asian-American feminist,â to working oneâs personal details into the storyline. The point here is less about whether it is preferable to state or envelope the biological and cultural elements of oneâs representational perspective into the account and more about what you do with them. Perspectives are like opinions: Because everyone has one, what distinguishes them is their quality. What do they enable? What do they constrain (and is the writer aware of it)? How do these details make the story more credible as well as more interesting?
These reflexive moves help the reader evaluate the interpretations of the author more fully. If we know âwhoâ is writing an account and fully understand her or his position in the world in relation to the subject matter, we are better able to judge the plausibility, utility, and accountability of that interpretation.
Robin M. Boylorn provides another writing method for introducing race and gender as an embodied perspective on race and gender in the academy.11 She begins her evocative account with what she calls âA Poetic Beginningâ:
Colorblind
Midnight falls into morning
Daylight drifts into day
And it is there
Where now meets eternity
Where Black fades to white
Where every color under the sun touches the sun
That color is insignificant
That you canât tell where one ends
And the other begins
Here, though
Where I stand
Where I sit
Where I breathe
Where I enter
Here,
Color is everything
It determines worth
Accountability
Fate
me
It labels me
Black
Female
Soul-child
Mysterious
Dark eyed
Beautiful
Brown skinned, girl
In the eyes of the beholder
powerless
vulnerable
helpless
In the eyes o...