Storytellers in remission

This week I spent a lot of time on Zoom with a scientist whose book I have been working on for nearly a year. He has an international publishing deal. The manuscript is essentially finished.

What we were doing this week was reading it as a whole book for the first time, comparing it against the proposal he wrote twelve months ago, and sharpening every chapter title and subtitle before he hands it in.

It is the fourth or fifth book of its sort I have worked on like this, alongside an author. Mostly people I work with are technical experts – scientists, more often than not – rather than people who would describe themselves as storytellers. They are publishing their first trade book for a general readership. They are clever, accomplished, and sometimes a little bewildered by the form.

The thing I have come to believe, doing this work, is that they’re not bad storytellers. They are storytellers in remission. Storytelling is fundamental to being human and never very far below the surface. But academic training rewards its suppression. The conventions that make a journal article credible are more or less the conventions that make a trade book unreadable. Strip out voice, remove yourself, generalise away from human specifics…

Do that for twenty years and the reflex becomes invisible to you. It feels like seriousness. It feels like rigour.

My job, across a year of working with someone like this, is not really editorial. It is closer to rehabilitation: returning a person to a faculty they already possess – in abundance – but learned to mute.

The shape of a year

The shape of the year is roughly three movements.

In the early months I am not editing. I am poking. I am asking whether there is another way to tell this. Ask where the story actually lives, and it’s often not where the author thinks it lives. Not at first, anyway. We find it together, building trust so that the author can try something on the page that may feel exposing.

From one month to the next, we work chapter by chapter. We edit one chapter and discuss the next one before it’s written. And over time the author gets better and better at structuring chapters as stories, rather than mere arguments with examples bolted on. Confidence builds, prose loosens.

At the end – as I said – we read it all, as a whole book. This shows up all sorts of things. What worked well at the chapter level might need to be stretched to reach back into earlier chapters and forward into later ones.

And then we go back to the book proposal that got him (sometimes her) the book deal.

Returning to the proposal

Returning to the proposal at the end of the process is something I recommend to any writer working on a long book. (I wonder how many do it?) I mean, the proposal sold the book. It’s a contract with the publisher and, more usefully, with yourself. Reading back over the proposal now that the book is finished you can ask: did I do what I promised? Did I exceed it? Did I drift?

This week, we were delighted to agree that my author had surpassed what he promised in the proposal. The book is more entertaining, more detailed, more technically interesting. That’s such a lovely thing to discover.

We also noticed something about the proposal itself: it contained almost no individual human beings. Everything in it was pitched at a high level of abstraction. Unlike the book, which is full of people – embarking on missions, taking risks, occasionally failing, often succeeding. It was delightful to see how much more human the book itself was than the proposal that sold it.

I asked if he could explain it. He said he’d not had the courage to put those stories in the proposal, hadn’t wanted the book to seem like a memoir. Then added, with a sort of rueful surprise, that the book actually is a little bit like a memoir. (Ha!)

And with that, he more or less compressed our whole year’s work into a sentence.

The experts are just spectators

One thing came up several times this week.

He was preoccupied by the very senior people in his field – peers, but also (and more particularly) figures he looks up to. He worried about how he was going to acknowledge their insights and claims, and how they would respond to his book. For a moment or two he seemed even slightly paralysed. I reminded him that he is not writing the book for them, but for ordinary readers who have a general sense that the subject is something they might enjoy knowing more about.

The eminent people in his field are spectators. They are allowed, at most, a privileged glimpse into how he speaks to those general readers. They can come and watch, but they are spectators. The book is not addressed to them.

This is a category error many expert authors make. They imagine their audience as a panel of judges who happen to include some readers. The reframe is to flip it: the readers are the audience, and the judges are eavesdropping. That changes who you are writing to, which changes your voice, and everything that follows.

What pictures are for

A similar thing happened with illustrations. The book he has written needs pictures to bring to life some fairly abstract ideas. He had a default reflex about what those pictures should be: graphs, tables, charts, cross-sections, the visual vocabulary of an academic journal.

Which is strange, because I have watched his lectures to undergraduates on YouTube. The images he uses then are dramatic, often beautiful. The talks are gripping. So his instinct is intact, but when the moment the work becomes a book, the journal-article reflex can reassert itself and he reaches for the chart.

My job, across the year, has been to keep noticing where that is happening and gently steering back. And what the year produces, if it goes well, is not really a finished manuscript. The manuscript is the by-product. What it produces is an author who can now catch the reflex himself.

Our final job together was to go through every chapter title and subtitle, one by one. We knew now what the chapters contained, and the effect they might produce on the reader. We could delete the generalisations he’d used as placeholders in the book proposal and insert specifics.

And now he is on his own. He’s handed in the book. The publisher will do what publishers do. The eminent peers will read it, or not. The ordinary readers, I hope, will read it and feel that someone has been speaking to them directly.