|
|
The Reader Is a Customer
| Article
# : |
11356 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
2,513 Words |
| Author
: |
Arthur Quinn
|
WRITING FOR STORY
Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction
Jon Franklin Atheneum
1986
233 pp., $19.95
In the past seven years Jon Franklin has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1979 for feature writing, the second in 1985 for explanatory journalism. In this book he intends to share what he calls "craft secrets"; he wants to do so by explaining how he himself writes. It is a chief strength of this book that its advice is always rooted in Franklin's own experience.
For instance, when he was working on Shocktrauma (his much-admired account of the rise of emergency medicine) he witnessed many dramatic scenes that cried to be written up, but one in particular was extraordinary. The ambulance had brought in a young man still alive despite a hole in his temple the size of a fist. Quickly the young doctor got his team into action, and within seconds the life support system was sustaining the young man's life. Suddenly the doctor stepped back, realizing what he had done: He was keeping alive not a human being but a vegetable. And yet having supplied support, he was now legally obliged to continue it.
"The doctor stood there for a long time. Once, he reached out toward the respirator, then withdrew his hand. The nurses' eyes followed his every movement. Another minute passed, then another. Finally the young doctor reached out, again, his hand trembling, and turned off the respirator."
This was terrific material. In all his years as a reporter this was "one of the most dramatic moments to which I have been privy." Moreover, it raised a whole complex of important questions, philosophical, legal, and social. This episode, in fact, was so rich, so wonderful that Franklin had to leave it out of his book altogether.
Chekhov's Law
The craft secret involved is called Chekhov's Law. Actually, it is not really a secret, for it was formulated by the late nineteenth century Russian writer Anton Chekhov. "Chekhov's Law specifies that if the opening of a story mentions a shotgun hanging over the mantel, then the shotgun must be fired before the story ends." An audience schooled in Chekhov's Law will expect anyone who coughs in the first act of a play to be dead of pneumonia by the fifth and will be sorely disappointed if he is not.
Chekhov's Law carries with it a negative corollary: Shotguns that are not going to be fired must be removed from the mantel before the story begins. The episode about the young doctor was such a shotgun. This episode raised a whole series of important and complex questions about the realities and potential abuses of modern medical technology. Franklin, however, realized on reflection that these questions were at best peripheral to the book he was writing. Hence the very dramatic impact of the episode "made it all the more distracting, and therefore dangerous to the story I was committed to tell."
Franklin assures us that we will find the application of Chekhov's Law to our own writing very painful. It will require us to blue pencil
...
Read Full Article
|
|
