How (and Why) to Integrate Research into Narrative

Navigating the challenges of weaving information and story. (Part 1.)

All that research waiting to be integrated. Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

These busy past weeks, I’ve been reminded that January is an unsteady beast of a month. The new year gives us the implausible belief that at last we will have order and consonance in our unstable days, even as winter storms, holidays, and respiratory viruses wreak havoc upon our schedules, and the result, for me at least, is often a kind of lumbering chaos. (It doesn’t help that January is my birthday month, which somehow makes me feel more distracted than usual.) Maybe February is the new January? Still: How is the January challenge going for those of you trying to do it? Are you managing to write 15 minutes a day, steadily? I more or less have been, but it’s not always been pretty. The best work I did was a day in Paris, after I extended my trip to have one solo day sitting and revising my manuscript alone for eight hours. Bliss!

A lot of you have asked about integrating research into nonfiction (or fiction or poetry for that matter). I wanted to outline a few ways to think about doing so, over the course of a few different posts.

Broadly speaking, I work with two kinds of writers interested in this question: 1) Scholars or experts who have a lot of knowledge but haven’t been trained in how to tell stories about that expertise to a general public—for example, scholars who want to make the pivot from writing academic books to trade books. 2) Generalists like myself who are skilled in reporting or research and want to blend rigorous research into a propulsive narrative, often a personal one, in the case of memoir, or a general plot, in the case of fiction. (Poetry is a kind of special test case…) Both face the same technical challenges, but come to the problem with different strengths and weaknesses, which I’ll talk about next time.

The First Method: Blending Research INTO Narrative

The first, and possibly hardest, method is to blend the research almost seamlessly into the narration and the thinking mind as it unfolds on the page. (See previous posts on thinking on the page: It is my contention that you have to be attentive to the idea of making thinking a technical quality of the prose before you can actually be good, rather than merely workmanlike, at integrating research.)

The queen of this method, unsurprisingly, is Joan Didion, whose training in writing promotional copy and essays at Vogue and whose deep study of Hemingway’s prose yielded a luminous, exact style in which each sentence contains both information and music. For a good example, read her essay “John Wayne: A Love Story,” and observe how she weaves the biography of Wayne, and a sharp cultural “reading” of him, into a personal narrative; all of it is filtered through a voice that from the start is thinking on the page and inviting the reader to think with it. Crucially, she never gets bogged down in large chunks of information. The information, rather, is largely, if not fully, blended into the unfolding thinking—I think of this as the pie crust method; making pie dough, you have to partly blend the butter into the flour, but not so much so that it melts; still, if the chunks are too large, then the dough is too fragile.

But it might help to think more granularly about how Didion does this, by talking about how she learned to do it. Here is the key: