Anne Truitt Zelenka

Stephanie Booth has been reading Taleb’s The Black Swan and twittering her impressions. I had forgotten until she reminded me that Taleb spends ample time on the human tendency to engage in simplification and storytelling when trying to make sense of the world. Taleb calls journalists “industrial producers of the distortion” and says anecdotes sway us more than abstract statistical information. His implication in the book (though Stephanie doesn’t read it this way) is that such activities are bad, bad, bad, in that they mislead us and misrepresent reality.*

But we need both, we need the abstract statistical information and we need stories to make sense of it.

The tension in nonfiction writing: Be accurate, but tell a story too

As I’ve been finding a way to express my observations of the webified world, I’ve realized that a central tension for nonfiction writers is between the need to tell a compelling story and the need to accurately represent the actual situation you’re talking about. At least that’s a tension for me, because I always want to wrap up my observations into something that makes some sense beyond just the details and data strung together linearly. And yet I don’t want to write B.S. that has no grounding in reality or rationality or research.

I’ve noticed that some ways I’ve come up with to describe what’s happening, for example the busyness vs. burstiness distinction or the connected age concept, tend to generate powerful responses, in a way that simple accurate and neutral reports don’t. The people who resonate with the story part of it don’t judge it from the standpoint of truth or falsity but rather from the perspective of how well it abstracts out the important parts of what’s happening and perhaps how well it makes an almost emotional case. The people who dislike it argue that it’s untrue, and then they pick it apart piece by piece, noting how it fails to correspond with reality.

How storytelling is like an abstract painting

There is something in that picking apart akin to dismissing an abstract painting because it’s not entirely faithfully true to life. Yet some of the most wonderful paintings are those that take what’s most meaningful or beautiful or painful and bringing that to the viewer’s attention.

Still, the best abstract paintings, in my opinion, come out of a deep respect for and knowledge of and skill in representing reality. As I’m learning to paint myself I realize that I will only produce an important and valuable abstract painting after I have spent years on learning composition, shades of value, shapes, color theory, and everything else required for creating realistic representational paintings.

The problem with nonfiction writing is that people don’t take it metaphorically or abstractly or creatively whereas people expect that paintings don’t always look like reality. People seem to want writing to be nonfiction or fiction with nothing in between. The Bible is the best example of that: on one side you have the true believers who say that it is all true and it all happened. On the other side you have the people who don’t believe and argue against it on rational grounds (e.g., people don’t rise from the dead). The power of it, though, may lie in the middle, in the stories it tells, in which people can find truth but of the metaphorical kind not of the “it really happened” sort. But that’s an argument I’ll make another day, and one I’ve made in the past to my religious friends with little success. Why? Why are we so lacking in the ability to speak in stories without taking them entirely literally?

What’s rationally true, what’s emotionally resonant

By chance, I picked up The Writer’s Survival Guide by Rachel Simon at the library over the weekend and blasted through it. I loved the book, but it annoyed me that she focused so much on fiction… didn’t she know, I wondered, that many people who want to write do so through nonfiction? And then I looked her up on the web today and found that since writing her survival guide she has quite successfully written emotionally-resonant nonfiction herself and she sees how storytelling matters in nonfiction too.

I used to think that being accurate and knowledgeable was the only key to intellectual honesty and success. Now I seek a balance between what’s rationally true and what’s emotionally resonant, and I find more and more I want to tell stories in addition to saying what’s true. Am I saying in another way that we need the left brain and the right brain together? Yes, I am.

* UPDATE: Stephanie points out in the comments here that the quote she tweeted was about the problem of “silent evidence” not about the so-called “narrative fallacy” but elsewhere in the book Taleb calls the narrative fallacy a fraud and says it “severely distorts our mental representations of the world.” My point remains the same: Taleb’s book generally argues against using narration to understand the world.