Review of A Mind Made for Stories

A Mind Made for Stories—the very title makes my heart pump faster and my soul shout, “Amen!” It makes me think of how Sharon Bala's novel The Boat People helped me understand the plight of Sri Lankan refugees earlier this year. It also makes me think of how reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything in 10th grade suddenly unlocked her previous year’s science course for one of my daughters, causing her to burst out: “Oh, THIS is what they were talking about in physical science!” This, however, was not what the book was about—or rather, it was only a small piece of it. 

My favorite teaching books have stories about kids learning and then tell me how to get similar results in my classroom. As I got started on this one, I realized this was not one of those books. Rather, it was theory about how narrative, instead of being the kiddie menu of writing modes, is actually the deep structure of all reading and writing. (Note: An idiosyncratic definition of narrative is used.) But as I read on, author Thomas Newkirk tapped into some of the thinking I’ve been doing about writing—reading it, doing it, teaching it—validating, challenging, and extending some of my thoughts. His use of examples grounded the theory, and his voice embodied the theory, keeping me with him for the whole, enjoyable journey. And I even ended up with a couple of really good new teaching ideas! 

I began to be intrigued because over the last 4 years of teaching AP Language and Composition, I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for nonfiction reading and writing—for the significance of audience, occasion, and purpose; the importance of balancing appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos; and the sheer variety of moves and their combinations available in nonfiction. I’ve told my students (with fingers crossed, hoping I wasn’t committing rhetorical heresy) the opposite of Newkirk’s assertion—everything is persuasion. A description of the sunset is persuading the reader to see beauty where I do. A novel persuades the reader to enter its world, solve its mystery, understand its characters. A user’s manual persuades the reader to operate the car safely and effectively. 

On the other hand, I’ve become more and more convinced that there is a shape to every individual piece of nonfiction—and not a one-shape-fits-all generalization like a hamburger on a bun, or the three-layer square of the (3-point) body with the introduction and conclusion funneling in and out, but something as unique as the voice, knowledge, perspective, and passion of this particular author on this particular slice of this particular topic. This is basically Newkirk’s definition of narrative. I’ve attempted a variety of ways to help students chart or represent capture or articulate this shape, but I’m not entirely satisfied with the result. 

Newkirk didn’t give me a template or final answer, but he did let me know it’s okay to be thinking these thoughts about writing as I read, and write, and talk to students about reading and writing. His initial discussion of efferent (for extracting information) and aesthetic (for effect or enjoyment) writing targeted the false dichotomy between them, because, as he argues, we most effectively remember information when we’ve enjoyed the process of reading it (ch. 1). Suddenly I had language to describe what my AP Language students have experienced with a really excellent textbook, The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric. They’d come back from the first reading assignment saying, “That’s the best textbook I’ve ever read! It’s not even like reading a textbook!” And subsequent textbook reading assignments were never met with groans.

I love Newkirk’s description of all good writing for sustained reading as “scratch and itch”—the author creating in the reader a need to know, and then satisfying that need, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and chapter by chapter basis, whether in fiction or nonfiction (ch. 3). The chapter on the seven deadly sins of textbook writing reinforces that good writing has commonalities across genres, and not just for students. Here are the sins, backed up with examples of transgression and re-writing (ch. 4):

• Flatness. “By flatness, I mean the seeming refusal to create human interest, often in events that were tremendously interesting.” (See initial anecdote of A Short History of Nearly Everything.) 
• Overuse of “to be” verbs and passive construction. On every English teacher’s list of targeted no-no’s, and here it applies even to textbooks!
• Piling on. There are more and less effective ways to list and elaborate.
• Refusal to surprise.
• Lack of a point of view. 
• Refusal of metaphor and analogy.
• Ignoring the human need for alternation.

Future chapters elaborate, such as ch. 6, “On Miss Frizzle’s Bus: Or, How We Really Want to Learn Science.” So by the end, I really had an altered consciousness—or at least an example of an altered consciousness, and therefore permission to pursue my own musings toward an altered consciousness—about, as the subtitle promises, How We REALLY Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts.

And, yes, there were also a few immediately employable ideas, for myself as a reader/writer as well as for my students. One is “a manageable list of features of writing that call for special notice” (p. 41): titles, beginnings, climaxes/key details, extended descriptions, changes (e.g. in direction, setting, …), point of view, repetition, surprises/ruptures, and endings. This could be pasted inside any reading journal. 

One that could be pasted inside any writing journal is “A Baker’s Dozen of Self-Prompts or How We Give Ourselves a Conference” (p. 18): 

• What happens next?
• What does it look like, feel like, smell like?
• How can I restate that?
• What’s my reaction to that?
• What example or experience can I call up to illustrate that?
• What’s my evidence?
• What parts of my prior reading can I bring to bear on that?
• What comparison can I make that makes that clearer?
• Why does that matter?
• What do I mean by that?
• Who else would agree with that? Disagree? What would they say?
• How can I qualify that statement? What are the exceptions?
• How does that fit into larger debates or controversies?

A final one is “Stories of Our Thinking” (p. 49), a more organic, inquiry based structure than the traditional 5-paragraph essay for a literary analysis essay:

• Describe a scene or situation in a text that raises an interesting question.
• What is that question?
• What are some possible answers to that question?
• Which is the most compelling answer to that question?
• How does this new understanding of the situation help you understand other parts of the book?

The book works illustrates this structure using the “careless people” quote from The Great Gatsby. I can immediately think of quotes from Cry, the Beloved Country, Night, and The Scarlet Letter that would do just as well for those books.

All in all, it was a worthwhile read, both in content and as a mentor text—one I’ve referred to in conversations already this summer, and will certainly read again.