Rebecca Solnit Writing Style

Rebecca Solnit writes argument as narrative. The scene comes first, reported straight, and the general claim waits until the reader has already drawn it. Her best-known essay opens at a party on a forest slope above Aspen in the summer of 2003, where the host holds two women back after the other guests have drifted into the night, sits them at his grainy wood table and asks, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books." She answers that there are several. He asks what they are about, she starts on the most recent one, and he cuts her off to ask whether she has heard about "the very important Muybridge book that came out this year."

It was hers. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West had been published that year, and her friend Sallie had to say "That's her book" three or four times before the host took it in. Nine paragraphs pass before the essay claims anything general. Around five hundred and twenty words. The paragraph that finally does it runs to thirty-two words and opens by saying that the confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in her experience, gendered.

That proportion is the technique. Somebody who has just watched a man recommend a book to the woman who wrote it needs no help seeing what the scene shows, so the general sentence lands as agreement, and an argument a reader has assembled for herself is a hard thing to argue back at. The cost is real. Steven Pinker spends a chapter of The Sense of Style on the opposite advice, and the experiments he cites are unkind to writers who hold back: people given a paragraph about washing clothes could not follow it until somebody told them it was about washing clothes, and being told afterwards repaired nothing. She gets away with it because nothing in the scene can be read two ways.

Her other structural habit comes out of her subject matter. A book called Wanderlust: A History of Walking arrives with an order already in it, because a walk goes one way and its stops turn up in sequence, and the sections of an essay laid over a route inherit that sequence for nothing. Take one thing from this page. Find the sequence inside your subject that you did not invent, and let it do the work you were going to spend on transitions.

Named allies, an unnamed target

Sallie is named. So is Marina Sitrin, the houseguest who told her to write the thing down, and so is Philip Prodger, whose book on Muybridge she cites when she corrects a letter-writer. The man at the centre of the essay is an imposing man who had made a lot of money, and later Mr. Very Important. He gets nothing further. The asymmetry keeps the piece off one identifiable person, which would let a reader file it as a private grudge, and it turns each named person into a witness. Name whoever corroborates you. Describe whoever you are arguing with.

Entering at the last quiet moment

The essay does not open on the interruption. It opens on two women wondering why they came, a house they can price at a glance, and a host asking them to stay a little longer so he can talk to them. A paragraph of ordinary evening goes by before anything happens, and it is what makes the interruption legible, because you have to see the room as she saw it, unsuspecting, or there is nothing there to interrupt. Fiction writers get told to enter a scene late. The nonfiction version is later than you think and earlier than the incident. Find the last moment at which nothing has happened, and start there.

A second incident after the claim

The general sentence is not where the anecdote stops earning. Straight after it the essay goes back to Muybridge, where a pedant had written to the New York Times to explain that Muybridge made no breakthroughs in photographic chemistry, and she answers with the wet-plate research behind her own book. Same subject, second incident, claim now visible in advance. A reader who accepted the point in the abstract watches it tested on a case where the dispute is technical and the stakes are small, and the essay proves its own reach without saying that it is doing so. Plan two incidents and put the claim between them.

Titles that make a move

Two of her titles are complete sentences, and both sit on books about who gets to speak. Men Explain Things to Me has a subject, a verb and an object, and states the pattern the book documents. Call Them by Their True Names is an imperative aimed at the reader. Set those beside Wanderlust, River of Shadows and The Faraway Nearby, which are noun phrases attached to books built around a subject, and the sorting is visible from across the room: when the book argues, the title does something, and when the book travels, the title names ground. Work out which of the two your draft is, then look at your working title again.

Counted particulars, hedges kept

She gives numbers where a vaguer writer reaches for several. She and Sallie are forty-ish. Six or seven of her books were out by then. Sallie says the same three words three or four times, and the essay keeps the hedge instead of settling on a figure. That is the part worth stealing: an approximate number offered as approximate reads as memory, while a round number offered as fact reads as a story somebody has tidied. Count whatever you can count. Keep the hedge on whatever you cannot.

Expertise held back

The scene works because she could have beaten the man on his own subject. River of Shadows took the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism the year after that evening, and the topic he was explaining to her was the topic of that book. Standing changes what an incident can carry. Being talked over is a grievance while the narrator might have been wrong, and it becomes evidence once a reader can see she was not. Before you spend an incident, work out what you can prove about the thing you were discussing.

Inductive order

The particulars come first and the general claim comes last. That is the oldest arrangement in rhetoric and the one most likely to lose a reader on a screen, and she runs it in its strict form: nothing in the opening pages of the Aspen essay signals what the piece will argue. The claim, once it comes, is made once. She does not circle back to restate it at the end, where a school essay would, and the last page of the piece is about Women Strike for Peace and the women who were tired of making the coffee. The arrangement asks one thing of the writer, and it is not patience. The incident has to admit a single reading, because a reader who assembles the wrong argument will go on to defend that one.

Concessio inside the scene

Halfway through the party, with the argument still unmade, she breaks off to grant that there are plenty of generous men in her life, and she lists them: editors who listened to her when she was young, her younger brother, friends of whom it could be said, as Chaucer said of the Clerk, that gladly would he learn and gladly teach. Then she returns to the host. Putting the concession there does something the same words cannot do after a thesis. It arrives at the moment a reader is forming the objection, before anything has been asked of them, so it reads as accuracy. Move your own concession to the paragraph before your claim and read both versions aloud.

The route as outline

A physical journey supplies an order the writer does not have to defend. Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost take movement across ground as their material, and a reader accepts one stop following another without asking why this section comes after that one. Jane Alison gives the shape a name in Meander, Spiral, Explode: the meander, a narrative that wants to reach its end and keeps declining to arrive yet. John McPhee got to the same place from the other side. He drew the structure of a piece as a diagram before he wrote a word of it, and Draft No. 4 prints the diagrams. An essay organised as an argument has to earn every transition, and a walk supplies them in advance. Alison's own specimens of the meander run from Murray Bail's Eucalyptus to the single escalator ride of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine.

Anticlimax

The party scene refuses its own best ending. The host goes ashen, and then, in the same sentence, he begins holding forth again. Stopping at the ashen face would have produced an anecdote about a man who got what was coming to him, which is a story with a satisfied reader and no argument in it. Going one clause further turns a private win into a description of something that repeats, because his embarrassment changed nothing about what he did next. Watch where your own anecdote stops. If it stops at the moment you come out ahead, it is a story about you.

Wandering without a route

The essays look free-ranging, so imitators reproduce the freedom and skip the itinerary. What comes back is a draft whose sections could be shuffled without a reader noticing, and that is the diagnostic. Her sections resist shuffling because each one is a stop and the stops arrive in the order the ground puts them in. Before you defend a digression, check whether the paragraph after it depends on the paragraph before it for anything at all. Number your sections, shuffle them on purpose, and see whether the draft gets worse.

Telling the anecdote in which you win

Her scene is one she loses. She is talked over, she doubts her own authorship, and the man carries on undamaged after the correction lands. Imitators reach for the incident in which they had the perfect reply, and the piece stops being evidence and becomes a report of a personal triumph that no reader has any reason to generalise from. The test is what the story proves about the world when the narrator comes off badly. Pick the incident you would rather not have told anybody about.

Explaining the scene while it is still running

Nine paragraphs of party go by without one sentence telling you what the incident demonstrates. Imitators cannot hold out. They write the scene and then, two lines in, add a clause like which was, of course, the whole problem in miniature, and the moment that clause appears the reader stops watching and starts being told. The annotation is usually the writer reassuring herself that the point will land. Delete every sentence in your scene that could be moved into the argument, then check whether the scene still works.

Withholding the point from a reader who can leave

Her readers arrive at a named essayist in a publication they chose to open, and they will give her five hundred words before she tells them anything. A blog post has no such credit. A reader two seconds from the back button will not sit through your party, and the delay that reads as confidence in a magazine reads as evasion on a page with no name behind it. The technique survives the move, but the promise has to move with it. Put the subject in the headline and in the line underneath it, then let the scene run as long as you like.