Tell Me A Story
I learned my first lesson in storytelling at around five years old. I was playing Skee-ball and another little girl snatched my winning tickets and ran away. I caught up with her and gut punched her after she wouldn’t return them. (This isn’t my finest moment.) I realized that she would run crying to the adults over my assault and it was my job to make sure they knew the whole story. Specifically, they needed to know the sequence of events: the theft preceded the punch.
In case you’re wondering, I still got in trouble.
My self-satisfied, smug, and serenely unregretful five-year-old self understood something about storytelling. The sequence matters in order to understand the priority of the storyteller. I certainly would not have put it this way then, but I will now: her main objective would be to paint herself as a victim; mine, to paint her as a thief. So, we would have two different stories.
What does this have to do with writing?
For academic writing, this order-according-to-priority is what we often call a throughline. Separate from the argument, the throughline is the road you take to prove your argument. The throughline helps you guide your readers through your thoughts so that they can be readily convinced of your argument. In class, I liken it to a road trip: your argument is your destination. The throughline is the route.
Let’s return to the example above. My argument was that I should not be punished for punching the other little girl. My throughline emphasized that I was minding my good business and winning at Skee-ball when she stole my tickets. (I might actually still feel justified about this – sorry not sorry? – but that would be “tone” and we’ll save that for another newsletter.) In order to be convincing to the adults, I had to prove that her theft was the mitigating factor for my behavior, the inciting incident for the descension of my little red mist.
In monographs, the argument may be more complex, but the principle remains the same. You want to figure out the best way to take your reader from what they know to what you want them to know. For that you must ask yourself, what is the best way to tell this story? Or, what story am I trying to tell?
Often scholars will turn to other books to understand what kinds of stories they are telling. How does Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake tell a story? (That book proceeds as an ever-expanding dictionary entry. The wake gets widened from the ship, to the hold, to the weather.) How does Shanna Benjamin’s Half in Shadow tell a story? (This book uses a series of vignettes to remember and piece together Nellie Y. McKay’s career and the magnitude of her influence.) How does Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s Muslim Cool tell a story? (This writer takes us through various cultural touchstones like fashion and music.)
I’ll admit that I often find it difficult to understand my own throughline by looking at other academic books, so I’ll look at fiction. Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell does a fantastic job of moving between the past and the present. I found this incredibly useful for my second book, since it relies on conversation. Sometimes, I’ll look at music: what album tells a story and has no skips? Janet Jackson’s Velvet Rope or the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack or Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing. I found this incredibly useful for my edited collections when I wanted folks to travel from one emotion or intellectual place to another.
There is a caveat or two: First, chronology is a useful touchstone, but it does not solve the issue of throughline. Moving forward through time does not necessarily mean a march toward the more progressive. Trudier Harris’s Saints, Sinners, and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature marches through time, but she does not make a linear progressive argument. Instead, she makes an argument for why – at each point in time – authors find useful the trope of the ‘strong Black woman’ even as it fails in a socio-political register. Technically, Courtney Baker’s Humane Insight proceeds chronologically, but her throughline is a story about how we look at images of Black death, with particular attention to watershed moments of looking. I deeply appreciate Aria S. Halliday’s attention to chronology in Buy Black because each chapter has an overlapping chronology, where the moment she analyzes is critically linked to or happening alongside the moment analyzed after. Her version of chronology is a kind of simultaneity appropriate to the task of examining popular culture. I point to these examples to say, you’re going to need more than the movement of time.
Second, the throughline announces itself in the details. One very astute client likened it to putting the finishing touches on interior design: a pillow here, bringing the colors of the wall into the vase, connecting the shine of a lamp with the lacquered finish of a coffee table, mounting a painting that will function as the centerpiece of the room. Certainly, the throughline appears throughout the text, but it will be most visible in four main places: the chapter breakdowns (if you have them), the beginnings of chapters, the endings of chapters, and the conclusion. These form the connective tissue of your work. These are your opportunities to announce where you have been and where you’re going in terms of your argument. For instance, why do we move from one object to another or one event to another or one character to another? What does this movement add to the argument? What questions does such a movement answer for the person who wants to be convinced of the argument?
My five-year-old self was scrappy with, as is typical for that age, an overblown sense of justice. Children’s justice, at least. Quite frankly, it never occurred to me to lie. Then as now, the throughline – the most convincing one – is above all honest.