Speaker: Tom French
Session: Serial Narratives: The Mechanics of Unfolding
Dec. 1, 2001, 3:30 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.

Colleagues:

Tom French, who specializes in writing serial narratives for the St.
Petersburg Times, is a beefy, broad-shouldered guy with a thick wave of
silver-black hair. I figured him for 45, give or take. He grew up a story
lover, he said -- a kid who read by flashlight under the covers -- in the
home of a "story saboteur." His father would decide whether to read a book
by going directly to the last page; when he took his kids to the movies,
they'd walk in midway through the film, watch the second half, sit through
the intermission, then watch the beginning. French would plead with the old
man to respect writers' intentions, but his father was the sort of guy who
just had to get straight to the bottom line. French said his whole career
-- writing and publishing narratives one chapter at a time -- was probably
"an elaborate attempt to get my father to read a story from beginning to end."

The three most beautiful words in English, French said, are not "I love
you" but "to be continued." His talk was an argument for the power of the
of the slowly unfolding story -- the wait, the suspense (though I don't
think he ever used the word cliffhanger). The world in general, and the
newsroom in particular, are like his father -- let's get to the point, cut
to the chase, what's the bottom line? But the faster life gets, French
said, the more powerful it is when a writer or director makes you wait to
see what happens next. We all long for completion, he said, and a
writer can use that longing to advantage. He offered a couple of
interesting reasons why this may be true: one is that slowly unfolding
narrative is closer to the rhythms of real life. Another (which I hope I'm
not overstating here) is that when readers consume a story in discrete
chunks, their sleep and dreams -- their subconscious, I guess -- come into
play so they process it in a deeper way.

French offered a number of tips to writers who would master the techniques
of storytelling. Here's a partial list:

1. Study the stories all around you.

2. Find a simple frame for your story.

This was French's way of saying "focus down, be specific." Don't write
about high school football, write about one team for one season (or maybe
even one player for one game). The bigger and more complex the themes or
issues you want to deal with, the smaller and more focused your frame needs
to be.

Every story has one -- the unanswered question that pulls the reader
through. In the movie Jaws the question is: which characters will
survive and which will end up as shark food? In a series French did on a
woman who was into all things paranormal, the engine was: is she crazy? You
have to identify your story's engine, know how it functions, and then use
it to propel your narrative from day to day.

4. Gain altitude.

This one French said he learned from Poynter's Roy Peter Clark. The idea, if I
understood him right, was that once in a while a writer needs to rise above
the particulars of the story to look down and see what it all means. It
sounded good when he said it that way, but when he read an example, from
the story about the crazy (?) paranormal woman, it struck me as
thumbsucking and I had to wonder whether it really helped. The facts of the
story, as French related them, were spectacular -- writer's gold -- and it
seemed to me they would have done the job fine all by themselves. I wished
I could have picked up a copy of the series on the way out -- something to
think about for future conferences, maybe.

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Jack Hart
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