Stories that teach
How to get readers interested in the nuances of complex debates over climate policy? Yawn. Unless, maybe, you start your story like this:
A typhoon has hit Manila during a UN climate summit, and world leaders are stuck in the basement of a Manila hotel. The American president has a psychological meltdown after a tree crashes through the evacuation bus, killing the driver ...
Fiction & narrative nonfiction techniques
It's easier to do this in fiction, of course—and indeed, this text we workshopped this month was a chapter from a forthcoming novel written to help explain climate science and policy. But even just reading fiction—and better yet, trying to write it—is a great way to learn how to tell effective stories that are true, too. Some of the best science writers adapt the storytelling techniques of novelists to the factual writing of narrative nonfiction. Doing so helps steer clear of the trap of didacticism—the top-down lecturing mode into which science communication can easily fall. Especially when the topic is something that's important, but that an everyday audience is likely to find boring or "too hard", storytelling is a communication vehicle that can come to the rescue.
Food is also a science story
Along with dramatic storytelling, another way to seduce readers is apparently to appeal to their stomachs. This month we also workshopped a few more short texts that participants had written for last month's "2 levels" exercise—trying to write two versions of the same text (see "Writing for kids makes us better science writers for adults"). As it happened, both of these texts tried to use stories about food to teach science:
- "Materiality is a potpie"
- "The biochemistry of miso"
Just for fun, here's an outtake from the latter—the version for kids. Join the workshop spirit: How would you try tweaking this to make it better?
... In Japan, people learned that they could first cook some beans, then put the beans in a wooden box, then sprinkle some nice mold on top, mix it up, and then close the box and let it just sit there for long time—a really long time, like, many weeks.
During that time, what’s happening inside the box? Remember the example of mold growing on a piece of bread. The mold eats the bread. Just the same, in the box the mold is eating the beans.
But molds eat in a funny way. Molds don’t have mouths with teeth, and they don’t have stomachs.
Instead of teeth, molds have lots of little machines on them, like tiny robots, called digestive enzymes. These tiny robots break the beans into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces include parts of proteins, just like in cooked meat, which taste good. They also include sugars—yum. So the mold’s tiny robots dothe hard work of breaking the beans into tastier pieces for us, which is similar to what happens when we cook meat. ...
—Trevor Corson
Image: Matt Cole, Vecteezy