Ideas and Details

As some­one who has been a class­room teacher of ele­men­tary, high school, col­lege, and master’s degree stu­dents, I some­times point out to fel­low edu­ca­tors that we may con­vey the notion that fic­tion writ­ing must be dra­mat­ic and com­pelling but non­fic­tion writ­ing can be bor­ing. I’ve used a pic­ture book that my broth­er and I wrote about ani­mals—Water Hole Wait­ing (Green­wil­low Books) — to show the pow­er of details in non­fic­tion: how inter­est­ing verbs and metaphors, for exam­ple, can pull read­ers into pay­ing atten­tion to real things. (After all, School Library Jour­nal called our book “a gem for writ­ing teachers.”)

What I didn’t grap­ple with as much in those writ­ing work­shops and pre­sen­ta­tions was the trait of orga­ni­za­tion. But it can be a doozy! Once we’ve cap­tured ter­rif­ic details, we still have to be stitch them togeth­er in pleas­ing ways. We can start by look­ing at var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tion­al schemes that pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers have found. (Pic­ture books are par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for this hunt, since they don’t have a myr­i­ad of threads to poke through.)

Fic­tion writ­ers use plot insights to give scenes shape. Some non­fic­tion books now bor­row com­mon fic­tion orga­niz­ing tech­niques — for exam­ple, pat­terns of three. Non­fic­tion pic­ture book biogra­phies were once usu­al­ly orga­nized birth-to-death. Some still are. But a more com­mon pat­tern now is what one of my VCFA stu­dent essays called “seed-to-tree”: the book opens with a scene from the person’s life that shows a pas­sion or skill or dream that (in spite of adver­si­ty in the mid­dle of the book) ends in some kind of tri­umphant dis­cov­ery or accom­plish­ment on the last page or pages.

But a par­tic­u­lar­ly hard chal­lenge for orga­ni­za­tion is writ­ing about ideas.

Of course, there are teacher tools. If you do a search for “graph­ic orga­niz­ers for writ­ing,” you know what I mean. But those tools can also get in the way. When I was teach­ing writ­ing to col­lege stu­dents, I had to grap­ple with an over-reliance on the five-para­graph essay.