Today’s bouquet is small so we have more time for the main event.

The word for the day is integration. How can writers of narrative seamlessly weave in background—and message—without ripping disenchanting holes in their tapestry that cause readers to lose sight of, and interest in, the big picture? This question has been on my mind a lot lately, because I can tell it’s on the minds of many authors.

Infodumping is somewhat popular. “I forgot to tell you” flashbacks are pretty common. Halting the story to tell the reader precisely what it means happens regularly.

I am a writer and editor who believes there is a season for every strategy under heaven, so I do not categorically reject narrative asides and interruptions. If I did I would be condemning myself along with many much better writers than me. In fact, there are many times in a story when a well-timed interruption is just what the doctor ordered (to build tension, for instance). Almost any approach, when wielded thoughtfully, can contribute to an amazing piece. And of course, every writer enjoys the right to pursue whatever course they decide is best.

The tragedy is that asides, when not employed thoughtfully, come across as clumsy tack-ons. The information they contain looks to readers like graffiti on a stained glass window or duct tape on a pair of designer shoes. What is intended to help the story has the opposite effect, and the precious writer–reader connection is undermined.

There’s no way we can cover this topic exhaustively in the span of a newsletter, but we can make a start. So I will offer a handful of powerful strategies for integrating background and meaning.

But first the story. I invite you to join me, and let’s see what we can discover.

Ultreia et suseia!

A few days ago I was suffering from a mental fever, and in hopes of outpacing it I went for a walk. My illness related to an interpersonal situation (I am never lacking for “interpersonal situations”); and that day was, I think, the seventh running with my self-imposed infection. From what poorly conceived blueprints are mental and emotional habits like worrying constructed, anyway? What novel or train station or healthy relationship did hand-wringing ever create? Mercifully, my exhausted state of chronic emergency was interrupted by a phone call.

Having always lived in and near cities, I’ve become fond of urban hiking, and when my friend rang I was exploring for the thousandth time the pleasant pedestrian region I inhabit—a jigsaw of suburbs which invite me on adventures in every direction. My area will never suffer the misfortune on being on any lifestyle magazine’s list of 50 Best Places to Live (at least not until the great fresh water apocalypse of 2050), but I enjoy it. There are old and mighty deciduous trees, seemingly numberless parks big and small, rills and ponds, segments of city trails to wander upon, and of course beautiful houses to admire.

Many of the houses are built out of great heaps of somber grey stone and the mortar of history. One has an armillary sphere in its backyard and a tower defending the front (the owner, who was standing on her porch contemplating the universe one day, told me it contained a sauna). Another house has narrow columns and an exterior spiral staircase. Three more have precipitous eaves that sweep almost all the way to the ground. Yet another is an austere stucco cube with a southwest vibe.

So much character! So many different lives being led in so many slightly (or drastically) different ways, all within a three-mile radius. It’s a museum of human experience.

The main drawback, one might say, is that my apartment, the starting point of all these colorful adventures, is situated upon a little arrowhead of residential territory wedged in the shanks of two busy thoroughfares. This means that in no matter what direction I venture on my errant explorations I must begin—and-end—by carefully tiptoeing over the legs of this traffic giant without waking it and being kicked into the next life. But even that’s okay. I’m accustomed to these moments of peril. Perhaps I even subconsciously anticipate the crossings, as these rites of passage make the peace and contemplation which follow all the sweeter.

And anyway other, if less-dangerous detours always await beyond the busy streets. Sprinklers for freshly seeded yards nudge me off the sidewalk. Lawnmowers and leaf blowers shout to walk on the other side. Roofers and siders and pavers and renovators set up cordons for their dismantling and assembling operations, and I must circumnavigate each one.

In other words, adjusting to circumstances is a constant on my peregrinations, because parts of the neighborhood are always in flux. On my walks I encounter abundant opportunities to witness big and small works of beauty emerging from destruction. One project of particular joy and fascination to me has been going on for months: a long and winding municipal effort to crack the sternum and rearrange the guts of a mile-plus stretch of road along a suburban creek, in order to regrade the street and repair erosion.

As I unraveled my personal situation to the friend in my ear, I passed between the flashing barricades that marked the entry to this zone of chaos. It was the symbolic turnstile ushering me into Wonderland. I stepped down the dirt ramp to reach summer street level, which was nearly two feet below the yards on my left and the tree-shrouded creek on my right. I rambled into the phone while I wove absently around traffic cones. I dodged muddy water pooled in the footprints left by titanic machinery. I peeked into gaping portals to the underworld that peered back at me from beneath striped drums. I crunched over arthritic bones of gravel and sidestepped gas lines (or some kind of tubing) that lay like gangling, exposed nerves along one side of the operation.

I’ve always loved construction. I thrill when I can weasel my way (legally) into a place of upheaval to watch up close the descent into incomprehensibility and the slow emergence of fresh order from the churn. Over time, as a new building goes up, or a garden is installed, or even when a street is freshly paved, I feel like I am witnessing a marvel. A cement-smeared prestidigitator in a yellow hardhat crumples up a piece of plain white notebook paper and then, with a flourish, unfolds a wrinkle-free print of Monet’s Woman with a Parasol.

Why can’t everyday life unfold itself just as magically?

“What do I do if—?” I asked my friend, and “What if I feel—?” and “I’m confused by—” And probably more than once I said, “I don’t know what to do.” Subconsciously, what I really meant was that I felt deeply anxious about matters beyond my control, and I wished I could perceive exactly what set of actions and words would yield perfect results in my interpersonal dilemma (whatever those results might be is anyone’s guess—I certainly didn’t know). I also longed for perfect internal calm and a permanent exorcism of all self-doubt and the crippling fear of regret.

If only I had simple burdens like road engineering or designing skyscrapers.

I feel the need to clarify that my friend talked plenty, too. I lent ear as much as I borrowed—at least I hope so. But that person is skilled at responding thoughtfully, and I am not shy about leaning on them for that. I also appreciate their Buddhist sensibility, which I don’t get a ton of exposure to in everyday life. So this person expands my perspective and helps me to lean on myself better—a bit like what a skilled editor does for an author (you know I had to work that in somewhere).

While the two of us contemplated whether we could solve the mysteries of the age or at least of my next few days of anxious living, a secondary and equally powerful form of group therapy was quietly at work on me. The man-crushing diggers parked around me, the story-high mounds of gravel waiting to be distributed, the wavering ribbon of black water and reflected clouds which exposed itself to me at a bend in the road, and the newly laid slopes of pale white stone along that creek all weighed in wordlessly on my mobile talk session. And even though my ego wasn’t listening, my body and soul were.

The romance I have with creation from disorder—with creation and disorder—is preconscious, and I think that’s why the scenery helped me so much that day. This instinctual affinity dates to long before society tried to teach me to see blocked-off lots and torn-up streets as impedances to … what? To a frictionless life of shuttling in monotonous straight lines along paths whose scenery never changes, as I unreflectively complete task after task until the day I die, content in my final moments to know that I was never obstructed in my efforts to hurry up and keep everything always the same?

No: no to all of that. Instead, over and over, I fall in love with disorder—with change, with difference. I seek it out. I find it enchanting, fascinating, hopeful. A healthy reminder of the complexity of life, of its high costs and great rewards. This enchantment partly explains why I love writing and editing so much, because working with words sends us traipsing over and over into the upheaval zones of our lives, emotions, and thoughts to ask, “What flowers can we coax out of this mud? What figure can we sculpt from this clay? What precious jewel is hidden inside this rock?”

However, when disorder arrives unexpectedly, or when I find it festering inside of me, I do not rejoice. Instead I react as if I am drowning.

About a mile after I had left the construction behind (it was a long walk, and a long conversation), in the middle of listening to something my friend was sharing, I recognized I was in the process of drowning again. Hearing his reflective tone made me feel ashamed and inspired. I tried not to lose the thread of what he was saying while I rummaged around inside of myself for a life preserver of calm.

Then, almost in spite of my efforts, my lungs expanded as if I’d received a hit of pure oxygen, and I felt the omnipresent tension in my abdomen relax. It was like the God I believe in reached down and hoisted me by the armpits out of the deep end of my inner wave pool, and immediately I stopped choking and swallowing water.

“Hold on a second,” I asked my friend, halting by a broad, empty intersection near a field dotted with purple phlox. “I’m having a moment. I’m realizing something.”

I think my instincts had the epiphany before my brain did, which is why I didn’t notice it until I was past the torn-up road. Or maybe being able to recall the mess was part of the metaphysical story I had to read all the way through on that overcast afternoon while on the phone with my friend and trying to pick out a perfect path to peace. I think my feet needed to read every chapter—the before, the during, and the after—in order for my mind to arrive at the destination of insight.

My revelation was multifaceted, and I’ll only share one part of it today. I saw that the road was the road the very first time it was poured and steamrolled, but it was also the road while its surface was being pocked and pitted by cars and ice and storms and its curbs were being encroached upon by floodwaters. All this summer, as it has been stripped to the bone, churned, piled upon, and reconstituted from fresh materials into a fresh parkway with new dimensions and slopes, it has continued to be the road. And it will still be the road in whatever state the future finds it. The road always succeeds in being the road.

Actually, I fibbed a little. The metaphor of the road came to me the next day—to my conscious mind, that is. But I maintain that my subconscious was fully aware of the resonance of my surroundings right away. Here’s what I managed to put into actual words to my friend.

What my anxiety had prevented me from seeing was that I was already succeeding in being me. Also, that me was okay in the profoundest sense of the word. Yes, my skills of navigation (topographical, interpersonal, and existential) varied from day to day. My results, too. But this essential achievement of being, and the security that came from knowing it was good to be me, that I was okay*—these facts presented themselves to me that afternoon as unassailable.

All of this was especially true because I was participating with earnestness and willingness in the work of encountering, listening, reflecting, destroying as needed, and building. That is, in the work of life.

I felt, I told my patient friend on the other end of the phone, that I could now embrace whatever came my way with the interpersonal dilemma. Because I already was embracing it, just by being inside of it as a curious, grateful person living one moment at a time.

As I resumed walking, the mute road stretched out before me and vanished in a sweeping arc of maples. I’d hiked this blacktop a thousand times, usually moving under the tacit illusion that I knew exactly what awaited me around the bend. But I never did, did I? And that didn’t ever stop me from taking the next step. Perhaps it was always the not knowing that truly kept me moving.

I’ve been advertising for weeks that this newsletter will contain more than just Adam’s assorted thoughts and recommendations, and today I start to fulfill that promise.

Before we start, I admit that the story I shared (which actually is more of a personal essay) is not without flaws. It has not been through a proper editing process for starters. However, I know quite a lot about the art of words, and I am a devotee of trying to maintain reader attention while constantly interrupting the flow, so I am confident I can deliver valuable takeaways for you to employ in your own storytelling.

This is especially true because, as you probably noticed, mine was a highly interior piece of lyric prose that actually contained very little in the way of concrete action. It’s mostly scenery and reflection with only a few readily identifiable plot beats (walking, picking up the phone as I enter the construction zone, talking, passing by an exposed section of the creek, leaving behind the construction, stopping by a field for my epiphany). So my piece is ripe with opportunities to investigate how to fill in background and message without drawing too much attention to how we’re disturbing the flow.

The strategies I’m about to describe are widely applicable not just for essays like mine but for straightforward narratives. They are also not foolproof. Judgment is required to discern what writing strategy to use in which cases. And like I said, these tips are not exhaustive. This is a sampler of methods you can bring to bear when you want to introduce—and conceal—information that the straightforward narrative does not (seem to) supply on its own.

The best news is that writing is about discovery. Our true narrative path is rarely evident the first time we try to blaze it. So I encourage you to be bold and experiment. You don’t get better unless you practice. Then, wise readers and editors will help you identify what works and what doesn’t, and you will continue to refine your skills.

Okay, without further ado, let’s look at three practical strategies for artfully integrating background information (or a message) into your narrative.

One tried-and-true method for adding something that is not part of a smooth chain of events is to wait for that narrative chain to break itself. Then you can sneak your missing link of exposition or explanation into the minor chaos that ensues.

This interruption could take any number of forms in the plot of your story. A sudden gunshot. A car crash. The main character is smiling and applauding as their partner walks onto the stage to receive a lifetime achievement award, and they suddenly fall to the ground. A bakery employee has just finished putting lettering on a birthday cake and hands it to his coworker to carry to the customer waiting at the front counter, and the coworker promptly smashes the cake in the customer’s face.

To use this last example, you might elect to pull the readers out of the drama for a moment to reflect on the coworker’s history of irrational behavior. More boldly, you might choose to venture into left field about how the protagonist (the letterer) has always loved clowns, only revealing at the end of the digression that the customer is herself a clown and wanted to be hit in the face with the cake.

My “story”—perhaps bravely, perhaps foolishly—interrupts itself at the end of the very first paragraph. I open by explaining that I am in an anxious and confused condition, and I am on a walk. I indulge in some tangled stream-of-consciousness to emphasize my state of mind, then a phone call disrupts my train of thought. I take advantage of the disruption to have my narrator (me) sidetrack into an extended description of the neighborhood I am walking through and its assorted everyday pleasures and detours.

There are also subtle interruptions you can exploit. You might look for a minor shift in the flow of the narrative, for example. A moment of change in a setting or action that has been going on for some time. I do this in the first paragraph of section IV. Story-me has just come around a bend and the river is no longer hidden from view. I can now see it at the bottom of a slope of freshly laid white stones. I leverage this moment to give story-me the chance to sidestep into another reverie, this time about my romance with creation from disorder.

Of course the open secret is that we have installed the “natural” interruption, but it hopefully comes across more naturalistically to readers than our less-careful alternatives.

For example, even if I had chosen traditional narrative format rather than a conversational essay style, I gave myself built-in protection for at least some of the many would-be interruptions in two ways: first, story-me is introduced in a moment of internal upheaval, so that occasional distraction from external events is to be expected; and second, story-me (like real me) has a mind that goes a mile a minute, so it feels natural for the character to spend time inside his head.

This leads to our next strategy.

One of the more common mistakes with narrative interjections is when a writer delivers secondary information in an agent-of-God manner. The background info and/or message is hurled like a lightning bolt from the heavens, cleaving the narrative with an alien voice that seems to know everything but has no identifiable relationship to (or stake in) the characters and events on the page. This Voice’s only purpose is to state facts. This sort of interpolation can be enormously distracting to readers, and it mangles the tone, tension, and general self-sufficient liveliness of the story.

Instead of doing this …

This strategy is less about when to interrupt and more about how to do it.

For example, maybe your story revolves around two former college sweethearts meeting at a thirty-year reunion. The primary action is at the reunion, but at some point you need to furnish some essential background about what happened on their second date during their sophomore year. Rather than abandoning the reunion to spend ten pages telling that second date story in detail, you might stay in scene at the reunion, put the couple in a conversation, then have each of them remember that date in brief flashes between lines of dialogue. Perhaps they remember different details in different ways. Maybe one is only paying attention to how the other looks, and as their eyes fall on various body parts they experience particular recollections. Maybe the other is listening for certain words and phrases, and each one triggers a key detail from the conversation they had on that second date.

As for the particulars, say you want to hint to the reader that one of these characters, who behaves like a pretty good person, used to be terribly emotionally abusive and the second date reveals this—but only upon thirty years’ reflection. But the catch is that the one who got abused is hopelessly in love to this day, so you need to figure out how to communicate their insight into the abusiveness in a way that’s true to the lovesick character’s wiser-but-still-hopeful perspective.

At the beginning of part III in my story, while on the phone with my friend and trying to unravel this personal crisis, I enter a zone of chaos. A detailed and ambiguously unpleasant description of middle-stage road construction follows, as story-me walks down that winding, muddy road.

Then I suddenly go interior again, talking about how much I love construction. But I’ve already (hopefully) created the cover I need for this contextual aside by first providing plentiful evidence that story-me is really fascinated by my surroundings and in particular by built objects. I mention blueprints in part I, and go on for ages about houses and half-completed yard projects in part II, so it ideally feels natural when my mind goes there again in part III.

This interruption reads like one that character-me would naturally make at that particular moment while he lives out the narrative. Hopefully it doesn’t come across like real-world Adam plummeting onto the page to scrawl mystic messages on the wall. A further aid to this project of concealment is that story-Adam is still pretty conflicted about his inner turmoil and is looking for reasons to distract himself from what’s happening on the phone and in his head.

We saved the best for last.

You have probably heard the tried-and-true writers’ axiom “Trust your readers.” Today I offer you a corollary: “Trust your story.” Combine these two pieces of wisdom, keep them always in mind while you’re writing, and you will be amazed at just how much information you can get across without having to elbow your way into the story to communicate it.

Perhaps you’re thinking, Adam is just talking about “show, don’t tell.” Well, sort of. That is a big part of this, but I am tackling a deeper misconception.

Many writers—especially newer writers—seem reluctant to allow their story do the talking. I see this often when it comes to the message. Maybe the writer does not think their story actually illustrates the point (which is kind of strange, since one would hope that the chosen story has some strong resonance with the point it is meant to convey). More likely, the writer (rightly) perceives that stories grow beyond our strict control, and they want to lock that down.

In fairness, there are cases—even whole writing forms—where heavy-handedness is appropriate. As I noted, my story was more of a personal essay. This style is one that lends itself to interruptions. But in such a case the form and the reader expect that.

Traditional narrative is different. As I have said before, if you’re going to tell a story, then tell a story. When you choose this path, the style asks you to take a leap of faith and deliver your message into its hands.

(I say this apologetically, in ignorance of what this is like for parents, having only been on the receiving end.) Your commitment to narrative demands a lot of you as the author. You agree not to barge into your story’s room when it doesn’t do its chores exactly the way you like them done. You vow not to take all its tests to make sure it gets straight A’s. Instead you commit to empowering your story-child to carry its own weight and achieve its own victories.

It goes without saying that you are in store for a lot of the experimenting, feedback, and revising we mentioned earlier, as you equip and train your story to go out into the world.

The encouraging part is that your story, and by extension your connection with your readers, will be so, so much stronger thanks to the effort you invest in this. Thanks to your fierce commitment to interrupting as little as possible.

There’s a sense in which Strategy One and Strategy Two are applications of Strategy Three. But now we are talking broadly about paying very close attention to the plot, characters, and setting of your book, then leveraging opportunities already present in the story that can be used to suggest and imply and say without words all the things that the hovering part of you wants to puppet-master.

Do you have a character who turns into an alcoholic? Instead of just saying so, show them with a beer in their hand the first time, then ordering three drinks in the course of dinner in a later scene, then making a transparent excuse to their spouse about going out for toilet paper late one night and not returning until the following morning, reeking of booze.

Is the protagonist’s daughter having a very bad day? Restrain yourself from declaring that directly. Instead, maybe put them in the classic rainstorm while they’re hunting in their purse for the keys that are somehow missing at this infuriatingly inconvenient moment, and then they jump up and down in frustration.

We can also let setting and language do some of the work.

In my own piece, I wanted to wrestle with the ambiguity and beauty that suffuse the messy process of being alive and in relationship with other humans. So if we ignore all of the helicopter authoring I did for a moment (again: personal essay), when we look strictly at the narrative elements, we observe that I intentionally picked a chaotic setting that radiated the ideas and feelings that character-me was experiencing. There was beauty and ugliness, order and disarray, and visceral discomfort in the choice of language (gas lines like exposed nerves; gaping holes; muddy gouges). Finally, for good measure, I placed story-me on a walk so that he could experience a literal pilgrimage to parallel his interior journey.

Because when the story comes alive, readers can’t resist stepping into the skin of those characters. And if we have done well, our readers aren’t likely to forget it, or what the story means to them—without our ever having had to explicitly remind them.

A slice of life and three concrete takeaways to take advantage of in your own writing. While our primary focus was leveraging these strategies for narrative, tactics like these and the umbrella advice to interrupt minimally and/or elegantly are applicable to many sorts of writing.

Again, this is not meant as an exhausting catalog of strategies for thoughtfully handling interruptions in narrative. We have only scratched the surface, but I hope this gives you food for thought and some ideas to try.

Writers new and old exercise their attention all the time. Carry a small notebook or voice recorder with you, and practice noticing and recording situations, details, snatches of conversation, odd collisions of events and scenery. Practice taking down stuff you don’t normally pay attention to, as well. Make a special point of observing and remembering some of the countless ways that everyday life interrupts itself, subtly and dramatically.

In part you are assembling a library of stuff to later use in stories, in all sorts of unexpected and powerful combinations. You’re also building your curious capacity to notice more broadly and observe how many ways details come together—in real life and on the page.

This sort of attentiveness—and your ever-growing skill to dramatize that attentiveness in artful ways—is at the heart of vivid, meaningful, memorable storytelling.

P.S. – *I have alluded to my spiritual beliefs before. When I say “I am okay,” I don’t mean that as a woo-woo cliché. It is integrally tied up with what I have been discovering about God’s love for me. I feel compelled to mention this as a matter of personal integrity and gratitude. I’ve also placed this statement at the end, however, out of respect for my readers, since we all come from different places and this is an editing newsletter, not a religious one.

P.P.S. - I enjoy genuine connection, so if a thought or question came up for you, hit reply and tell me about it.

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