Writing well involves continual learning. That reminder smacked me in the back of the head after receiving pointed but helpful feedback on the first draft of my book manuscript.
I spent 18 months researching and writing the first draft of my fifth book, Barons, Brewers, and Bootleggers: A Social History of Beer in Missouri. Topping more than 83,000 words, BBB is the longest book yet that I’ve written. It is also a different beast from my four prior books.
My first book Last Bite is a cookbook of compiled recipes from local chefs and cooks. KC Ale Trail, which sold through its first and only print run, assembled profiles of 23 breweries in five cities across Kansas and Missouri, serving as a snapshot in 2014 of prominent regional breweries at the time. Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland is perhaps the closest book to the one I’m currently writing. Yet, that history book compiled a chronology of known breweries in the city from the mid-1800s to 2016 and featured entries that summed up the scope and story of each brewery. Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, published in late 2017 (how time flies), was a regional travel guidebook. All of these books, each published by different publishers, served a specific functional purpose and were quite unlike each other.
Once again, I set an intentional and ambitious goal to write BBB. This book certainly differs from the more brewery-focused Kansas City Beer in my approach to writing about Missouri’s beer history. BBB focuses on the stories of people, the times that they lived in, and their connection to beer or brewing. I wanted to stretch and challenge myself as a writer to produce more literary work that made reading about history both informative and entertaining.
Further, for the purposes of the university press, the book needed to also be a scholarly work that added to the canon of Missouri history and held up to peer review. Ideally, BBB would contribute to a body of knowledge and stand on its own over time. Even so, I didn’t want to write a dry high school-level textbook that would bore me as a writer and lull readers to sleep. Rather, I sought to use creative nonfiction techniques in storytelling that captured the hopes and dreams, triumph and tragedy, challenges and accomplishments of selected people chosen from Missouri’s 200-plus year history.
My first draft of BBB represented the result of conducting extensive research online and reading related books. I dug through primary source material such as city directories, newspapers, county records, and flowery biographical profiles penned about prominent citizens of the time. In a sense, I gave myself a lengthy homework assignment. I relished chasing down facts, synthesizing data from multiple sources, and investigating details and threads like a detective sifting through past lives and questionable sources.
So far, the manuscript that I produced fell short of the mark in terms of style and substance for both my editor and, eventually I realized, for myself. My editor pointed out examples of where I needed to elaborate, resolve questions, and add material. In addition, he pointed out that the manuscript would benefit from more storytelling rather than assembling facts and details in a sensible chronological fashion. It is and was a good problem to have.
Partly, I fell short of my own goal of storytelling because I focused too much on meeting an overall word count for the book. Doing so meant producing leaner more efficient writing that reported rather than spun a well-told nonfiction story. Only later did I learn that the word count was less rigid and the manuscript’s length shouldn’t get in the way of the material. I also grasped after the fact that I leaned too much on my 25 years of freelance writing and reporting experience. That type of writing involves its own techniques and skills. Using a lean and tight writing approach enabled me to hit my word count but sacrificed the rich narrative storytelling that this history book, and the people included in its 40 chapters, deserved.
So back to the drawing board. As mentioned, writing involves continual learning. Sometimes learning means remembering old lessons from graduate school courses. To learn, relearn, and find renewed inspiration, I returned to authors who had success with writing narrative history. Their works proved informative and entertaining, serving as a model and guide for BBB.
In recent days, I have revisited the work of friend and Kansas City-based author Candice Millard, who wrote The River of Doubt, River of the Gods, and other compelling history-grounded titles. I studied books by accomplished writers David McCullough (The Pioneers, 1776, Truman, and more) and Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, Travels With George). Work by my former Emerson College professor Douglas Whynott, such as The Sugar Season, and Jon Langmead’s Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling proved instructive as well.
Here are some writing observations, notes, and reminders that I jotted as I studied these books for style, structure, and technique.
- Writing about facts can still be descriptive in tone, word choice, and sentence structure.
- Context matters a great deal. Providing context is helpful and possible for multiple purposes. Importance or impact – Go beyond reporting and stating. Offer context about why the information or quote matters. Frame the scope of a time, event, or action, for instance.
- Consider the human factor of a decision, interaction, or response to events. Add context in human terms and, if possible, convey how the character reacted as a person. What changed? Pose questions about how they might have felt or what was different from the prior moment. Was this inciting event a first-time occurrence or conversation that shifted understanding in a meaningful way?
- Providing context enables the author’s voice to contribute and deliver a point of view without overshadowing details and facts about the person, place, activity, or event.
- What is the mood of the time? The zeitgeist or prevailing spirit of the culture, economy, and energy of a place and people?
- Character description can include more than physical appearance, extending to physical traits, posture, demeanor, etc. Conveying this requires finding reliable sources, particularly when the person is no longer alive and pre-existed modern media.
- Add description to set a scene and mood. Paint a picture with relevant details and engage the reader.
- As a device, think about other events that occurred on or near a focal event, providing framework for a sense of time, backdrop of greater events, and why it might matter.
I jotted these notes and others down in a journal to prompt me to pay attention to how something is written rather than simply engaging with the story itself. Writing involves continual learning.
To be fair to myself, I didn’t completely abandon these techniques above and others. Mostly, I relied on my habit of reporting for the sake of efficiency. Still, plenty of passages and chapters include lyrical and literary writing when I felt inspired about the subject matter. In retrospect, I need to learn to trust my instincts and allow myself to use all of the writing skills in my toolbox.
As I embark on rewriting and further research as needed, I find myself slowly but surely reinvigorated about the work. Putting ego and emotion aside after receiving tough but helpful critical feedback, I reminded myself to focus on the manuscript in order to produce a worthy book. While time-consuming, the writing and research is the fun part for me as an author. It is necessary to do the work, including rewriting, to tell the best possible story and grow as a writer. That’s the goal for myself and for the readers who will pick up the book one day.
As a friend and fellow writer once encouraged me, “Keep going.”
If you enjoyed reading this update on my research and writing for Barons, Brewers, and Bootleggers: A Social History of Beer in Missouri, then please consider subscribing to my newsletter. Spam-free, you will receive a monthly update that gathers recent posts, news, and upcoming literary events.
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Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite.