Unsolved mysteries
Last week I said that my feature on Teotihuacan and the Maya contained a writing challenge: There is no answer to the mystery, and thus no natural resolution to the story. I’ve done a couple big stories like this, and I thought I’d explain how I think about structuring them. When done well, I think, stories like this can be even more satisfying than ones that present a clear answer.
Science writing is challenging in many ways, but it has one huge advantage over other kinds of nonfiction: The scientific method provides a built-in narrative. A scientist has a question (beginning), she does an experiment (middle), and she figures it out (end). This is the narrative structure of a mystery, which just so happens to be one of the most inherently propulsive and compelling genres in the history of story telling. Of course, reality is never really this neat, and scientists will be the first to tell you that. Experiments go wrong, they realize they were asking the wrong question, “figuring it out” opens more doors than it closes. But the overarching mystery structure still mostly holds, and you’ll see it over and over again in science stories, particularly those that are about one or a handful of studies.
If your narrative doesn’t have a natural resolution to move toward, you need the other fool-proof way to create tension and suspense in your story. You need conflict. This is another area where science writing has an unusual advantage, because scientists disagree with each other all the time. The foundation of Western science is falsification, which is literally, can I prove you wrong. This means that scientists are unusually willing to talk about their disagreements, to each other and to you, the journalist. Of course things sometimes tip over into the personal and it can get emotionally messy for everyone, but for the most part scientific conflict is contained in the professional sphere and recognized as not only an unavoidable part of the job, but a 100% necessary one. As a reporter, you don’t have to drag it out of people. It’s right there on the surface, driving the whole enterprise.
No-resolution conflict has provided the tension in two features I have written in particular: the Teotihuacan-Maya story, and this story from 2015 about the evolution of the Amazon’s biodiversity. For this style of story telling to work, you have to have a debate that is more or less equally balanced. It can’t be one lone voice against the scientific establishment, with evidence generated by weak experiments, or none at all. (If that’s your story, maybe consider…not writing it.) Multiple voices, with multiple lines of strong, scientific evidence, need to exist on each side. And their conclusions must be substantially different, if not in total opposition to each other. The Amazon was once a saltwater wetland, or it most certainly wasn’t. Teotihuacan conquered Tikal, or it definitely did not.
When I’ve written about debates like that, here’s how I (and many, many other writers) structure the story in its most basic form. First you lay out the question, with as much history and context as you need, with an eye towards showing readers why this debate matters. Then you explain one team’s answer, in a completely convincing way. Readers should fully understand their argument and buy into it by the end of this part. And then, you turn it all on its head with the other argument, which—and this is key—you also make completely convincing. For this structure to work, you need to present the best version of both arguments. This is not the same as exaggerating or making something up, or even leaving out an argument’s weak points. Those can and should be in there! But fairness and balance are absolutely vital in these stories, not just for the usual journalistic ethics reasons but also because the narrative tension will fall apart without them.
In fiction, this intellectual rug-pulling would be called a twist. Another thing our narrative-loving brains go absolutely bananas for! I’ve loved many science stories written this way, and I’ve gotten great feedback from readers on my stories with this structure. In addition to the joy of surprise, it also makes you feel like you’ve learned so much. If you can understand not one but two different explanations of Teotihuacan-Maya history, well, you’ve got a pretty good grasp on those cultures and the evidence archaeologists are working with. The different explanations don’t hinder readers’ understanding of the context, they amplify and brighten it. At the end of the story, the mystery isn’t solved, but a whole world has opened up. That’s pretty satisfying too.