Writing that Flows Like a River

What You’ll Learn

Kim Trevathan is the author of three books in which he canoed some of the South’s longest waterways. In this episode, he gives a preview of his sessions at the upcoming StoryConnect conference where he’ll be talking about beginning and ending stories strongly, as well as five ways to improve your written storytelling skills.

Guest Speaker

Kim Trevathan

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Andy Johns: What are some ways that you can improve your written storytelling? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer Utility Resources, and I’m joined on this episode by Kim Trevathan, an author and writing professor at Maryville College who is also one of our speakers at the StoryConnect Conference. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But Kim, thanks for joining me.

Kim Trevanthan: Well, thanks for having me.

Andy Johns: So this is kind of fun for me. I had read a couple of Kim’s books a few years back about his paddles on the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River. So we’ll try not to geek out too much on that and focus on the writing. But Kim will be the writing instructor that we’re having at our StoryConnect Conference and Workshop coming up in Gatlinburg, March 8 to 10. If you have not registered, there is still time. The hotel rooms are getting a little scarce, but you should still be able to find a spot to stay. And StoryConnect.com has all of the details. Kim will be joining Robin Conover, who was on a previous episode. She’s a photography coach for the session or for the conference. And so between the two of them, it is a pretty strong one-two punch there for both the written side and the visual side of storytelling for your magazines or other communication projects. So Kim, we’ve got the commercial out of the way. We can focus on what you’re going to be talking about, and you’ve got a couple of sessions. Let’s talk about the main session. You’re thinking, right now, kind of five ways to improve written storytelling is what you’ll be talking about, right?

Kim Trevanthan: That’s correct, yes.

Andy Johns: And so some of those ways, let’s dive in and get into them. So now you have written in addition to the books, and I guess we should talk a little bit about those. Your latest one is “Against the Current.” I haven’t read that one yet, but tell us about that book and then some of the other books that you’ve done. And then we’ll get into some of the columns and other work.

Kim Trevanthan: Well, to talk about the fourth book, I need to mention my first book.

Andy Johns: Right.

Kim Trevanthan: Which was based on a canoe trip I did down the Tennessee River in 1998. So that was an eventful trip. And that resulted in my first book by the University of Tennessee Press. And I took a dog named Jasper along with me on that trip. So 20 years later, when the 20 year anniversary of that trip started to come around, I started to think, well, I could do the Tennessee River again and just see how it’s changed in 20 years.

Andy Johns: Now, notably, the first time you did it, you went with the river.

Kim Trevanthan: This time I decided I won’t just do the same trip going down river. I’ll go up river, and also see how that changes things. And to add into the mix, of course, my dog Jasper wasn’t alive after 20 years. I went out and got a new dog named Maggie, and she was a ten month old puppy. And let’s just say she’s overly enthusiastic in terms of social. She’s a very social dog.

Andy Johns: There you go.

Kim Trevanthan: So she provided a lot of good content and a lot of tension in that story. And I found that going upstream is a lot different than going downstream in terms of locking through dams. And I also went in the spring versus the late summer as on the first trip. So there were a lot of differences, and I discovered a lot of things about the river going upstream and about myself. So a lot of the book is about aging too. I turned 60 on the up stream trip, so I celebrated my camping in a public park in Alabama.

Andy Johns: So paddling the entire length of the Tennessee River downstream was too easy. So you waited till your 20 years older and decided to go upstream to do it. It sounds like a lot of work to me, but I’m excited to get into the book as soon as we get past this conference planning, and I have time to do things like read books again. But I’m excited about it. Now, you are in East Tennessee now, but you are from Murray, Kentucky. One of your other books was on the Cumberland River. And I know we have a lot of folks from middle Tennessee and Kentucky who listen to the podcast. So tell us briefly just a little bit about that one before we dive back in.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, I’m from Murray, Kentucky, which is in western Kentucky, far western Kentucky, and it’s actually on the Tennessee River. It’s toward the end of the Tennessee River near Kentucky Dam, Kentucky Lake.

Andy Johns: Yep.

Kim Trevanthan: But the Cumberland, I got interested in the Cumberland pretty soon after that first book. I wanted to do another one. Didn’t take a dog on this one. I took a photographer, Randy Russell, with me. So the pictures are probably better in this book. But the headwaters, we started at Harlan, Kentucky, which is famous for a lot of reasons.

Andy Johns: Not a lot of them good. But yeah, yeah, it’s famous. Infamous.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, it was a great trip and a lot of that – the first 90 miles or the first third of that was on a lot of moving water, so free flowing Cumberland before we got to the first dam. So that made it a lot more interesting and much different than the Tennessee River for me. And we did go downstream on this one. And we did portage around Cumberland Falls, if anybody is wondering about that. It’s a pretty good obstacle.

Andy Johns: Yeah, I would say so. Whether you’re in the daytime without the Moonbow or whether you’re coming through, that’s the one that has the Moonbow I think it’s pretty famous there. But we could, like I said, I could geek ou on the trips themselves because that’s right in kind of my wheelhouse of wanting to adventure. But I’m sure that if folks come to the StoryConnect Conference, they’ll get a chance to hear more of those stories. But one of the things that that you mentioned that is important to your writing, and I think that people could hear about it there, whether you’re talking about the photographer or the dog or yourself, is characterization and kind of building those characters. And really that’s true whether you’re writing a book that’s 260 pages or whether you’re writing an article. It’s important to to develop those characters.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, it is. And on these long trips I took, of course, I met a lot of people. And there’s something about going along with just a dog instead of another person. I think I met a lot more people with with just Maggie and Jasper along than I did when Randy went along. But Randy is really outgoing and also got us in contact with with other people. And that was one of the highlights of the trip. And I remember there’s a lot of interactions we had, but in particular, I remember coming upon this ranger, Stuart Bryant, when we were still in Kentucky, close to Wolf Creek Dam. And he came up to us, he motored up to us in his boat and he goes, he says, “What are you doing?” Just looking at us in the canoe. We said, “We’re canoeing the length of the Cumberland River.” He waited a couple beats and he said, “Are you crazy?” Of course, he was just kidding. And later on he said, “Do you want me to arrest you for the photo op?” But he had a great sense, sort of a deadpan humor. And you try to remember what people say. I took a little recorder with me, which, by the way, the Cumberland River took from me a little bit later. It dropped out of my life jacket into the river, so I had to furiously take notes to catch up on things.

Andy Johns: Yeah.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, but what people say and what they look like and the tone of what they said, is really important to get into a book. And just Randy himself was a character too. We disagreed about country music. He loved today’s country, and I like the old school stuff. You know, Hank Williams senior, not junior. So we had little conflicts in the boat as well. And that, I hope, came across as humorous and good natured in the book as well in the Cumberland book.

Andy Johns: That could be good for hours of debate and entertainment as you’re paddling, and I’m sure you had quite a few of those. That gets into it a little bit. So if somebody is a magazine writer, and I know you’ve written columns and shorter pieces too, so in a book, you really have the luxury of more space to develop some of those characters. And I think one of the other things that you’re going to talk about is kind of selecting the details and how to be selective about what details you include. But building those characters out, even if it’s a 500 word piece or 1,000 word piece in a magazine, there are still some opportunities to get into characters a little bit and kind of paint the picture for folks, even if you don’t have quite as much space as you do in a book. Right?

Kim Trevanthan: Oh, yeah. I mean, you could. You can do it. And of course, yeah, in a column, I had an outdoor column for The Metro Pulse. It was a weekly and in Knoxville and for the Knoxville Mercury, also an outdoor column. And, you know, with the outdoor columns, when you’re going outside, you want to use descriptive language, and you want people to feel as if they were there with you. But you can’t overdo it. You have to think, “Well, what is the gist of this experience that I want to convey to the reader? And where am I going overboard with description, and what’s the thing that I want to to highlight in the piece?” And I’ll use an example from a late column. And this was actually the last column I did for the Mercury before it went out of business. And this was on Chilhowee Lake. And pretty soon in that trip, I went with Dr. Crane, who’s a biologist, Dr. Drew Crane, at Maryville College. And we were going, we were paddling on Chilhowee, up to a campsite. And pretty soon after we put it in, we saw something going across the river and in front of us kind of swiggling across the river. And Drew said, “Hey, there’s a snake over there.” And so, of course, being curious, we paddled toward the snake, and we got closer and closer to it. And he said, “It’s a copperhead.” And so I slowly, he goes, “Slow down. Slow down.” We had to get the telephoto lens to get a photo of it, which was a little bit blurry. But it turns out it wasn’t a copperhead. It was a timber rattler.

Andy Johns: On the water?

Kim Trevanthan: So I was able to use that in the lead and just kind of give some information about what kinds of snakes are swimming. And this was pretty rare to see this, but a lot of people think we have water moccasins in east Tennessee. We do not. We do have them in western Kentucky. So I was able to use that information just to give people, just to correct some of the some of the myths and fears that people have about snakes that they see in the water around here.

Andy Johns: Sure. And I could see that being, that’s a good way to kind of describe the characters that you all were. Not everybody sees a snake and wants to go paddle toward it. There are a lot of folks who might be tempted to do the opposite. But that kind of brings us to another point of your storytelling tools there, which is tension and conflict. And even in that story, you tell the tension when there’s the snake and then conflict resolved. Y’all got out of there, I’m assuming, got out of there unscathed. But tension and conflict is another essential part of storytelling as well, you said.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Of course, the snake wasn’t interested in us, and Drew did say he wanted me to slow down at a certain point, and we didn’t get very. We didn’t get very close, close enough to take a picture. But yeah, tension. I think readers, they always want to. You always want to raise some kind of question or leave readers wondering or begin with a question or something that needs to be resolved in a piece, particularly a narrative-driven piece. You know, I think about when I did the outdoor column, I would think about trips that would be fun. But people don’t just, they don’t want to just read about a trip that was off, “Oh, we saw a wonderful sunset, and we had a great hike.” You know, there has to be a quest or something that drives the narrative forward. So for my last book, I did a lot of things to sort of set up tension for myself. And one of them was to adopt Maggie, a ten month old puppy, like I told you, sort of hyperactive. So she provided a lot of tension and a lot of conflict. Her agenda on the trip was much different than mine. And let me just say, I won’t give away too much, but we locked through the dams, and Maggie did pretty good on the first dam, Kentucky Dam, which we locked through after dark, which was not fun. The next dam we had some challenges. So the lock masters were very friendly, but Maggie got a little bit restless in the boat, so let me just leave it at that, right now. I’ll reveal more at the talk.

Andy Johns: Sure.

Kim Trevanthan: We had some challenges.

Andy Johns: Speaking of building some tension there. Now you’ve got me wanting to read, yeah. So another piece that I want us to get into here, because this is one particularly – I’ll be looking forward to this session because it’s something I’ve always struggled with when it comes to writing. You’re talking about beginnings and endings, and for whatever reason, I’m fairly good at beginning a story when I’m writing, but the ending is really the hard part for me. I know some folks, it’s the other way around. They really have trouble getting going. But the breakout session that you’re going to be doing at StoryConnect is looking at beginnings and endings, which are pretty obviously some of the most important sections of anything anybody’s going to write.

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, they are, and they’re hard. They’re a little bit harder with nonfiction. I write fiction, too. So in fiction, you know, you can make people wonder who survives, right? You know, if the narrator is going to – or not the narrator, but your main character – if the main character is going to survive or not. If you’re writing nonfiction, of course, we know you’re survived because you wrote the book about it. So.

Andy Johns: Right.

Kim Trevanthan: But I think one thing to think about in ending nonfiction narratives, journalism feature stories, is to save a little something. Save a little something for the end. And sometimes you can connect it back to something you, a question you raised in the beginning, whether it’s a profile or a story that you’re involved with. Those kinds of things can help propel the reader through a piece. Just saving a little bit of a complete answer to a question, for example, whether it’s thematic or it has to do with a character is one way to think about it. But you do want to give the reader a sense of completion. It doesn’t have to be a full blown conclusion, like in an essay. But I think connecting to something you raised in the beginning is one technique for framing a feature story or a narrative nonfiction.

Andy Johns: Perfect. And then on the beginning side of things, if folks are, you know, that’s where folks talk about writer’s block. But I know when I’m writing a story, a lot of times I won’t necessarily start with the first sentence of the story. You know, you start getting down the facts and all that and then you come back to the beginning. But you have some – and I know that you work with undergrads, too, there as a professor. Do you have some ways for folks to nail the beginning of the story because, I mean, we know a lot of the time with folks as scattered as they are today, sometimes you may only get the headline and then the first sentence or two for a story to kind of hook them in.

Kim Trevanthan: Sure. I love beginnings. I love beginnings stories, and usually I’ll start a story different ways just to see how it turns out and just to see how it affects the structure. But I teach students to summarily. You know, I teach them how to write hard news. And then when we get into features, we’ll talk about different ways to begin a story, and even different ways to start hard news stories. But they know that who, what, when, where, sometimes why, way to start a story. But I think there are variations with that. And I think there are a lot of different ways to hook readers into narrative stories and into profiles and those kinds of things. One thing one way is, of course, a quote – something that somebody that you’re interviewing, a source says something really interesting. That’s one way to start, and put it into context and introduce a character that way. I think sometimes beginning a story in a crisis like maybe not, it doesn’t happen at the beginning to place the reader in the middle of a crisis and then backtrack is another way to do it. I did that with my first book, and I began the book by talking about a campsite we had in Alabama where we had a visitor who showed up and started asking us a bunch of questions. And he was inebriated. He was not sober. And my dog Jasper loves all people, and he growled at this guy. So that put us on edge. So I start the first book that way and sort of backtrack from there.

Andy Johns: Got it. I like it, and that gets back to the tension you were talking about earlier, kind of adding that in there. Well, the last thing I have for you, and I know there’s a lot more that we can talk about on the rivers or any of it. But let’s talk big picture here about writing in general. And, you know, we’re in a world where TikTok is a thing. I mean, you’re on a college campus. I’m sure you see it all the time. These guys, you know, the Twitter, we got the attention span for the 240 characters for Twitter. Does good writing still matter? Why is it so important that we spend the time, that we take the time, to really hone our craft and get better at telling the stories and at writing?

Kim Trevanthan: Yeah, it definitely matters, I think. I taught a journalism class last semester, and I asked students at the beginning of the semester how they get their news, and almost all of them said social media. And so I required them to subscribe to The New York Times. So they’re reading The New York Times, and they’re seeing a difference in watching a TikTok video and actually reading a story that somebody reported on with some care, exhaustively, ask good questions, put things into context, and really give some interesting answers to questions that’s raised about by an event or in a profile, those kinds of things. So yeah, I think writing is essential. And even when you produce a video, there has to be some writing on the front end. But I think the key for writers now is to recognize that we do have a lot of competition out there, whether it’s news or any kind of content that you want to publish. And you’ve got to work hard to make sure that your writing is clean, it’s concise, and that you’re telling a good story that is propelling readers forward through a narrative or what have you. So it’s a challenge, but I think it’s good for writers to recognize that challenge and to rise to it. And a lot of that has to do with also making your writing vivid and making readers feel as if they’re there with you. And there’s a lot of different techniques for doing that, some of which I’ll go over in the talk.

Andy Johns: Here you go. It’s a good, good teaser to the conference. I appreciate that. Well, no surprise there that two writers get on a phone call, or on a podcast here, and decide that writing does matter, so I appreciate you. Maybe we’re preaching to the choir here, but I do appreciate you sharing those insights. And I’m looking forward to those sessions at StoryConnect. Again, if anybody’s listening, all the details are at StoryConnect.com. It’s March 8th to 9th this year, 2023, and we’ll be in the Great Smoky Mountains. So you’ve got some good sessions during the day, and then just a gorgeous scenery all right around it. So looking forward to you being there. Kim, thanks for being a writing instructor and for being on this podcast with me.

Kim Trevanthan: Thanks for having me, Andy.

Andy Johns: He is Kim Trevathan, an author and professor at Maryville College and our writing instructor at StoryConnect. I’m your host, Andy Johns, and until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.