‘Always start out as an idiot’

4 Lessons From Michael Pollan to Illuminate Your Nonfiction Writing

Being new to Medium, I’m finding this to be an amazing space to learn about how other writers write. I can’t get enough of it.

I also love advice about why so much writing advice is bad, so awful, in fact, that it makes you “want to gouge your eyes out.” I’m not there yet, but I can understand how you might feel that way.

But what really draws me in is when writers share the underlying ‘ethos’ that guides what they care about, and how they write about it.

Put simply, for me a ‘writing ethos’ means the characteristic spirit of a writer manifested in their beliefs, practices, and aspirations for writing about the stuff they care about.

The author Michael Pollan has shared bits and pieces of his writing ethos over the years, and I’ve found what he has to say immensely useful for writing nonfiction.

#1 Be a fish out of water

This is probably the most important aspect of Pollan’s writing, and one that you’ll see threading through much of his work: don’t just write about a topic, go have a new experience that will illuminate your story. Tell about what you noticed, felt, and thought when you began learning, and failing, and learning about your topic. Try to find a ‘way in’ to experience your topic anew, whether it’s starting a business, learning to surf, using a foreign language, or getting a tattoo. And laugh at yourself along the way too:

“One of the very important parts of my work is to have an experience that will illuminate the story. So when I wrote about food, I bought a cow and followed it through the food system, through the meat industry. I apprenticed myself to a great baker to learn how to bake. And I feel that these kinds of experiences, especially when you’re doing it for the first time gives you an ability to see things very freshly. And you have that sense of wonder that comes with first sight. And you also get the comic possibility of a fish out of water, doing something that he or she is not very good at, and the learning that comes from that.”

#2 Multiply the perspectives

Writing an essay or short Medium post is one thing, but if you’re working on a more ambitious book project, Pollan’s idea of multiplying perspectives was really helpful for me in visualizing how to proceed through each chapter.

Writing a non-fiction book, Pollan says, gets interesting when you multiply the perspectives or layer the different lenses that you bring to your story.

“One of the things I always think about when I’m starting a project like this, is what are the different perspectives that I need to bear on this subject?”

If you read Pollan’s work, you see how each chapter delves into the topic from a different perspective. For example, in How the Mind Works, each chapter leads the reader through a series of perspectives: the neuroscience of psychedelics, the phenomenology of his lived experience – the memoirist part of the book – and of course the necessary historical lens:

History always illuminates things. How did we get here? Why did it take so long to get here. What did we learn along the way?

Each chapter gives the reader a different lens on the subject, to circumference your subject from multiple perspectives to allow a higher resolution image of it to develop:

What necessitates a book is that no one perspective will give you the picture, you need the full dimensional picture.

#3 You have to ‘eff’ it

The psychologist William James (1842 -1910) was fond of using the adjective ‘ineffable’ to describe what having a mystical experience is like:

“Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind.

– William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 370.

Unfortunately, for a writer, telling your reader ‘you just had to be there’ just doesn’t cut it. This was the challenge for Pollan when he needed to write about his experience of having ‘trips’ while taking psychedelics as part of the research for his book, How The Mind Works.

“Well, I had to ‘eff’ it,” Pollan says. “I couldn’t just let that lie and say you had to be there.”

Great, so how do you ‘eff’ it? How do you write about deeply personal experiences that are challenging to describe to people who’ve never experienced what you have before?

Imagine a caveman, Pollan says, coming to present-day New York City and seeing subways zooming by, planes overhead, the commotion of traffic, people talking on phones: “What does he say to his friends back in the cave?” It was loud, fast, and crazy? He doesn’t have the language for it.

Like the caveman back from New York, for Pollan to tell his readers what he experienced during his psychedelic trip — that the universe was a giant tub of limitless love–just sounded like a hallmark card, a ‘banal platitude.’

But a platitude is not something untrue, it is just something that has lost its emotional force through repetition.

His strategy? To narrate the experience as best as possible, and then to break the fourth wall with the reader: “Yes I know this sounds like a banal platitude, totally crazy, but this is what happened!”

Be candid with readers he says. Tell your personal experience as it happened, ineffability and all. Then ‘eff’ it by contextualizing it from the new vantage point. Sort of how you would write a memoir as an adult about your 10-year-old self. You don’t just remain inside the head of the 10-year-old:

“Your story gains its edge from going back and forth in perspective. Inside/outside.”

#4 Always start out as an idiot

What I find so compelling about Pollan’s writing is his ability to take the reader on an educational journey as he bumbles his way through his topic, messing up, but learning stuff along the way too. Like when he embarks on starting a garden without losing his mind in Second Nature. Or when he freaks out over the New Age soundtrack his guide has him listen to on his first psychonaut trip in How the Mind Works.

In these early moments of his journey, we begin with Pollan the idiot: the reader is not talked down to by a pedantic expert, but invited on an educational journey guided by an endearing idiot determined to figure stuff out with you.

“I love being at the beginning of a learning curve rather than at the end. One of the reasons I moved from writing about food to [psychadelics] was I realized I had become an expert after 3 or 4 books on food. And I don’t like writing as an expert. I think readers don’t like experts. I think they want someone to take them on a journey, and my education becomes the story that you follow, I always start out as an idiot in my writing. I’m naive, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m confused, I have questions in my head, I’m reluctant, I’m skeptical, and gradually I build my knowledge, we learn things, things happen, and by the end we are experts but we’re not at the beginning. I think that’s a really important lesson for writing in general. I think even though when you finish a research project you have your conclusions. Don’t give ‘em on page one, that’s like starting the joke with the punchline. With storytelling, you start from knowing less and you move toward knowing more.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of our ignorance. We should use it in our storytelling.”

–Michael Pollan