Creative writing workshop: Adventurous creative non-fiction

00:22

Outside the hangar, the night is a storm of white noise.
Ears ringing, chopped air full of engines and rotors, I walk towards the big red helicopter which hunkers on the tarmac, blinking.
Lit from beneath it looks ominous, frightening – long blades strimming a high hiss above the turbo-jet blare – a siren vortex barely at bay.

Fifty miles to the south a vulnerable man has gone missing from a care home. The alarm was raised an hour ago and the tasking call requesting a search and rescue (SAR) helicopter arrived thirty minutes after that, but the individual has been missing for several hours and might have walked some distance.

A few minutes earlier, inside the base, Winch Operator and mission planner Keith Fentiman was on the phone co-ordinating the forthcoming search with a sergeant from the local police. ‘We’ll search initially to the south of Fleet Hargate.’ he told him, having identified an open area of fields with drainage ditches as the sort of place the SAR team could best help. ‘In the town we're not going to be much use. We’ll work out a search pattern, working east or west, heading south and down and away, because I can’t think he’s got far if he isn't very well dressed and he’s had sleeping medication…’

The sergeant suggests the missing man’s likely direction of travel, repeats that the care home staff have said his disappearance is very much out character, and promises to pass on details of any sightings. Keith thanks him and signs off before briefing the room:

‘Four foot 11, high risk mis-per, 54 years old. He could be in his pyjamas, could be naked, we don't know. He’s diabetic and Down’s Syndrome, possible dementia, been missing since 20:15 Local, so he’s been gone about four hours.’ Pointing to a map on a large monitor: ‘They’re talking about a six-mile radius of a care home at this particular grid.’

The map is a maze of fens, dykes, drainage ditches, and power lines. Perilous to pedestrians and helicopters alike.

‘If it is dementia, they tend to go in straight lines. And if they come up against an obstacle they stop.’ Winchman and main medic Mark Vickery tells me whilst dressing in his bright orange flight suit. ‘But with Down’s, he could have gone anywhere.’

I leave the team of RESCUE 912 readying notes and kit and go out to look at the aircraft. Co-pilot Alex Stephen is already inside making ready for take off.

Lead-pilot David Preston passes and I ask about fuel. They’ve got 4,500 pounds, enough for about three hours flying time, he says ‘Three hours 15 minutes, something like that.’ They’ve put in a bit more to extend the range.

I thank him.

‘See you!’ he waves a hand and walks into the halo of noise.

* * * * *

The events described above occurred in August 2022 when, as research for my forthcoming book, Overnight, I spent 24 hours with Rescue 912, a Coastguard SAR helicopter crew based at Humberside Airport.

The way I tell the story owes much to one of my my favourite non-fiction books, John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, a collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr, first published in 1967.

An account of three months spent shadowing an English country GP, John Sassall, in the Forest of Dean in 1966, on publication Berger’s book was hailed as masterpiece of witness: a moving meditation on humanity, society and the value of healing – yet it is a fundamentally strange, uncanny hybrid; neither straight reportage, nor extended photo-essay.

After some intriguingly gnomic introductory lines about the nature of place, the idea that landscape is a place people live within, the book open with an astonishingly immersive account of Sassall racing to attend a man crushed by a fallen tree.

The story switches viewpoints, tenses, and voices several times in it’s short existence – zooming in on apparently incidental details, drawing back to reveal panoramic tableaus, the micro and macro side by side – three pages of action, certainty and doubt – a set-piece which leaves the reader breathless and, in my case, deeply moved.

None of the authorial pyrotechnics I’ve just described get in the way of the telling, in fact I’m not sure I noticed them on first reading because they all act in service of the story being told. It’s only when one goes back and tries to understand how Berger did that that the dynamics and editorial choices are revealed.

Several of my favourite non-fiction authors fall into this hybridic, filmic and I’ll be talking about their amazing ability to connect and communicate during my workshop at Durham Book Festival – the fact that, for example, by mixing the factually acute with the offbeat, one can sometimes hit upon a affecting emotional truth, as Kathryn Scanlan did so brilliantly in her slim equine odyssey Kick the Latch, Christopher Neve’s sublime Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague, Samantha Harvey’s stellar novel Orbital, or Alice Oswald’s long-form hymn to water and river song, Dart.

The idea that there are things to be learnt and assimilated from all sorts of writers and writing is paramount because everything is a potential resource and inspiration to the non-fiction writer.

We must always be alert to details and child-like in our wonder, the better to convey the world around us in all its urgent beauty and strangeness – be that the crew of Rescue 912 cometing-off to help those in need or narratives closer to home. Whatever you’re writing or want to write, it should be a fun, far-reaching, thought provoking morning.

I hope to see you there!

Creative non-fiction tips

1. In daily life, be the big eye and the big ear – visual and verbal details, however tangential or apparently strange, can lend a piece of writing fidelity.
2. Change the tense – would your story work better set in past; might present tense increase the immediacy; how about a mix of both?
3. Should you explain everything at the start or drip-feed details of the who, what, where, when, why, and how throughout?
4. What interests you most about your subject? Define and zero in on that aspect. If it compels you it might likewise connect with an audience.
5. Might your story benefit from being told in a different order from which it occurred? My SAR helicopter chapter begins in the action of a call-out then goes back to the start of my 24 hour shift with the team, the better to engage, invest, and hook the reader.
6. Read widely. A good writer is an omnivorous reader.

Part of Durham Book Festival, the Writing Adventurous Non-Fiction workshop with Dan Richards takes place at Clayport Library, Durham, on Sunday 13 October, 10.30am-12noon. £15/£12 Book: Workshop: Writing Adventurous Non-Fiction with Dan Richards - New Writing North 

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