A Sense of the World | A Conversation with Jason Roberts

You write both fiction and nonfiction. Do you see those disciplines as complimentary, or conflicting?
So many of the writers I admire--Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Peter Matthiessen--have worked diligently in both, so I’ve always thought of them as interlocking. I think each informs the other. For me, at least, working in fiction and nonfiction seems to minimize the temptation to blur the two. You have an outlet for your flights of imagination, so you’re less compelled to speculate, invent dialogue or add other “novelistic” touches to your factual work.

At the same time, the spirit of narrative nonfiction is to take up the same challenge as the novel, which is to tell a cohesive story about convincingly-drawn people. So you’re constantly honing the necessary techniques. Both, for instance, need a strong sense of scene. In nonfiction you can rarely add those in-the-moment bits that convey a sense of realism: you know, “He paused to stir his coffee,” and so forth. But you can still evoke the moment, the drama of the moment, by placing it in the proper emotional context. Giving a sense of what’s at stake for everyone in the room. Staying aware of the clashes of agenda.

Also, you keep attuned for how people fall naturally into storytelling archetypes. I was, I’ll admit, happy when I came across John Dundas Cochrane’s unreservedly nasty pre-emptive attack on Holman in Siberia, because it meant I had a strong antagonist for that part of the book. I didn’t have to force things to portray him as Holman’s enemy. The man had already cast himself in that role.

You started out in journalism. What did that bring to the mix?
I guess it kept me from being precious about my prose. I had to work my way through college, and I did it by writing and editing--mostly for weekly newspapers and small-circulation magazines. And right after school, I was editor-in-chief of a nonprofit news service. Overall, I learned how to quickly cut to the chase, to get the bones of a story upfront, in the very first paragraph. Most importantly, I learned how to compete for the reader’s attention.

Then you became a specialist, covering technology.
Yes, although it was never a conscious decision. I was living in Northern California, on the periphery of Silicon Valley, so that was the zeitgeist to tap into. That kind of writing has a high educational quotient. You’ve got to bring the reader up to speed, without making them feel dumb for not knowing something in the first place. A lot of that carries over into narrative nonfiction--backstory, details that need to be quickly assimilated.

Was it a jarring transition, from writing about technology to writing about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
No, not really. As I came to realize, Holman’s story was very much rooted in its own technology. The Noctograph--that was a high-tech device for the day. His unique method of orientation, by sound, was something I could only understand by approaching it as a technological issue, plugging it into later research by Daniel Kish and others. Holman himself couldn’t describe the principles behind his method. Echolocation wasn’t a concept in his day.

You had a somewhat unconventional upbringing. How did that inform your worldview?
Yeah, my parents were struggling actors in Southern California. Then they made the very natural leap from Hollywood bohemians to full-fledged countercultural types--hippies, really, although that was more of a media term, not one I heard in my household. My sister and I say we were “raised in the back of a Volkswagen bus,” which isn’t too far off. We moved, a lot. Pretty much in a broad swath between New Mexico and Hawaii, and sometimes off the grid. Education was pretty erratic. I stopped going to school at 15, and wandered around on my own for five years before going off to college.

Do I have a unique worldview arising from that? I don’t know. It’s hard to triangulate. It certainly made me a book lover. I read everything I could get my hands on. I’m sure the nomadic lifestyle helped me identify with Holman.

What can you tell us about your next book?
It’s another work of narrative nonfiction, a real-life adventure from approximately the same time period. But while A Sense of the World is about a man sort of on the fringes of history, this next one has history--a key event in world history, actually--right in center stage. Once you start digging past the static, diorama versions of the past, the ones they teach you in school, so many unforgettable characters just jump out at you. It’s exciting, really.