The black art of storytelling Hrush Jan 20, 2007

American college football isn’t something I usually read about or follow, but this is some of the beautiful prose I’ve ever come across. Written by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker.

The Ballad of Big Mike

We can learn a little something from him about the black art of storytelling. For instance, here’s three paragraphs, each ending with something that that makes you want to desperately keep reading:

Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was a star point guard at Ole Miss, drafted by the New Jersey Nets. And while he didn�t make it in the National Basketball Association, he took his preternatural court sense into the business world and made his fortune � sort of. He owned a chain of 60 Taco Bells, KFC�s and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not, he could always call games on the radio for the N.B.A.�s Grizzlies, which he had been doing since they arrived in Memphis in 2001. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white Southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.

Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. �What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,� he told me once, �was what not to do: beat up a kid. It�s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.�

Sean was 42 years old. His hairline had receded, but not quite to the point where you could call him bald, and his stomach had expanded, but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status � his own and other people�s � but not in the way of the Old South. Not long after he became a figure in Memphis � a putatively rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies � he had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn�t encourage them because, as he puts it: �I don�t hang with the blues. I�d rather go to a high-school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four Scotches and complain about my wife.� He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.

Great storytelling is about flow — keeping your readers absorbed and entranced. Few non-fiction writers understand flow the way Mr. Lewis does.

Thanks to Matt Linderman of 37Signals for pointing this out.