My Advice For New Writers: Write Nonfiction Like Fiction

Nonfiction shouldn’t be drier than a Popeye’s biscuit

I became an editor after a decade in freelance writing. One of my specialties is nonfiction editing (for books). What I see most from new writers—people who didn’t come from writing-heavy degrees or journalism backgrounds?

Their writing is dry. Bone-dry. Dry enough to make a Shamwow jealous.

And that’s fine for some things. Technical writing and academic writing absolutely need a Squirt to recover from. But when you’re writing for an audience—like we do here on Medium, or for magazines and blogs, it’s a death sentence.

By that same token, I see a lot of current or former reporters who had the inverted pyramid hammered into them too hard. Inverted pyramid is great for papers. It serves a purpose. Cut from the end, and make room. For mediums where that’s not an issue—books, blogs, anything that favors long-form content, it’s unnecessary. It tends to wreck the flow of a piece, when you front-load it too hard.

What I’ve learned from working in various forms of writing—from AP Style to playwrighting and experimental literature: the simplest answer is often the best.

Lee Gutkind’s The Art of Creative Nonfiction was part of my undergrad reading, and it changed my outlook a bit. It didn’t take for me, until I took more creative writing classes and led critiques.

Any good nonfiction is creative nonfiction.

Bad nonfiction is an encyclopedia entry.

Only one of those, do we tend to read for enjoyment and have the writer tell us a story.

Creative nonfiction has a long history and breadth, but for this piece, it’s about New Journalism. The work of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, et al.

They’re the people long-form content today comes from.

Each of their writing has something in common. They use dramatic structure. Usually a 3- or 4-act structure. Same as fiction novelists, screenwriters, and playwrights use.

To write better long-form content, use that structure. The fiction structure. It goes like this:

• Act I: The Setup
• Act II: Complications
• Act III: The Resolution

They’re not weighted equally in length. Act II is the longest. Act I is the shortest. They break down in standard form to 20/55/25 in percentages, on average. So:

• The Setup is 20% of your piece.
• The Complication is 55%.
• The Resolution is 25%.

The Setup

The setup is your opening scene. Introduce everybody, and bring the reader into the world of your story. Capote did this in In Cold Blood by introducing the killers (spoiler alert for a nearly 60-year old book) and the setting of Holcomb, Kansas, and the family of victims. Act I in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the introductory road trip part of the book and adaptation. You get a feel for our leads, what’s going on, and what their plans are.

This should—and refer back to In Cold Blood and Fear and Loathing—be what drags the reader in. Don’t lead them in. Drag them right in, and make them love you.

You hardest hits in dramatic structure should be your introduction and your climax (reverse order).

A lot of new writers make the mistake of hitting a little later, in the body of their piece—the opening of Act II. The reader won’t make it there, unless you drag them in from the beginning.

The Setup sells with your confidence in the story. Get the reader excited by showing them what excited you to write it. This is a key part of, “Show, don’t tell.” In Cold Blood doesn’t start with the Clutter family murder. It starts with building a living, breathing Holcomb, Kansas. A place that feels calm and relatable for readers, and at odds with what they know the story is about. This builds suspense. Suspense is an underrated form of hooking. The cheap way is beginning with a shotgun blast. The master’s way is building the suspense, and getting the reader asking questions.

Complication & Climax

No, it’s not the fresh, new Jane Austen joint. It’s Act II.

Act II is the sweat, blood, muscle, and bone of your story. Start wide, and work inward to the climax. Capote does the transition into Act II (what screenwriters call the, “break into two”) with the murder of the Cutters. This is the payoff for the suspense in Act I.

The payoff gets the reader excited. They know you can deliver, and they’re waiting for more. Build again. Capote goes into the background of the killers, and follows them in the leadup to the murder. The reader knows what’s going to happen to the Clutters. But what about the killers? The, “but what about the—” is what keeps readers around for the body of your piece.

Continue to invest them, dive deeper—and then: once obstacles have been brought up and overcome, once more suspense and tension has built, until you story is fit to pop with all the tension; knife the reader through the heart.

Robert Penn Warren was a master of this. His All the Kings Men has two climaxes, that are built to throughout the book, and the climaxes are near-simulateous. You have the story of Willie Stark (a very thinly-veiled reference to real-life Louisiana governor Huey Long), and his continual corruption and brazenness, and you have the story of the narrator and Stark’s henchman and biographer, Jack Burden. Burden gives up a career as an academic historian to serve as Stark’s Chief of Staff. Burden’s life is complicated by the fact he ends up blackmailing his father figure, local judge Montague Irwin, on orders from Stark.

This builds and builds throughout All the King’s Men, and leads to a climax that features (spoiler alert again, this time for a 1946 novel):

• The judge committing suicide, after speaking to Burden—and it’s then revealed the judge was his actual father.
• Willie Stark’s murder. He’s killed by the husband of a woman he’s had an affair with.

Those are big-money payoffs. It worked well for Penn Warren. He got a film deal shortly thereafter, and the first (of several) adaptations hit in 1949. The most recent features Sean Penn and Jude Law hitting in 2006 (in stellar performances).

These are the kinds of payoffs you want, in your own content. Raise the bar for yourself. Good writing is about delivering a payoff that your reader knows is coming—but giving them even more than they asked for.

All great writing does this: from Sophocles to Spike Lee. Martin Scorcese and Gay Talese have also been masters of these. Charles Bukowski and Robert Frost both used it in their poetry.

It works because you’re not just delivering content. That’s a weak delivery and climax. You’re delivering value. You’re giving the reader more than what they paid for.

The Resolution

This is the comedown and the pillow talk of any story. In All the King’s Men, Jack Burden goes through a crisis of faith and meaning after Stark’s death, and begins to find his way again. Capote’s In Cold Blood has a resolution centered around the peoples’ way forward. The meeting in the graveyard, between Susan Kidwell and Al Dewey encapsulate this. They talk about their plans for life, and how it goes on.

The conclusion of a nonfiction piece is about the, “next steps.” It’s not to tie it up nice and neat, necessarily. You’re tying off the plot of your story, right now. It’s not a call to action, either. We’re not doing copywriting here. For journalistic work, it’s about contextualizing and pointing the reader toward more questions or further information. It’s showing the horizon to the reader, not a closed door.

A good nonfiction resolution is about:

• What do we do next?
• Who comes into this story from here?
• Why did this thing happen?
• How does this story affect others, and other stories?
• What do we do about this issue?
• When will the next issue like this happen?

The entire range of the 5 Ws.

This is important for the audience, because it invests them in your work, and brings the story into the real world. It goes off the page. It stays on the page when the story is, “X happened, then Y happened, The End.” It exists in an artificial place—stuck on the page.

It’s important for you, the writer, because a good resolution for a nonfiction piece should lead you to more stories. There are always more stories to tell, about any given topic. Those questions above—those are the ones to ask. They take you places.

Pro Tip

If you’re a new writer, or even an old, salty writer:

Take one of your earlier works, or one of your drier works, that don’t follow this structure. Rewrite it in a more dramatic structure. Pay attention to your tone, your voice, and how you’re telling the story. Compare the two.

The one using dramatic structure will almost invariably be more appealing—even if you haven’t grown in your craft since writing it.

Writers, we’re just storytellers. The forms we work in, they’re just that. Forms and mediums. There’s an art to telling a good story. Whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or the spaces in between.

Understanding that can elevate your writing from just-ok, to good, and from good, to great.

We’re not remembered for the facts we share. We’re remembered for the stories we tell.

Dan Ellsberg would tell you the same.