How Stories Will Improve Your Nonfiction Book
As a professional book coach, I work with many nonfiction authors. Most of my clients are writing their first book, so naturally there is a steep learning curve that provides multiple opportunities for improvement. But no single pursuit pays off more richly than learning how and why to tell stories when it comes to writing a nonfiction book.
Even when the cold hard truth of your nonfiction book is quite compelling, you’re better off sharing your facts and ideas as narrative if you want your readers to get past page one. This is because reading books is primarily a pursuit of pleasure, and that includes nonfiction. If your readers aren’t enjoying themselves, they will find something else to occupy their minds in the precious little downtime they have available to them. Unless you’re writing a college textbook, nonfiction authors — just like novelists — are in the entertainment industry.
Put another way: consider the people who might actually read your nonfiction book. Why will they care enough to finish it? How will your writing make them stay up late because they couldn’t put your book down at bedtime? What is it about your nonfiction work that will make it stand out amongst the almost two million books that are published every year? The answer is storytelling.
Here are four key ways you can write more interesting and compelling stories to carry your next nonfiction book forward.
Understand the Hierarchy of Narratives
Novelists know something that nonfiction authors need to learn: all stories are not created equal. This is why one book will sell five million copies and another only fifty.
An easy way to improve your storytelling is by understanding what I like to call “narrative hierarchies.” This is a simple and effective way to identify different types of writing and elevate your own craft accordingly.
Let's begin at the lower end of the scale with the following sentence about a factual statement:
There is an oak tree in my front yard.
That statement is a fact, but it’s not a story. Nothing happens. There’s no drama, no conflict, no intrigue. You aren’t left wondering if something is about to happen. The essential nature of a fact is that it simply exists — much like the tree in the front yard.
But what if I wrote these next few sentences in my memoir instead?
My mother always told me not to climb the oak tree in our front yard. She was afraid that I would fall out of it and break my arm. When I was ten years old and my parents left me alone at home for the first time, I climbed the tree and lost my footing and plummeted to the ground. But mom was wrong about breaking my arm. I dislocated my collarbone.
These five sentences are more than a fact. But, are they a story? Not exactly. I call this type of narrative an anecdote. It’s a lot like a story, but because it's told like a fact — something that happened in the past and now resides in history — but it lacks some key elements of a full and robust story.
In the hierarchy of narratives, an anecdote is much more effective than a fact. In this example, we learn something about the author and his relationship with his mother as a boy. The reader can begin to imagine that the author is headstrong or reckless or adventurous as a ten year old. It’s fine if none of those things are true, but the goal is to get the reader engaged — something the fact alone could not do. The reader is actively participating in the book because the anecdote is higher on the hierarchy and this brings benefits to the reader’s experience.
Now, let’s climb another rung on the ladder of narrative. Here’s a part of a story about that same oak tree:
When I was ten years old, I was sent to my bedroom for breaking my mother’s vase. Being stuck in the house all day was bad enough, but it was a beautiful sunny day, and my two best friends were calling up to my room to join them on a hike to the swimming hole. I was locked up in solitary confinement, and the prison guard was going to spend the whole day in the kitchen baking pies. There was no escape. Then I saw the old oak tree stretching its massive limbs toward my bedroom window and I began to devise a plan . . .
Even though the story is incomplete (for the sake of brevity in this post), you can tell that it contains elements missing from the anecdote. The story demands resolution. Something has to happen. The author needs to open the window and inch out onto the sloping roof. Or maybe he asks his buddies to find a rope in the garage that he can tie around his waist in case he slips and falls. Or perhaps he simply decides to suffer his punishment and reluctantly opens his first novel and discovers the joy of reading during his imprisonment. It doesn't matter how the story is resolved. What matters is that the reader now craves resolution — something that did not happen with the fact or the anecdote.
Upgrade Your Anecdotes
Now that you understand the different levels on the hierarchy of narratives you can start to make changes. Many first-time nonfiction authors write anecdotes when they should be telling stories. They tend to reduce engaging narratives to fact-like historical references. Instead of “cutting to the chase,” they cut out the chase entirely. I have tried for years to understand why new writers prefer this type of communication. My current theory is the lack of confidence. Authors don’t believe anyone is really interested in their full story so they hurry up their writing to produce an anecdote, thinking that shorter is better.
My advice? Analyze your anecdotes. You have probably cut out “the chase.” Put it back in. Create a dilemma or conflict that demands resolution. In the example above, the ten-year-old boy is banished to his room on a beautiful summer’s day. His dilemma generates tension, and with good writing the tension builds during the story. Ratcheting up that stress pushes the reader along because they expect they will be satisfied in the end. It’s the writer’s role to produce catharsis as the story concludes. Have confidence that your reader will usually want a story instead of an anecdote and give them the tension that leads to resolution.
Write Stories Like You're Telling a Joke
One of my favourite techniques for showing clients how to upgrade their anecdotes is to compare stories to jokes. Both have the same three part structure. But telling a joke like an anecdote is so obviously cringeworthy, my authors get the message pretty quickly.
Jokes and stories have a setup, a dilemma, and a resolution. In a joke, we call the resolution a “punchline” and the dilemma is often just a mild escalation in tension. That’s because jokes are very short — they don’t require the kind of massive tension buildup you’d find in a book. Here’s an example:
Setup: A lion walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “Do you have any jobs?”
Dilemma: The bartender shakes his head and says, “No, sorry. Why don’t you try the circus?”
Resolution: The lion replies, “Why would the circus need a bartender?”
Now, imagine that dorky friend of yours who simply cannot tell a joke without ruining it. “Hey, have you guys heard the one about the lion who goes into a bar looking for a job because the circus doesn’t hire bartenders?” That’s what a joke looks like when it’s told like an anecdote instead of a story. Very few of us would ever tell a joke like that. But many nonfiction authors do the same thing with their stories! They cut out the best parts.
Anecdotes often deliver the punchline way too soon. The summer that I turned ten was a disaster thanks to a broken collarbone. It all started when I shattered my mother’s prized vase and she banished me to my bedroom. Did you see what happened there? Even if the author goes on to tell a high drama, tension-filled story about climbing down the oak tree we already know how it ends.
The reason jokes are funny is because the teller and the audience have an agreement. They both adhere to a formula and (as long as the joke is told within that structure and follows the correct order) it has a chance to produce the desired result. Storytelling is no different. Rather than laughter, the payoff will be generating buzz about your book, which can lead to higher sales and happier readers.
Don’t Let the “Truth” Get in Your Way
Memoirs, biographies, and travelogues offer ample opportunities for telling tension filled stories. But even information-based writing like self-help, how-to, and historical books can (and should) reach higher on the hierarchy of narratives. The challenge is that authors sometimes feel that their message speaks for itself and doesn’t need an assist from storytelling.
Mark Twain famously said, “Never let the truth get in the way of telling a good story.” This quip is usually interpreted as a license to stretch the bounds of veracity. But I think it contains a deeper meaning. Many nonfiction authors get too caught up in the “truth” of their message and forget to keep their readers engaged by telling stories. No matter how important the point of your book might be, make sure that it’s packaged in narrative wherever and whenever possible. But how far up the hierarchy should information-driven or opinion-based nonfiction strive to climb?
I’ve worked with a number of psychologists and counsellors who share information about client cases. Even though the author carefully conceals the person’s true identity through the altering of information, turning this kind of writing into high stakes drama of deceit and intrigue would sensationalize a real person’s struggle. In a self-help book written by a professional healer, anecdotal writing is both respectful to the person who is the source of the narrative while still more engaging for the reader.
Leadership books often use narrative to bring cutting edge business concepts to life. The authors are usually coaches, consultants, or CEOs with examples of real scenarios that challenged them, their staff, or their clients at work. Here again, the anecdote will often be sufficient for the author’s purposes. Rather than writing abstractly about something like core values the writer can use an anecdote that encapsulates a company value (or lack thereof) in action. You don’t need to spin a long yarn to get your point across. But the narrative assistance from the anecdote improves your reader’s experience and comprehension.
I have a client named Nico Human who has just finished writing a leadership book called Joy Farming. Nico is a coach and consultant who works with leaders to cultivate joy as a tool to excel in business and in life. Throughout the book he weaves in narratives about his time as a boy on his grandparents’ farm in South Africa. His boyhood tales are fully realized stories with delightful dilemmas driving toward satisfying resolutions. But when Nico shares examples from his work coaching CEOs he switches to anecdotes to get his point across more quickly and professionally.
If you still think that storytelling is primarily a novelist’s concern then consider what Steve Jobs had to say about the subject: “The most important job in the world is the storyteller.” Books need to be entertaining so that the reader keeps reading. But the point of your story is what really matters. Just don't rely on the “truth” alone to carry you forward. When you write your nonfiction book, you have the most important job in the world. Do it well by telling better stories.
Steve Donahue is a professional speaker, book coach, and the author of two bestselling nonfiction books. His works have sold over 100,000 copies and have been translated into Korean, Turkish, Russian and Greek. Steve helps new and experienced authors turn their book ideas into well-crafted publications that delight readers and inspire change. To learn more, visit his website at MyBookCoach.ca.