Nonfiction sure demands more of an author. When you write among the world of realism and facts, there are so many other voices that accompany yours. Think of how many people want to have their say about sustainability, for example. One of my authors wrote a prize-winning book about the subject, using the lives of people like Jacques Cousteau and Cesar Chavez to illustrate the pillars of sustainability. That’s a unique take.
It’s one thing to have a take, but you need to take more steps to make up a complete dance routine. Good nonfiction not only sets the stage with facts, it gives the reader a way to participate by thinking differently and acting in some way when they see the changes. Yes, you can chronicle every misstep of ecology or race theory, but you could be more than critical. You could offer ideas for hope and change.
The presence of those ideas and the evidence of hope signals the arrival of a book. That’s work that has a meaty table of contents in your notebook as you work, so each chapter has a number of points to cover and chapter-wise takeaways for further action and thought. What does this amount to? That’s the question to ask when you propose a nonfiction book for the world, whether that’s to an agent, a publisher, or more importantly, to yourself.
It’s not a bad thing to have only reporting to rely upon. That is the realm, though, of the meaty long-form article. You read them in places like The Guardian, or an old-line magazine like Atlantic Monthly. Six or eight thousand words, and the story is done. By the way, many a powerful nonfiction book started as a great article. There’s a gem from the New Yorker of the 1990s, Crisis in the Hot Zone, that became a book of the same name. Without The Hot Zone, I never would have written my debut novel Viral Times.
Nonfiction demands that we authors study our proposals and see all the points we need to hit. Writing nonfiction is not like a diving routine, except when it is. The judges at the Olympic games consider if a dive is completed. They don’t mean if the diver lands in the pool. They mean if every aspect of the dive is executed in full. Those aspects are your details in your table of contents.
While I was a journalist, I rarely outlined the smaller articles I wrote. There just wasn’t time on a daily deadline. But these were only 600-word stories. What happened was far more important than why. Nonfiction authors need to show us the why, in part for the readers’ satisfaction. The Why, after all, is what stays with us.
