Since the new year, my reading has been mostly non-fiction. I got several books for christmas, and without any fiction books in my queue to intersperse with them, I’ve been working through them one after the other. What I want to know is this: is there a non-fiction school that these authors are going to? Is it a single class? Is it just the result of one or two popular biographies, or some other popculture zeitgeist? Somehow the authors of modern day nonfiction have hit upon a standard format, and it is an irritating one.
Chapter One – The End
The non-fiction book begins at the logical end of the story. This apes the television trope of beginning an episode at the end, and then showing the entire story in flashback. This is, to be kind, overused in television drama, and makes even less sense in a work of written non-fiction. All non-fiction is inherently in this format to begin with, since we usually know what happens at the climax of the story before we begin. It isn’t necessary to start a book about the sinking of the Titanic disappearing below the surface of the water. We know what happened to the Titanic and we feel the sense of impending doom without this artifice, because it really happened. This is a trope that belongs in the world of fiction.
Exempli fucking gratia: Halsey’s Typhoon, telling the story of the U.S. Third Fleet’s encounter with Typhoon Cobra at the end of World War II, begins with the examination of Admiral Halsey during the subsequent investigation. The rest of the book is told in chronological order, but the authors have decided to set the scene for us by starting here because they want us to reflect, throughout the rest of the story, whether Halsey bears personal responsibility for the ships and men lost in the typhoon.
Chapter Two – Chapter One
It is important to jump back to the beginning of the story here, because this is also how it is done on TV.
Chapter Three – Autobiography
Once the non-fiction writer has begun the narrative of the book, it is essential to shift to a second, related story. This is the self-indulgent metastory of how the author came to write the book. The main story is notable, and this second story is not, but they are treated with equal gravity. Now we have a story that we don’t care about tied to the story we actually wanted to read. It saves the author the trouble of writing a second book patting himself on the back for writing the first book, I guess.
For instance: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – which is fully half about the author’s difficulty getting access to the family for interviews. The titular story makes up maybe a quarter of the book, which is actually the most interesting quarter, despite the author’s efforts to portray the story of the effects on the Lacks family as the interesting part.
Remaining Chapters – Alternating stories 1 and 2
It’s important not to stay with one story for too long. Non-fiction feels dry to stupid people, but especially to writers and editors who are convinced that their audience is stupid people. It’s as if a story told in usual chronological order of non-fiction will read like a history book, which reminds people of school, which reminds people of failure and shame. But again, I feel like the influence here is also the way stories are presented in movies and television. Cutting from one storyline to another in fiction promotes drama, because we inherently desire a linear narrative where we will learn what comes next, and by subverting that, tension is created. This makes a lot of sense in fiction, but it fails for a lot of reasons in non-fiction writing.
First, the reader of non-fiction probably knows something about the subject. People may occasionally pick up a book on a subject they don’t know anything about, but most of the time the person who buys the book was already interested in the subject to begin with. So the tension this creates in fiction is subverted. It is also usually subverted somewhat by the “beginning at the end” device that I talked about way at the start of this post, depending on what is revealed and how strong the reader’s memory is.
Second, reading is much slower than TV watching. That means that setting up tension in chapter 4 and resolving it in chapter 10 probably means sustaining suspense across hours of reading, and maybe across multiple reading sessions. The author has no control over this timeline. If the payoff is too far from the setup, the tension may have dissipated and the literary device rendered useless.
Finally, this method creates tension in fiction because the audience wants to know what happens next. If the tension fails to materialize for the first reason listed or fails to sustain for the second, then all the author is doing here is making the reader eat his vegetables. There is absolutely no penalty to giving the reader what he wants right away.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the authors of these books aren’t really attempting to manipulate tension, but merely follow the alternating storyline format because that’s how interesting non-fiction is written. This is my greatest worry, and when I suspect it is at work, the aspect of the work I find most dissatisfying.
Multiple Afterwords
An afterword for every printed edition seems to be the norm now, and while these occasionally discuss additional research or information that has come to light in the intervening years, they also tend to be self-indulgent, talking about the way the book has affected the author’s life, thanking the audience for their outpouring of support, and so on. While this is less disgusting than the author inserting his life in the narrative, it is still pathetic.
Some Exceptions
While “Halsey’s Typhoon” follows the alternating stories method above, it is movement from ship to ship within the fleet, without disturbing the chronology, and the story is about a typhoon occurring across hundreds of square miles and affecting dozens of ships simultaneously. This is therefore the best and most natural way of telling the story.
Heavenly Intrigue is also told as two separate stories, mostly intertwined. In this case the story tells the lives of Kepler and Brahe before merging to talk about their interaction, as they were contemporaries. In that sense it is less jarring than in some books, although it does feel like the important parts of the book, the time they were working together, is subordinate to their lives as pure biography, maybe because they worked together only for a short time. This is another book that is guilty of beginning at the end, however.
Spilling the Beans, Clarissa Dickson-Wright’s autobiography, is entirely free of the criticism I leveled against the general category of “non-fiction” above. This might be because it is an autobiography, or it might be because Clarissa Dickson-Wright (of the tv cooking show Two Fat Ladies) is one of the very few people qualified to write their autobiography and simply knows how to present a true story in an interesting way, but whatever the reason, this is by far the best of the non-fiction reading I’ve done this year, and a hearty recommendation of it is the best possible place to end this tirade.
