Plotting nonfiction

An awful lot of the techniques that get used in fiction have applications in nonfiction as well. They’re not necessary in nonfiction, but they can add a lot of appeal, interest, and readability, among other things.

One of the less obvious candidates for this sort of usefulness is plot. The problem is, I think, with that nonfiction is supposed describe reality, and reality doesn’t have a plot…or does it? If plot is a pattern of events, questions, and answers that builds to a final climax, then no, reality doesn’t have a plot, because reality never has a final climax – it just keeps on going.

But a book about reality does have an ending…the author has to stop somewhere. The trick is to find a story-like pattern within the reality that the book is describing…and if there is one thing that human beings are really, really good at, it’s pattern recognition. Once the author has that, it becomes a matter of arranging the facts so that they build up to a climax.

Sometimes, the plot-pattern doesn’t take much looking for. In a few years, there will probably be a bunch of books out analyzing the events of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I’d be willing to bet that the most successful ones will end with the capping of the well, even though there’s still a lot of work still being done down there and a lot of issues that haven’t been resolved. Most of the books about the Enron collapse a few years back ended with the arrests of the top management. Biographies of famous individuals tend to end either with their deaths or with some key event in the person’s life – Napoleon’s final loss at Waterloo, Oppenheimer watching the first atomic bomb tests.

Picking that key, climatic event is the first step; the next one is organizing and presenting the facts and events leading up to it so as to keep the reader in suspense. Yes, suspense, even though in a lot of cases the reader already knows what happened. Napoleon lost. Enron collapsed. The oil well got capped.

What the reader doesn’t know is exactly how things came together to produce that ending, and that’s the part that the writer can make fascinating. The very best example I know of is the movie Apollo 13. Even the first time I saw it, I knew how it came out; I remembered listening to that four minutes of silence when it was the real thing. And I was still on the edge of my seat along with everyone else in the theater…and I still am, every time I watch it.

The nonfiction writer creates this buildup the same way a fiction writer does: by repeatedly calling the outcome into question, just when it seems to be a sure thing. Sometimes, this isn’t hard at all – think of all the different ways they tried to cap that oil well before they finally got one that worked, or the problems and glitches on top of problems and glitches that kept happening to the Apollo 13 crew. After a while, it starts to seem as if success is going to be impossible, even if we already know what happened.

Other times, the writer misses the boat. I read a book once that recounted the founding and growth of a company that eventually became a household name. It should have been fascinating – there were so many times when the founder escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth that his eventual success should have been a triumph. But the writer got so bogged down in minutiae that he lost track of the story and overshot the ending – the book continued past the success of going public and petered out over several more chapters describing the growth and expansion of the stores (which was, at that point, inevitable).

Even a how-to book can often be presented so as to build to a sense of completion. I own several books on house construction; the best start by describing the foundation and then “building” things in order: a chapter on the basement, then one on the first floor, doors and windows, second floor, and finally the roof, so that at the end of the book there’s a sense of having gone methodically through the whole house. There’s no reason why the author couldn’t have put the chapter on doors and windows first, followed it with the one on roofs, then the one on basements or the first floor…but it wouldn’t have the same pattern.

Note that I’m not talking here about changing any of the actual facts. Accuracy is vital for nonfiction – that’s the whole point, after all. But anyone who’s ever watched two political candidates spin the same story in different directions knows that how you present the facts is nine-tenths of the battle.

Other aspects of fiction writing can apply to nonfiction…or not, depending. A book of knitting patterns isn’t likely to have much use for techniques of characterization or dialog, but a memoir, biography, or the story of Apollo 13 or Enron probably will. And practically all nonfiction uses description and narrative summary in copious quantities. Style counts for a lot, as does clarity.