The truth about nonfiction

    In high school I was not a fan of English class. It seemed that we spent an eternity talking about Shakespeare and a bunch of books that I really wasn’t interested in that we talked way too much about. When I went to college I was happy to write research papers and the deeper I got the more I fell in love with research and writing. While my goal as a kid was to write teleplays and screenplays my teens brought the dream of writing a novel. I had started a novel that would be abandoned repeatedly, but life led me to a path of writing nonfiction.

    School and work brought questions of local folklore and urban legends which I began to research and practice writing papers about. I eventually shared some of my work to help a friend learn how to write research papers and after a while people viewed me as someone who knew about these stories. This led to a ghost group where I immersed myself in over 130 years’ worth of research and created handbooks for my investigators. That work led to my first two books published in 2008. In 2025, I published my seventh nonfiction title and am currently working on the eighth. 

    Just what is nonfiction? Most people know that fiction is stories that are made up of characters and events that didn’t happen which would make nonfiction the opposite. Nonfiction is based on facts, possibly historical events or people, or other real-world topics. Fiction has genres like romance, science fiction, horror, thriller, mystery, and more. Nonfiction can also be broken down into five styles and multiple genres. The styles are how the topics are written and some of the genres can fit into multiple types based on how they are expressed by the writer.

Narrative
These are true stories using techniques seen in fiction like pacing, setting, and character development based on real people.

• Biographies – A third person account of an individual’s real life.
• Autobiographies – A first person account of the author’s life.
• Memoir – A first person account focusing on a specific area of their life such as experiences or a period).
• True crime – Historical accounts or investigations into real crimes from serial killers to cold cases.
• Adventure and survival – Real stories of journeys or overcoming natural obstacles or perilous situations.

Expository
Explaining a specific topic in a way to teach or entertain an audience. This could be academic/educational or informative.

• History – Factual overview of a historical event, time period, or civilization.
• Science and nature – Discussion of scientific and natural topics that is usually taking complex topics and making them easier to understand or entertaining. Astronomy, physics, geology, biology, dinosaurs, medicine, and more.
• Society and culture – Dealing with social dynamics, race, gender, cultural practices, and contemporary issues.
• Philosophy – Big picture questions about humanity and our place in the universe such as human existence and logic.

Persuasive
Argues a position or side to a topic using logic, evidence, credible sources and will appeal to emotion.

• Opinion pieces/Op-Eds, speeches, argumentative essays, advocacy writing.

Descriptive
Using sensory rich detail to immerse the reader when depicting people, places, objects, or experiences. A tangible image is created for the reader to describe real people, places, or events to build an emotional connection to the subject. The idea is to bridge information and experience to engage the reader and make the content as meaningful as it is informative.

• Travel literature, journalism, nature or environmental writing, nature or environmental writing, could also include memoirs and biographies.

Creative
Blending factual accuracy with techniques used with writing fiction such as character development and dialogue. The idea is not to just tell the story but to paint it in the mind like a fictional story.

Other genres:

• Self-help/personal development, health and wellness, spirituality and wellness, business and finance/economics, cookbooks and food writing.

    So how does one write nonfiction? The best way I can describe the difference between crafting nonfiction from fiction is that fiction is building something from ideas and nonfiction is creating ideas from taking something apart. Picture fiction as adding and shaping information to ideas taken from inspirational sources. Nonfiction is whittling away information from resources to focus on a specific set of ideas within a topic.

    Writing nonfiction should start with a lot of planning. You need to have an idea of what function your book will have. What specific information do you want to cover? How do you want to cover it? What will your audience be and will they connect with the information and the style you intend to write it? Consider the reader’s expectation based on the genre you intend to write about (just like fiction, nonfiction doesn’t have to fit in one specific genre). A lot of the previous may depend on your personal writing style so write with your strengths.

    A unique part with writing nonfiction is that unlike fiction genres there may not be a lot of competition for a specific idea you have in mind. There may be hundreds of romance novels dealing with the pirate era and despite your best idea your book may get lost at sea. The same isn’t always true with nonfiction. Looking at the current market, you may be able to create something to fill a need or gap in what is already available for your topic. There may be a thousand crock pot recipe books, but how many of those are for breakfast? I’m not sure that’s practical, but it’s just an example. The idea is to balance originality with need. If something is too specific you risk not selling many copies and if it blends in with everything else you may suffer the same fate. The goal is to craft something unique enough to grab attention and fill a void without being too fine that it only represents a fraction of a potential audience. 

    Writing fiction depends on how original you can tell a story that share common threads with other writers and nonfiction isn’t that different. Once you have an idea of what to write I recommend a thorough outline to visualize how the topic will build on itself and flow to the reader. From there the work goes into research. If you’re doing a breakfast themed cookbook are you sure those recipes are correct? Maybe grandma forgot a step or got the temperature of the oven wrong, and you certainly wouldn’t want your cookbook to make someone ill. If you’re writing about health and wellness, animals, history, or economics, you’ll want to make sure that your facts are facts and know that you can trust the source of your information.

   For my 2025 release, Eastern Cryptids, the hardest part of writing the book was creating the idea and figuring out what I was going to cover within the book. A book talking about strange creatures all over the world would have meant a lot of creatures with very little content and the opposite true if I focused just on my home state of Ohio. Both of those have already been published by various authors and I even wanted to avoid a United States version. Instead, I merely focused east of the Mississippi River in a region where I live and have done an overwhelming majority of my presentations. The area also encompasses 26 states and the District of Columbia. 

    The next hardest task was the whittling down the nearly 200 creatures to those that would benefit the book and provide an ample example of the various types that have been witnessed. I decided to avoid stories with no true witnesses and pure folklore although I used more popular creatures to explain that segment. I then had to put these creatures into categories where I opted to put them in types (Bigfoot-like, upright canine, sea/lake/river, other aquatic, out of this world, out of time, and out of place). I could have easily put them in states or sections (north/east/south/west) but I felt that the types worked best for both those that read from front to back or those that search for their favorite beasts and then explore other things.

    Lastly, I filled in the blanks by doing thorough research on each individual creature trying to find something unique that no one else had mentioned or at least a different take on the story, evidence, or evolution of the legends. For my book I used plenty of references that I made available for the reader. This is a lot of extra work but for my format it meant that I could back up what I wrote by providing the details of where I came up with my information. This may seem like a lot of work, but from concept to publishing it took me about eight months and during that time I was working on other projects.