I'm looking ahead to the August contest - writing a nonfiction piece about the "art of writing."
What is your best advice about writing a good nonfiction piece?
What is your best advice about writing a good nonfiction piece?
How do you write good nonfiction?
- Thread starter Louanne Learning
- Start date
The usual advice is to make it personal. Relate to the reader.
Zatamon
New Member
Feel passionate about the subject. That's the biggest compliment from readers about my Physics book - "his passion on the topic shines through every word". Readers don't just want to learn about a topic, they want an emotional connection to it. You have to make them feel that the time spent reading is going to enrich their life.
I think this is vital.
So, we have established that an emotional connection is needed in both fiction and nonfiction.
What other aspects of writing fiction apply to nonfiction?
What other aspects of writing fiction apply to nonfiction?
It needs to be interesting. Or to be more specific (and this really applies to fiction too), both author and reader begin with hoping that it's not going to have the safe uninspired plod of a middle school hamburger essay.
Fiction and non-fiction are both creative writing. Tone, voice, pacing, persuasion, etc. They all matter. Thinking about it now, what aspects of fiction don't apply other than the, you know, fictive part?
Honesty.
Non-fiction, to me, is not the place for hyperbole and widespread generalizations. I've read a few memoir type books over the last few years and some were good, some were more interested in selling me on the author's brand than they were anything else.
There is an element of the personal, and the passionate, I think, that needs to be in non-fiction because without that, the writing becomes dry. Depending on the content of the piece, though, there might be an inevitability of dryness.
When it comes to specific topics, being the kid in the corner talking about something with full animation of face and hand gestures is the way I want to be as a writer. I want to be able to support myself with facts, though, and not rely purely on passion.
Non-fiction, to me, is not the place for hyperbole and widespread generalizations. I've read a few memoir type books over the last few years and some were good, some were more interested in selling me on the author's brand than they were anything else.
There is an element of the personal, and the passionate, I think, that needs to be in non-fiction because without that, the writing becomes dry. Depending on the content of the piece, though, there might be an inevitability of dryness.
When it comes to specific topics, being the kid in the corner talking about something with full animation of face and hand gestures is the way I want to be as a writer. I want to be able to support myself with facts, though, and not rely purely on passion.
Pyroglyphian
New Member
Plan, I say. Ask yourself questions like, "What does the reader already know about this subject?" and, "What key points do I want to get across in this piece?"
Good luck with the contest!
All good advice, but I've always found that the best non-fiction literally "reads like a novel." It tells a compelling story that makes you want to turn the page to see what happens next.
S. C. Gwynne is one of the best non-fiction writers around. Primarily an historian, his work covers everything from the Civil War to Comanche supremacy in the Old West to airship disasters to a revolutionary approach to strategy in football.
John McPhee covers an equally broad range of subjects, and has been doing it for over half a century for the New Yorker magazine.
Robert Claibore's book Our Marvelous Native Tongue is far and away the best book of the scores and scores I've read on the English language. It's nothing less than a five-hundred page love letter, by a man whose devotion to the language is on every page.
But one essential element of non-fiction writing hasn't been mentioned: get your facts straight. Without accuracy, it may be elegantly phrased but isn't worth a cent.
S. C. Gwynne is one of the best non-fiction writers around. Primarily an historian, his work covers everything from the Civil War to Comanche supremacy in the Old West to airship disasters to a revolutionary approach to strategy in football.
John McPhee covers an equally broad range of subjects, and has been doing it for over half a century for the New Yorker magazine.
Robert Claibore's book Our Marvelous Native Tongue is far and away the best book of the scores and scores I've read on the English language. It's nothing less than a five-hundred page love letter, by a man whose devotion to the language is on every page.
But one essential element of non-fiction writing hasn't been mentioned: get your facts straight. Without accuracy, it may be elegantly phrased but isn't worth a cent.
