How to Build Momentum and Suspense in Nonfiction Storytelling
The best nonfiction storytelling feels just as exciting as a fictional book or movie. Here’s how to heighten the pace and keep things moving when telling true stories.
The next session of one of our most popular classes—Audrey Clare Farley’s The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel—is just around the corner, starting October 29. Today, we’re sharing Audrey’s StoryCraft article about how to get started with ensuring your nonfiction scenes are just as exciting as anything a fiction writer can dream up.
In his craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer
offers this advice: “Always be escalating.” He goes on, “That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.”Saunders is writing for fellow make-believers, and this insight comes from studying a particularly narrow genre of fiction, the Russian short story. Nevertheless, his words are instructive for many of us who write narrative nonfiction. We, too, have to craft compelling storylines. We, too, know that we’re competing against social media for readers’ attention — and that many literary agents and editors are on the hunt for the most page-turning projects.
But how exactly does one “escalate” in nonfiction? What literary devices help to build momentum in a story that’s also, or even primarily, meant to inform or persuade?
These are questions I think about a lot in my own writing, and that I cover in my classes. I tend to tell fellow nonfiction writers that we can draw on almost anything from the playbooks of novelists, including devices like foreshadowing and dramatic irony. Further, even our takeaways or “morals of the story,” can benefit from Saunders’s “always be escalating” rule. There are so many ways to do this. Here’s a brief look at some of my favorite approaches — and some nonfiction books that use these devices to great effect.
Give Readers a Hint
When readers suspect but don’t know something, or when they have knowledge that exceeds certain characters’, they’re inclined to keep reading. They want to see their hunches proved right, know how action unfolds or learn how characters are changed by an event. This means narrative nonfiction writers may have to scrap the academic rubric, which requires them to show their hand in the opening pages, for more crafty scaffolding.
This doesn’t mean to obscure the truth or imply something that isn’t true. But by revealing some of the details early on, without giving away everything, you get readers thinking about what the full story might be — and that makes them want to read on to learn it all.
A prologue could establish what happened — building suspense by showing us the general events with color and excitement, but leaving some mystery as to all the details — while subsequent chapters reveal how, why, by whom, or to what effect.
Play With Time
A history textbook tells nonfiction stories in straightforward, chronological order, but a narrative nonfiction book doesn’t have to. Playing with timelines is difficult to execute, but when done well can be very effective in terms of building momentum.
One character or storyline might move forward in time, while another moves backward. This is loosely the structure of Cristina Rivera Garza’s award-winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Sifting through archival records and plumbing her own memories, the author goes back in time to understand her sister’s life leading up to her murder; she also reproduces unedited letters and notes to enable her dead sister to speak, unmediated, to readers in the present.
Follow a Change
It helps to remember that, for Saunders, escalation means “advancing the story in a non-trivial way.” No matter what heavy lifting chapters do to educate or entertain, each one should also change the whole somehow.
Think about what changes from start to finish in your book. Remember that it might be less about the events than the characters themselves.
Change might entail a character’s transformation or that of the writer. Some of the most propulsive true-crime books find momentum not from can’t-look-away crimes, but from the teller’s trials. Think of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which describes the late author’s psychological descent while pursuing the Golden State Killer. Or Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, which explores the author’s childhood sexual trauma alongside a murder case.
Make Your Point Incrementally
In academia, writers are often told to introduce their argument early on, using the opening pages to spell out a thesis. But in narrative nonfiction, the most effective theses tend to be laid out incrementally and only as narrative events permit. When I read a book that patiently makes its claims (I’m thinking of Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, on slavery and national memory), it feels as if I am the one turning on the light bulbs in my head. I’m coming to the author’s conclusions with him, in real time.
It can be daunting to think one must “always be escalating.” But thinking in terms of escalation can save writers from spending time on scenes or sections that aren’t needed. Any of the books I mentioned above are great places to start if you’re working on a nonfiction book and want inspiration about how to build momentum from start to finish. Also keep in mind that escalation can come naturally through revision. In many cases, it’s only after putting words on the page that we can make connections and see causality. Far from applying a formula to a story, then, escalation is often the work of surprise. When we allow language, characters and ideas to get away from us, we find our stride.
Want to learn more about how to write engaging and suspenseful nonfiction? Grab one of the last seats in Audrey’s upcoming Narratively Academy class, The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel. If you’re aiming to get that big nonfiction or memoir book project moving this fall, this one’s for you.
