Do you know whether your book should be fiction, memoir, regular nonfiction, or even how-to? Once you write some basics about your book, you’ll be ready to make that decision.
Even if you are sure, read this chapter. I won’t try to change your mind but I do want to save you from barking up the wrong tree.
Why try to figure out your form in the first place? Why not just jump right in?
Simple answer: An initial focus will help your ideas flow.
A story can be fact or fiction. A newspaper story is a factual narrative: Yesterday a pedestrian was killed by a drunk driver. or Last night the city council met and voted to give a raise to the librarians.
Here are the basic forms of books you could write. Even if you’re just focused on writing one book right now, you might write other books later, so it’s good to have an idea of these things.
FICTION: Stories you make up. Fiction can be based on fact. Most novelists use material from their own lives.
For instance, we know that Harper Lee based her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird on her childhood in small-town Alabama. She used bits and pieces of it, inventing the plot about a black man fighting a trumped-up rape charge, his word against that of his white accusers. The book rings with authority because Lee knew what she was talking about.
It can’t hurt to set a novel in a milieu familiar to you.
Here are rough word counts for different forms of fiction, although there are no hard-and-fast rules about it:
Microshort story: 5 – 100 words
Short-short story: 100 – 1,000
Short story: 1,000 – 5,000
Novelette: 5,000 – 10,000
Novella: 10,000 – 40,000
Novel: 40,000 – infinity
Most novels and short story collections run between 50,000 and 100,000 words.
MAINSTREAM. This encompasses everything that doesn’t quite fit a subcategory. Tell an interesting story that is not a mystery or romance or science fiction, and you might be writing a mainstream novel. Authors mainly known for their mainstream fiction: Charles Dickens, Pat Conroy, Anne Tyler.
LITERARY. Books that get kind of philosophical. You’ll find these assigned in college literature courses. These books explore deep human themes, like love, death, alienation, religion, and ultimate purpose. Literary authors include William Faulkner, Isabel Allende, Kazuo Ishiguro.
I’m going to go into some greater detail in these next couple of categories, mystery and thriller/suspense, because they’re the widest-read categories in fiction, and if you’re thinking of writing a novel, ten bucks to five says you’ve got a mystery or thriller in mind.
A MYSTERY is a puzzle, the classic example being: Here’s a dead body, now whodunit? Most mysteries try also to answer the questions howdunit and whydunit. It’s a venerable form. Most writers start out being great mystery readers.
Examples of mystery writers: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco.
A THRILLER is a pursuit. This category often overlaps with mystery, but the key feature that distinguishes a thriller from a mystery is time pressure.
Like so: The bad guys are planning something dreadful for innocent parties. In order to avert catastrophe, the evil must be stopped. Usually the bad guys and the good guys take turns pursuing each other.
The element these two forms—mystery and thriller—have in common is suspense, and I’ll get back to that.
A few major subgenres of mysteries: The noir novel, which features a morally ambiguous hero; Jim Thompson’s underground classics Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me are examples.
Then there’s the cozy, in which the violence takes place offstage—no explicit violence. Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels are cozies.
The DETECTIVE novel usually means a private investigator, and you can start with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and keep going through Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and beyond.
POLICE PROCEDURALS usually involve police detectives and the technical details of how they solve a crime; Elizabeth George writes these.
The AMATEUR SLEUTH is not a law-enforcement professional, but something different, like maybe a reporter or an actress. Most of my books feature amateur sleuths.
More categories exist because people like to categorize things. I don’t think much of categorization, because like rules, categories can make for rigidity. But it’s wise to have a passing familiarity with this kind of thing, because then you’ll know what the hell authors, critics, and booksellers are talking and arguing about.
A few major thriller subcategories: The GEOPOLITICAL thriller, which includes espionage, global politics, and intrigue. Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is one, and some call Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code another.
The TECHNO thriller verges on science fiction, with hot technology figuring large in the action. Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October would be a well-known example, with most of Michael Crichton’s books thrown in.
PSYCHOLOGICAL thrillers usually involve a psychopath of some variety, a murderous nut on the loose. A prime example being Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.
You might notice that many of the novels I’m mentioning have been made into movies. This is not by accident! Hollywood goes after the most powerful material it can find in these popular, categorized genres.
There’s the HISTORICAL thriller, which these days usually means low-tech; Ken Follett’s books could be placed in this category.
DISASTER thrillers feature humans who must cope with forces beyond their control. Paul Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure was an early and a famous example.
For all this, the categories of mystery and thriller eventually break down into similar elements. In order for a mystery to hold the attention of your readers, you need to inject some suspense, like the sleuth who’s unraveling the mystery becomes endangered himself or herself. That’s an element of the thriller. And in a thriller, you can’t have a prolonged, pointless pursuit—with the possible exception of the 1974 made-for-TV film Killdozer—without injecting some intrigue into it.
To reduce the terms mystery and thriller yet more, you could say that the mystery is cerebral while the thriller is gut-level. And you can see that writing a purely cerebral story without some element of danger can feel flat, and a story with nothing but chases and explosions can feel juvenile, not to mention monotonous, without an element of human intrigue.
High stakes might involve the hero’s reputation, or his very life, or the lives of other people at risk. A story needs villains, of course—and when I use the words hero or bad guy, of course I mean either male or female, and I will use both interchangeably.
You see that some elements are shared between the two forms, but you probably knew that intuitively already. The boundaries between the two forms are pretty liquid. I will note that in a mystery, a crime has already been committed, but in a thriller, the crime, or at least much more crime, is impending. And as one of my correspondents suggested, a mystery can be a thriller, but a thriller is not necessarily a mystery. In fact, I routinely posit that every novel is a mystery, because wanting to know what happens keeps you turning pages!
Contemporary mysteries tend to focus on a small world: maybe a family, or a few people, maybe a town. Contemporary thrillers tend to involve great swaths of society: secret organizations, armies, governments.
SCIENCE FICTION. Stories set in other worlds, or the future or distant past, involving scientific discoveries and made-up technologies that seem plausible, given the fictional conditions you set up as an author, fall under this category.
For instance, if you have a story set on a huge, solid planet, you know you’re going to have to account for gravity. You can’t have near-weightlessness occurring there without some good explanation, or your story won’t seem plausible.
Our friend Ray Bradbury wrote lots of sci-fi, as did Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke.
FANTASY is often set in mythical/magical times, for example when unicorns roamed the uncut forests of what we now know as Europe.
Top fantasy authors include J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and J.K. Rowling. I don’t know what it is with the initials.
ROMANCE. This huge category features love stories of all stripes, but the one absolute requirement is a happy ending.
Top authors in the genre include Nora Roberts, LaVryle Spencer, and Jude Deveraux.
HISTORICAL. These novels are set in actual historical times, like Edwardian England or Renaissance Italy.
James Clavell, Robert Graves, and Pearl S. Buck all wrote historical fiction.
CHRISTIAN. A story of any kind—family saga, romance—with a Christian theme.
Examples of Christian writers: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and more recently Tim LaHaye.
PARANORMAL/SUPERNATURAL. This one can bleed into just about any other category. Usually the action starts in a real-life situation, then the supernatural creeps in. Some of Stephen King’s work could be called paranormal, as well as that of William Peter Blatty and even Edgar Allan Poe. Vampire stories fall into this category as well as the next.
HORROR. This category can be supernatural or not. Horror is the land of the eerie, the haunting, and the flat-out terrifying. Here we also find the work of Stephen King and Poe, plus authors such as Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Dracula).
YOUNG ADULT, or YA. Another huge category, written for readers aged fourteen to twenty. YA literature is often about—what else?—growing up.
Successful YA writers include Judy Blume, Philip Pullman, and Stephenie Meyer. (The paranormal often finds its way into many young adult books.)
CHILDREN’S. This massive category includes picture books and books for very young readers. The information and advice in You’ve Got a Book in You might seem aimed specifically at writers of books for grownups, but in fact it all holds true for writers of children’s books as well. The young need great stories, freely told!
Well-known picture book and children’s authors are Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
OUTSIDER FICTION. Also known as minority fiction, this subgenre offers stories geared toward gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender, Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian audiences. It centers on themes thought to be of interest to these groups. Increasingly, outsider fiction addresses the immigrant experience, no matter what country of origin.
Also in the outsider fiction category is fiction by or about inmates. If you’re in one of these groups, sometimes it’s just a relief to pick up a book that’s about your subculture.
FAN FICTION. These are novels that are written based on fiction that already exists—be it books or TV shows or even video games—by fans of the original material.
If you wrote a book using the characters from your favorite TV show, putting them in different situations but having them behave consistently with their already established personas, you’re writing fan fiction.
This is a controversial category, as fan fiction is both a tribute and, in some ways, a rip-off.
BLENDED FICTION is any combination of genres: Historical YA, literary mystery, Christian sci-fi, gay paranormal romance …
We next segue into the oddly stimulating gray area of creative nonfiction. That seems like a contradiction in terms, like ‘cheap Rolex’ or ‘liquid ice.’ But this is a contemporary category that means a factually accurate account of something that happened, told in a narrative form that might include dialogue and inner thoughts of the characters involved.
For instance, if you wrote a piece of creative nonfiction about the Battle of Gettysburg, you might write it from the point of view of one fictitious soldier or many, or even soldiers and officers with real names who were known to be in the battle. You might make up dialogue and their inner thoughts for them. You might make up incidents that happened on or around the battlefield.
However, creative nonfiction must stay true to known facts. If you wrote the story so that the Confederacy won the Battle of Gettysburg, you could not call it creative nonfiction.
Truman Capote blazed an exciting path when he wrote In Cold Blood, which told the true story of a home invasion, mass murder, and its subsequent investigation, trial, condemnations, and executions. It wasn’t strict reportage. It was Capote putting himself at the scenes and imagining what it was like based on known facts: What were the people thinking and feeling when those events occurred?
Of course, gory murders make compelling material no matter what genre you’re writing in.
In the simplest of terms, nonfiction is something that really happened.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY. This is the story of your life, written by you. A category usually reserved for people of historical significance and celebrities, like Nelson Mandela, Lee Iacocca, and Katharine Hepburn.
MEMOIR. Essentially the same as autobiography in that you’re writing about true incidents that occurred, but you’re not necessarily writing the story of your whole life. This is a great form if you want to write about a specific period in your life, like when you were in a post-grunge band or when you fought in Vietnam.
Today lots of people are writing memoirs, which is good because lots of people lead interesting lives. A guy who took a job as a Christmas elf at Macy’s wrote about it and he made it big: David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice. His work is memoir.
Your memoir might be of a particular episode in your life and its aftermath, like when you got fired for turning in your company for malfeasance, or how you escaped an abusive parent by running away and living on the streets for three years. If you think your personal story is compelling and might help others, consider writing a memoir.
FAMILY HISTORY. Every family needs one!
BIOGRAPHY/MONOGRAPH. This is the life story of somebody who is not you. (A monograph is simply a book that features or is about the work of one person.)
ORAL HISTORY. A collection of transcriptions of recorded interviews that usually focuses on a particular subject or time period. These are great fun to do. Consider writing a family history as an oral history, with all of your relatives participating.
HOW-TO. Do you know how to do something exceptionally well? Have you succeeded in business or developed a new way to do something that other people would want to know about? You can tell them about it. A how-to book can be on any subject under the sun. All you have to do is know what you’re talking about.
TOPICAL NONFICTION. Things like true crime (an account of a murder and its solution, for instance), history, politics, psychology, sports, science, the story of an organization or place, and other such things all qualify as topical nonfiction. This genre usually requires research, meaning you will have to go out and dig up information.
Fun stuff about doing research:
ESSAY. Do you like to offer your opinions? More important, do you find writing a way to explore issues and figure out where you stand on things? If so, the essay form might be for you. Book-length collections of essays usually consist of individual essays first published elsewhere, usually in magazines or as part of a blog.
BLOG. This is shorthand for ‘web log,’ which is basically a place on line where a person posts her thoughts, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Blogs can be terrific writing practice. If you start a blog, you might theme it according to your chief interest.
So, is it going to be fact or fiction for you? Ask yourself the following vital questions. It might help to write down your thoughts as you go so you don’t forget. Spend some time on this, let your thoughts develop.
A good friend of mine is an editor for Amazon’s self-publishing subsidiary, CreateSpace, so she sees a great many newbie manuscripts. Recently she told me, “The quality of these manuscripts is all over the place. Some are wonderful! But the absolute worst thing somebody can do is fictionalize their life story. They change the names and tell their story, but there’s no dramatic structure to it. It’s just this sequence of events, and some of them are cool, but the whole thing really doesn’t work as a novel.”
So if you’re considering fictionalizing your life story, you must treat your experiences as a starting point—as inspiration. Then get some drama in there! See Chapter Ten, Your Map, for how to do it.
Are you an expert at something? Does your book center on a skill or set of skills? Perhaps your thing is business savvy or how to make/do/survive something? For the purpose of writing a book, you’re an expert if you’ve taught it—if you’ve lectured at the college level or at companies.
Want to become an expert? Teach a seminar or course at your local college, free or for pay if you can. Agents and editors talk about a writer’s need for a ‘platform’ in order to sell nonfiction books. That simply means that you have basic credentials, and a following of some sort, or the potential for one.
Credentials = Credibility.
Do you enjoy asking questions and searching for the answers? If you’re passionate about a subject or if a subject keeps pushing itself into your heartbrain—whether it’s the quest to cook the ideal meatloaf or wanting to know what’s going on in the meth lab next door or coming up with an idea for the perfect embezzlement—explore it. Look into it and see how you feel about it. If you find yourself thirsting to know more about a subject, a nonfiction book might be the ticket.
Do you suspect that your true story, while compelling at least in parts, lacks pizzazz or the kind of ending you’d expect in a gripping novel? If your story is true, what about the other real people involved? While it’s acceptable to change names and identifying details and still call it nonfiction, if your subjects will recognize themselves in an unflattering light, you might want to change things still more and call it fiction.
What if you decide to fictionalize a real individual who you want to take revenge on, and/or be acidic about? Go to drastic lengths in the portrayal of this character. Otherwise I guarantee you the person will recognize him or herself. Give the person a totally new name—do not get cute—and change every one of their physical characteristics: hair, eyes, body type and height, skin tone, nationality, mannerisms of speech and movement, and so on. Even race or sex. You can’t go wrong changing the sex, because it will throw off every reader out there. I also suggest making the fictional character much more physically attractive than the real one. Save your vitriol for the personality.
So: Fact or fiction? Pick a way to start, get going on it, and see how the project feels.