Help On Non-Fiction Book

[automechan1991]

Hello, I am working on my non-ficton book, Life At C-Town. It's based on a true story, but, would it be okay if I made up a few things to make the book bigger? Also, where could I get an example of a non-fiction book? What format do I put the book in? Do I make a new paragraph on every subject change in the book? I have a lot of questions. Thank you. You can also email me at automechan1991@yahoo.com

[Al B]

There's a grand tradition in supposedly factual books of adding the odd bit of fiction or embellishment to liven them up or in some cases 'to tell a greater truth' by making something up, so yup, it's your book, and if you feel it needs some more stuff, why not? Sometimes the editor or publisher will suggest doing so too.

A good example of this being done in a book, is WW2 fighter pilot Richard Hillary's classic memoir, The Last Enemy. He wrote it whilst recuperating from being badly burned when bailing out of his Spitfire fighter plane, which was shot down by a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt 109 during the Battle of Britain. While The Last Enemy was a fairly compelling book in its original form, one of the hopes of the publisher was that Britain would gain sympathy from the US if people in the US read it, as it was published before the attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the US into WW2. And so, the end of the book was altered to include an event in which Hillary apparently rescued a young woman from a burning building which had been bombed by a German aircraft (having been burned himself in a crash, it would have been understandable if he'd have been reticent to do such a thing of course). However, the 'rescue' was a complete fabrication, it never happened at all, and was merely added to the book to make Hillary seem more heroic to US readers. It worked too, the book sold massive quantities in the US in 1941 beyond.

With regard to paragraphs - there's no absolutely unbreakable rule on when to start a new paragraph, but as a general guideline, it tends to be needed when a new subject or angle is introduced. A good rule of thumb I found is something along the lines of: an average sentence has 13 words and an average paragraph has 50 words. But this is merely something I observed from years of editing copy, so you can use it as a basic guide rather than a hard and fast rule. Don't just start one because you think it's time to do so though, have a good reason for doing so.

But, in common with using dialogue in your writing, inserting paragraphs also serves another purpose which is often overlooked, and that is that they add some white space onto the page. There a famous saying by Marshall McCluhan, who said that 'the medium is the message'. What he meant by that amongst other things, was that a piece of writing can be made more attractive to readers, and hence more likely to be read, by how it looks on the page. This is something advertisers are well aware of, and they refer to it as 'creative use of white space'. So keep that in mind too when you add paragraphs, because it's not simply the content of the text which makes it readable, but also the way it looks on the page.

Hope that helps a bit.

Al