Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

Writing fiction and writing non-fiction must be severely different, right? After all, authors of fiction rarely write non-fiction and few writers of non-fiction also write fiction. Well, that’s not quite correct — fiction authors often also write books about writing these days or have a blog, like this one, and write about writing in it. So what are the differences between writing fiction and writing non-fiction? Are there differences? Well, obviously, but they might not be that big.

There’s not that much of a difference, as it were. A good non-fiction book should entertain while you’re also learning something new. A good fiction book might teach you a few things you’ve not known before, even if it’s just a few words or a few details about a place or time you’ve never seen.
Fiction might seem to be ‘just imagination’ and nothing more, but as an author, I can assure you that one of the four jobs I continually cycle between is ‘research’ (the other three are writing, editing, and plotting). If you don’t do your research about real things you need to incorporate, be it objects or time periods, your readers will know. One or more of them will know about that time period or will be experienced fencers and know you’re winging it and be angry about it and, this being the time of the internet, they’ll tell everyone about it, too.
In addition to that, non-fiction needs to be written well, needs to be written in an entertaining way, if you don’t want people to just put your book aside or never buy it in the first place. Even textbooks usually try to be readable these days and not just stuffed with facts. It’s much easier to get students to read a textbook if they’re feeling entertained than if every sentence is a torture.
Fiction needs to have its facts right and non-fiction needs to be written engagingly.

The main focus of fiction is creativity. The author creates characters, setting, and plot and weaves them together into a story which others find entertaining. A lot of what is in a novel, novella, or short story has no basis in facts. It is not based on a real character, it is only using a specific time period (including the present) as a backdrop, and doesn’t follow real-life events (not completely, at any rate; even a story ‘based on real-life events’ will invent some of its content).
Yet, every story also has details which are based in facts. Your spy will drive a car and that car can only do what a car can do. Your medieval monk will follow the daily schedule of his order and that is something you can and should look up first, even if you modify it. Your fashionista will make comments on the current fashion or specific types of dresses that fit specific body types, which should also be based on reality. You don’t have to go the YA way and throw all the different brand names around, but if you use something, you should know how it can be used or what it looks like.

Non-fiction, in comparison, is steeped in facts. On the other hand, humans do not react well to only being presented with the facts. We’re hard-wired in our brains to respond better to stories than to facts alone, which is why we have newspaper articles and tell our friends all about how we were almost late for work this morning. To be read, non-fiction needs to have a certain entertainment value. The term ‘edutainment’ isn’t wrong — entertaining and educating don’t exclude each other, they should go hand in hand, if possible.
I’ve read a load of books on writing over the last decade or so, ever since I got back into writing in a more serious way, and even those which promote writing processes I don’t use have been helpful. In addition, I have read books on the history of writing (like the fun and informative “Monster, She Wrote”) or books meant to make fictional books more understandable (like “The Jane Austen Handbook” which is filled with details about the life of landed gentry in the Regency period). I’ve learned from all of them and some have given me new ideas (“The Jane Austen Handbook” sparked the basic ideas for this year’s August release “The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall”).
A good non-fiction book will entertain you as much as a good fiction book and will use similar techniques to keep you reading, too.

Last week, I published a blog post about the good writing of the “Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher. I focused on three techniques which he uses, two of which are also applicable for non-fiction.
A lot of people who write their first scientific essay for school or college or university try to sound knowledgeable by using big words and specific expressions. They think that using a lot of language which only insiders will understand makes the text sound more scientific. The opposite is the case. If you have understood your subject, you can write about it as well in regular, everyday language as in insider slang. If you have that understanding, you should use simple, everyday language. One thing which writers of non-fiction who are good at it say is along the lines of ‘write the text as if it were a letter to a friend who doesn’t have the slightest idea about the topic.’ That’s a very good suggestion for everyone who goes ahead and writes non-fiction. Keep the language simple.
The second thing which is applicable is to create a connection between the different chapters of your text. I mentioned how Butcher does that by ending on an interesting or curious note. The same is possible with a non-fiction text — just end a chapter by suggesting that the topic of this chapter and the topic of the next are connected. They should be, of course, but most non-fiction books follow a through-line which introduces topics based on the ones before, so it shouldn’t be hard.

Fiction and non-fiction are not as far from each other as you might be thinking. Humans need stories to understand the world, so non-fiction needs storytelling as much as fiction does. The main difference is the freedom to change things which does not exist in non-fiction. In fiction, you research details, but create your own narrative. In non-fiction, the facts create the narrative which you can then follow to make things interesting for the reader.

The Dresden Files' Good Writing

I am late to the party here and I know it — the “Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher have been a mainstay in Urban Fantasy for a long time already. There are 17 books out as I write this, after all. Now, before I tell you what this post is about, let me tell you quickly what it is not about. This is not a blog post about character development or world building in the series. I am reading book 3 as I write this and, given that the video which pushed me to read the first book mentioned the series changes quite a bit after book 5, I do not want to write about Harry’s development or the interesting approach to the Masquerade that early. Instead, I want to write about pure craftsmanship — Jim Butcher’s word-craft that keeps you reading longer than you should. It kept me up much longer than I should have been up as well.

Jim Butcher’s books have been called pulp and, after finishing two and a half of them, I am more than happy to agree. They’re pulp in the best meaning of the word. They are good, fast reads that keep you interested and make you breeze through them with a hunger for more. That is, in essence, what pulp stories should be like — excellent entertainment that makes you come back for more because you enjoyed yourself so much.
A lot of people look down on pulp as a cheap type of book which doesn’t deserve any recognition. These people probably have never tried to write something which is as focused on readability as pulp is. Readability is not easily defined, because how difficult or easy something is to read depends very much on how well you read a language and how large your vocabulary is. This blends into the first part of what makes the “Dresden Files” so good. To keep people reading, though, you also need to make sure they engage with the characters and get interested in and curious about the story and its next turns and twists.

The first thing which Jim Butcher does absolutely right is his wording. He uses regular words, his sentences are fluent and easy to read, and he doesn’t make the readers stop in order to look up an unknown word or try to make sense of a complicated sentence.
A lot of authors try to show their power over words — something integral to writing, of course, you need to be good with words — by using a large vocabulary and by creating complicated sentences. While this is certainly something, it doesn’t help the average reader with understanding what you’ve written. As a writer, I understand the need to show you’ve mastered your tools. As a reader, I find it easier to stay engaged with a book when it’s making things easy for me and doesn’t challenge me to look up every tenth word and analyse every fifth sentence for its structure. This is something which Butcher never does.
While showing off one’s own vocabulary can be very satisfying, it’s not helpful for gaining a large readership. The more special and the larger the used vocabulary is, the less people will find it easy to follow the text. Therefore, the first lesson to learn from Jim Butcher’s writing is that you should keep your wording and your sentence structure simple and flowing.
Easy reading makes for quick consumption and quick consumption makes for an enjoyable time.

The second and the third part are connected closely to each other, but I’ll talk about each of them in time: ending the chapter on a curious or interesting note and keeping the chapters short.
Let’s look at the chapter ending first. In a pulp story, you as the author want for the readers to consume as much of your story as possible in one sitting. To achieve that, the reader must be motivated to continue after the end of each chapter. An old technique to achieve that, copied from the movie serials of the early twentieth century, is the cliffhanger.
A cliffhanger is created by putting the main character or their love interest in danger at the end of a chapter or episode — literally hanging from a cliff or otherwise in deathly peril. Yet, you can’t do that the whole time. A thirty-chapter story, for instance, can’t put twenty-nine cliffhangers in — that would tire the reader out and they’d probably give up worrying for your main character or love interest after a while. After all, every time they hang from a cliff, they’re saved in the next chapter.
There is a smaller sibling to the cliffhanger, though. You can end a chapter on an interesting note, on a comment or suggestion that interesting things are going to happen in the next chapter. If you end a chapter with ‘had I known what the day would bring, I would have stayed in bed,’ the readers are going to be interested in what happened on that day. They’ll turn the page and start the next chapter, hoping it will be all about that day.
Butcher is good at making the reader curious. Since he writes first-person and the readers are in Harry Dresden’s head, it’s easy to make Dresden think about something strange or curious that will be featured in the next chapter, to comment on what is to come. Like this, Butcher evokes the ‘one more chapter’ feeling in the audience and that is always a good thing in a pulp story. In addition, he delivers on the curious note, which makes it easy for him to get the reader curious again.

This curious note on the end of the chapter goes well with another thing which Butcher does right: the chapter length.
A lot of people read by chapter. They stop reading at the end of a chapter when they have other things to do as well. They’ll tell themselves ‘I’ll finish that chapter before I start cooking dinner’ or ‘I have time for that chapter before I need to take the laundry out of the dryer.’ Like this, they often justify taking time for their reading while they should be doing something else — especially given that pulp is not considered ‘proper literature’ by many.
The length of a chapter has a big influence on whether the reader will read on or not. If a chapter has two hours of reading time (I’m not joking, the first chapter of the second volume of “Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation” does), chances are that a more chapter-oriented reader will not tackle it lightly. They’ll have to think about when they will have the time to finish it. That is not how Butcher does his chapters, though. I haven’t met a chapter which took me longer than five to ten minutes so far. Five to ten minutes are easy to justify and to get in between chores or other tasks. They’re essentially a coffee break.
A short, bite-sized chapter can easily motivate the reader to ‘read on.’ As a writer, you want for the reader to ‘read on,’ so make it easy for them.

In Jim Butcher’s books all three of these aspects come together: the story is easily readable, due to a regular vocabulary and easy-to-read sentences. It’s not challenging, it’s something you can read on the way to work or while you’re waiting for the dryer to finish the laundry. The chapters end on a curious or interesting note, motivating you to read the next one as well. As the chapters are short and won’t take too much time, it’s easy to give in to that ‘one more chapter’ feeling and read that chapter and, perhaps, the one after it.

Thor and Loki: Double Trouble Review

“Thor and Loki: Double Trouble” is a four-issue mini series I stumbled over by coincidence. I do get regular Amazon recommendations (as everyone who shops at Amazon does) and it was in my recommendations after I’d bought another comic book. I took a look at it, like the initial pages and the design, and decided to buy it. I loved it very much and have read it several times in a row, as it’s a fun romp which makes good use of its characters.

In general, I have a soft spot for stories which are more focused on the relationship between Thor and Loki instead of their big adventures or the darker sides they both have. Even by just looking into the first few pages I could access through the ‘look inside’ feature, I could tell that this mini series was one of those stories. It was about Thor and Loki being Thor and Loki and about them having an adventure that came about because of their characters and their relationship.
With its bright colours and clear lines, it was also obvious that the mini series wasn’t going to be dark — you don’t use that style in a story which is supposed to be dark and foreboding. Therefore, I was sure that it would be a fun read and bought it. “Double Trouble”, as I learned a little later, was a series in itself in 2021, there are more Marvel heroes in ‘double trouble.’

With Thor and Loki, though, the story is a ‘double trouble’ in more than one way. After Loki plays on Thor’s weakness of being unable to withstand a challenge and gets him to steal an artefact, they get into trouble over the results of using it. When trying to make their punishment of cleaning up after the facts easier, Loki accidentally sends them to another reality which has its own Thor and Loki — Jane Foster’s Thor and Lady Loki. This means we don’t just have the ‘double trouble’ of Thor and Loki, but also the ‘double trouble’ of two of each.
Naturally, there is a fight between the regular one and Lady Loki and an argument about who really is Thor between regular Thor and Jane Foster’s version. Yet, while Thor and his female version get their argument out of the way easily, their siblings need a lot longer to finish their fight over the artefact which brought regular Thor and Loki there in the first place.
Even though there’s the severe destruction of down-town Asgard, there’s no injuries or dead people in that scene, just a lot of rubble that needs cleaning up by the two people who caused the destruction in the first place. In the end, there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do, so Loki’s magic solved nothing. It’s a light-hearted story with a good end, if not necessarily a happy one for Thor and Loki.

Of course, if we’re talking about a comic book, it’s not only about the story. Comics are a visual medium and that’s a good thing, too. For the “Double Trouble” series, the graphics are crisp and bright and the line-work is clear and simple, often more akin to a Japanese manga than to a classic American comic book. Like this, it is easy to follow the action (and there’s quite some action in the comic) and it’s also easy to recognize the important parties within the story.
The writing of the story in general and the writing of the dialogues is also excellent. The behaviour of all involved is believable (although I was not aware Odin loved ice-cream that much until I read the comic). The dialogues are fun to read and play off quips to keep things light-hearted and fun.
The design of regular Thor and Loki is suggesting adolescent characters rather than adult ones (while Jane Foster Thor and Lady Loki are clearly more grown-up), which makes the story much lighter in tone. Thor and Loki look and act more like teenagers than like adults and their arguments are not harsh, but rather the usual arguments one would expect from two teenaged boys. Loki goads Thor, Thor lets himself be goaded. Thor impresses his fans, Loki cuts in and starts a fight. That’s very much an adolescent way of acting around each other.
The general framing of the action is also very well done. The panels are fun and show the story very well. Seeing Thor and Jane Foster Thor snack on some apples in the background while Loki and Lady Loki are fighting, for instance, is the kind of light-heartedness which you might want while two powerful shifters re-enact the fight of Merlin and Madame Mim from “The Sword in the Stone” — only without rules about ‘no dragons’ and in tones of green and turquoise instead of pink and blue.

“Thor and Loki: Double Trouble” doesn’t take itself or its main characters too serious and plays on the more light-hearted and funny aspects of their relationship. It helps, of course, that the comic can draw on versions of Loki who are less evil and more heroic or at least more of an anti-hero than a villain. Sure, Loki is a trouble-maker in the comic, but Thor is so, too, to a degree. After all, he has to be aware that breaking into the treasure room isn’t going to go over well. The quarrels between them are not dark or intense, they’re just sibling rivalry. As a matter of fact, they remind me of my Thor and Loki from the Loki Files — only that they have gotten over their rivalry and have become good friends and brothers who stick together by the time they reached adulthood.

Not That Many Updates

We have a release month again, of course, as it’s definitely May by now. Since the release of “The Fourth Reich” is coming up, here is an update from me as to the books which I have written or plan to finish soon or plan to write soon. I have more than enough projects waiting and really need to discipline myself more, so I get them out into the world before I think up even more projects.
It is not that I haven’t written anything — I wrote over 60,000 words last month. It’s just that relatively few of them were part of any official projects. There was a lot of smut, but there was little about Colin (who is now stuck in a manor home in a time loop with a killer…). Yet, I have written a lot, which means I can write a lot. I just need to focus more on the actual projects I have, such as Colin’s stories and the novel “Sword and Dagger” (working title, might become a series title) which I’ve set up to write next and hope to start this month after I finish with Colin.

My current release list:

• The Fourth Reich (May 2022)
• The Haunting of Winterthorne Hall (August 2022)
• The Necromancer’s Notebook (Isadora Goode Vol. 2; November 2022)
• The Lady of the Dead (February 2023)
• DI Colin Rook Vol. 1 (May 2023)

My next two projects:

• Sword and Dagger (novel, might be the start of a new series)
• John Stanton - Agent of the Crown Vol. 3

My projects are plotted, so all I need to do is to sit down and write them — which is, of course, the longest part of the writing process. Apart from the two projects listed above, I have a long list of other projects which are plotted and ready for writing. Quite some of them are mystery stories, there’s also a few horror stories coming up, and I do hope that I will also get around to continuing the Magpies series — I have ten titles at the ready, yet only one book finished and none more plotted.
I also want to switch as regularly as possible between story collections (such as Colin Rook), novella collections (such as John Stanton or Isadora Goode), and novels (such as this month’s “The Fourth Reich”). I have a lot more novels than other things plotted, though, so I can see myself writing more novels than other stuff in the near future.

I’ve also started to post ‘character dialogues’ on my Facebook Page every day. They’re short dialogues between me and my characters (sometimes, I even win…). If you check my page regularly, that might give you a bit more to read instead of only a few posts a week.

That’s it for the update. I hope it’s been informative. Check my Facebook Page, if you haven’t already. By the end of the month, “The Fourth Reich” will be out, then I can return to writing and finally get Colin out of that time loop.

Revisiting the "Relic"

In the nineties, “Relic” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child was one of the first ‘specialist thrillers’ I ever read. I found a German version in my favourite bookshop around the time around which the movie based on the novel hit theatres in Germany and picked it up for good reading. I fell in love with the novel to a degree and read it several times in the following years. The sequel, “Reliquary”, was one of the first book I read in English and never in German at all. I followed the series for some more books, but I haven’t read any of them in years. That changed recently.

As a matter of fact, I never saw the movie in theatres, but bought the VHS tape when it came out (it was the nineties — VHS was still the norm). The first time I watched the movie, I was not elated. As a matter of fact, the movie’s changes make the sequel impossible, but there were other things as well. Characters which should have been there, especially Special Agent Pendergast from the FBI, were nowhere to be found. The whole story had been moved from New York City to Chicago (which didn’t hurt as much as the missing Pendergast — the series is following him, not another character from the first book).
The movie isn’t bad as a such — it is fun to watch and the monster is even still good today. It pays not to push your monster out in the bright light of day, darkness is your friend for every CGI-created creature. As a thriller with supernatural/dubitable science tropes, the movie is good, as it were — as long as you’ve never read the book it’s based on.
Recently, Roanoke Gaming, whose videos on the possible biology of movie and computer-game monsters are a delight, did a video on the monster of “Relic” (the movie) and this inspired me to look up the book on Amazon — learning that the “Agent Pendergast series” I followed for six to eight books has capped out at twenty! I decided to buy the first three as e-books, “Relic” and “Reliquary” as a collection, “Cabinet of Curiosities” on its own. Those three are, as a matter of fact, my favourites in the series.

I dived into “Relic” again and was in for a surprise. Many books I’ve loved in the past have become far less of a favourite to me by now for various reasons. “Relic”, however, does still hold up. Thrillers need tension and “Relic” delivers it from the well-done and necessary prologue right up to the suggestion of the sequel at the end. It makes you love the characters and worry for them. It creates situations that are both believable (by the technology of the nineties) and tense.
Despite the fact that I have read “Relic” at least ten times, if not more often, I immediately got caught by the story. Not because I remembered nothing — I was still very aware of the big strokes of the story —, but because the storytelling was excellent. The characters were likeable and easy to imagine. The situations were grounded, the characters acting as one would expect — an FBI agent will have a different reaction to a horrid body than a doctorate student. The story evolved the way it should, pushing tension and stakes, with enough twists and turns to make things interesting.
Yes, many things which are part of the story wouldn’t work like that in the modern world. Especially smartphones are a game-changer when comparing eighties and nineties movies to modern-day ones. Access to information and easy ways to call for help can kill tension quickly. The time in which the book is set — then the modern day — doesn’t offer such help. Yet, that doesn’t matter — within the setting, the story works and not every story has to be transposable to the modern world.

Especially the climax of the book is intense and set in several different places at the same time. Preston and Child handle the different viewpoints well, knowing precisely when to switch from one to the other as to keep ‘he who walks on all fours’ in the focus. There is a constant feeling of dread, a fear of where the monster will be next. There’s additional dangers for the biggest group as well, not only are they the most likely target — so many brains to feast on —, they’re also underground and the water is rising (as it so often is during strong rain in New York City). The museum is on lock-down, so many people, most of whom are not trained to fight, are locked in with the monster. The few heroes inside have their hands full, trying to keep the innocent protected and get the creature down.
Leading up to this situation, we have more than just physical danger. There are several murders (albeit one stays undiscovered for several days — right until the big night of the exhibition opening), but there’s also a lot of museum politics. The need of the director to boost visitors’ numbers. The PR manager’s need to keep control of the narrative. The animosities between different departments and curators. All of this undermines the most logical actions under the circumstances — closing down the museum, doing a complete swipe, moving the exhibition opening. Those additional problems, however, are very grounded, because that is what it is like out there. So is a local FBI agent with a plan for promotion doing his best to shoulder aside the ‘stranger’ from Louisiana, despite the fact that Pendergast has the better plan. All of this is very human, all of this is realistic. All of it helps making the climax even more tense.

Even thirty years after the original release, “Relic” is a good book to read that will draw you in and make you worry for the main characters. The technology might be ancient by now (imagine computer systems run on key input alone — no Windows standard then), but even it does its job to add to the story. It was so clearly written at that time and is so clearly ‘top of the technology’ for that time as well. If you liked “Relic”, I would at least recommend the sequel “Reliquary” as well. Personally, I find “Cabinet of Curiosities” close to them, too, as two of the characters from “Relic” and “Reliquary” in addition to Pendergast appear there as well. All books are a good read and all are easily available for you, both in book and in audio-book form.