Facts in Fiction Help Elevate Your Novel to Bestseller Status
Write Better Now
We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.
That series continues today! Woot! And it’s all about facts being cool even in fiction.
I know that you’re all going to think that I’m biased because I’m a newspaper editor and reporter, but—cough—of course I am! We’re all biased.
However, there is some research (again by James Hall, professor and author of HIT LIT) that says that the top selling novels of all time by Americans has a lot of facts in them.
Facts? In fiction? Yuck, right?
Wrong.
A long time ago, a reporter was interviewing me about being a writer and I was talking about this and about the sexy objective correlative and she sort of gawped at me over the table at the coffee shop and said, “That’s why you have those details in there?”
Details can be facts, yes.
“We think of fiction and non-fiction as two distinct entities, but they’re actually two ends of a spectrum. Most books exist somewhere in the middle, somewhere between Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and an algebra textbook,” Trisha Brown writes for Book Riot.
Here’s the thing: Novel readers want to learn things, too. Learning isn’t just for non-fiction missives. You can learn via novel, via story, and people have been doing so for centuries and centuries.
Think of the Iliad, the beginning is basically a catalogue of facts: shops involved in the epic story. Facts conveyed.
Novels are way that we can learn about the bigger world around us. They can show us the etiquette and strategies of people not in our demographics. They can help us figure out how to be successful, how to interact with others.
As Karen Dess writes for Writers’ Digest, “Novelists are naturally drawn to write about the subjects that interest them. Doctors pen medical thrillers. Lawyers turn their hands to courtroom dramas. Suburban soccer moms write about—well, suburban soccer moms.”
And facts. We can learn so many facts within a story.
Think of The Da Vinci Code, right? It’s a thriller and a mystery that focuses on a historian. We learn about the Louve, about goddesses, the Hebrew alphabet, the Priory of Sion, cryptic puzzles and so on.
Think of any Dan Brown and James Patterson novel. We learn about government agencies, standard operating procedures, and so on.
Hall writes, “Fact-based fiction has broad appeal because it is simple hearty fare. No highly refined palate required. Anyone can buy a ticket. Information is the red meat that sticks to the ribs.”
It is, he says, purposeful pleasure.
So, if you’re looking to write something that is that purposeful pleasure and has that possibility of becoming a hit? Facts in your narrative can be a big key to that success.