Podcast: Transitioning from Nonfiction to Fiction: Mastering Intrigue Over Information
With anne hawley & Rachelle Ramirez
Are you a seasoned nonfiction writer stepping into fiction—only to find yourself over-explaining and dumping backstory? In this episode, Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez show how to trade information for intrigue: reveal instead of explain, invite wonder, and use scene, action, and dialogue to keep readers turning pages.
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Are you an experienced nonfiction writer making the transition into fiction and wondering what the difference is? Then this one's for you. Hello and welcome to The Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the happily of our author club. I'm Anne Hawley, and in today's episode, Rachelle Ramirez and I discuss the difference between information and intrigue in narrative fiction.
Let's listen in.
Rachelle Ramirez: What are the most common challenges you find with writers who come to you, who are generally have been writing nonfiction and now they're trying to move to fiction?
Anne Hawley: Yeah, there can be quite a bit of confusion because the accomplished nonfiction writer, say someone who has a journalism background, that's surprisingly common, or what they're used to is writing essays or blogs or that sort of thing, the first thing that they have to let go of them.
Pry out of their little tight little hands is their job in writing nonfiction is typically to persuade and convince, and when you turn to writing fiction, persuasion, and convincing play almost no part. You are there to raise questions, not answer them. As the writer of fiction, you are there not to explain things to the reader, but to reveal them, slowly to the reader to make the reader say, I wonder what that's about.
And not succumb to the temptation to explain what it's all about, but get the reader to turn the page and keep reading this story.
And where this manifests most commonly, and you see it all the time, I'm sure you've seen it too, as an editor, especially in opening scenes or at the beginning of a new, like a new act in the story or a new location, is a whole bunch of backstory. The reader needs to understand X, Y, and Z about this character before they can possibly move forward with the story. Because I, the author, I'm thinking of it like it's nonfiction. I need to persuade you to understand who this character is and where they come from, where their trauma is from, what bad thing happened to them in childhood, what explains everything about where they are at the start of the story.
The key here is the start of the story, which is the start of the story and the whole backstory-- you as the author, need to know it. You probably, it's probably a good idea for you to know exactly what your character's trauma was and what the terrible thing was that put them on this path to being a detective in the first place, or whatever kind of story you're telling, but the reader probably doesn't need to know it.
And the value of the author knowing, all about the character's backstory without succumbing to the temptation of leaving it all on the page. "She paused in her running from the antagonist to reflect on the time her father said, blah, blah, blah"-- The reason to leave that out is that you, if you know it and you know it thoroughly, then you will be able to depict it in things that your character says and does and reacts to in the story's present.
None of this is to say you can't write a story with two timelines or use flashbacks, but generally speaking, if you're writing a linear story, where the story starts is where it starts. It starts shortly before the inciting incident, and you, we just enough to get to know who the character is in their ordinary life now, before something happens to launch them into their story.
Rachelle Ramirez: What I'm taking from what you're saying is that it's as important what they leave out as it is what they put in.
Anne Hawley: Yeah. And a really good way for the person who's new to writing fiction, to study this and to understand, it is to go to your favorite novels, the ones that made you want to write fiction in the first place. The ones that you love, that you say, I would like to write a book like that, and go through, just take an opening scene, take a couple of scenes at the beginning, and notice what isn't there.
The example that I've often used is in a little newspaper article. This is would be a Victorian newspaper back in, you know, the late 1800s, early 1900s, where you would have a little story that said Captain Crewe brought his young daughter Sarah on December 7th to Miss Minchin's School for young ladies, and left her to be educated, and Captain Cruz's business back in India will be taking him back to Bombay in the coming weeks. Okay. That would be a little social column in a newspaper in Victorian times. This is the opening of A Little Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett, a novel that I frequently reference because it's a very good novel to study.
And if it were a journalism article, a newspaper article, that's what you'd get. You'd get who, what, when, where, why. It's Sarah Crewe and captain Ralph Crew, and in London, Miss Minchin's School in Finsbury Square and so forth. If you read the actual opening paragraph or couple of paragraphs of that novel, it does not contain very much who, what, when, where, and why.
What it contains is "once on a dark winter's day when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night. An odd looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares."
There's a lot to analyze there, but what's not there? You get the time of day, it just doesn't say at three o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, you get a little girl and her father, but you don't get what his business is, that She's an heiress. You don't get any facts about her. You get feelings and details about her.
So what you wanna look at in your favorite novel, or you can go look at A Little Princess because it's available for free on Project Gutenberg. Let me give you some of the things that aren't there. And I've submitted this list to certain authors in the past, and they say, Ooh, whoops. I include all that kind of thing in mine.
And you don't need the name, the physical appearance, the age, what the little girl is wearing, what her father is wearing. You're gonna wanna get to their names eventually, you might get to some description of clothes, but you don't need it right up front . There are no street names. There's no explanation of what types of shops and what's visible in their windows. There's no explanation of why there's a yellow fog in London that makes it so dark that the gaslights come on. She doesn't tell us what the people in the street are doing. Where the father and daughter are going is not even in the story yet.
We don't know yet. Don't you wonder, like where are they going? Where the taxi picked them up? Where are they mounted onto the taxi, how long they've been in the ta, all those kinds of things. They're not there, and it's really a good practice to look at good fiction that you have enjoyed and notice what isn't there.
It's hard to do because it's hard to notice what isn't there. But if you think about some of those things, specific information is often not there. It's details of the setting of the mood of the character's actions. Often it is missing facts, figures, information, because when you write nonfiction, you are in the information business.
When you write fiction, you're in the intrigue business.
Rachelle Ramirez: So intrigue is something that I think does tie directly into what you leave out, right? Yeah.
Anne Hawley: because what's missing is what the reader will be wondering about. And when the reader wonders about something, they turn the page and keep reading. And your job as a novelist, as a fiction writer, is to make me wanna keep reading. I'm not here to learn something. I'm not here to study. I'm not here to go to school.
I'm here to engage in a story, to get lost in the fictive dream, to get lost in the narrative. That's why I'm reading a novel. Don't explain things. Just lead me on,
Rachelle Ramirez: But then what if the writer says, oh, but Anne, what they need to understand is.
Anne Hawley: I, my answer is, and I hear that what? But you need to understand, I hear variations on that phrase quite a bit. My answer to that is always no. What they need to wonder about. Maybe at some point by the end of the novel, I need the reader to, I mean, the reader will not enjoy the novel unless they finally understand that this character was traumatized by something when they were six years old.
And I will be wondering what makes this character act this way? Who hurt you? You wanna read and find out. If you just explain it upfront then I'm not wondering anymore, and so I have less reason to keep turning the pages because I'm not intrigued. I'm informed.
Rachelle Ramirez: I had a client who was moving from nonfiction to fiction who found the analogy of a first date very helpful in terms of how much information to give and what to leave out. Just. The date was to look like, okay, this is a story. We have a beginning, a middle, and an end. How much information do you need as soon as the person sits down at the coffee shop, for example?
Anne Hawley: Right. And I use that one a lot too, even if it's not a date situation, but just you're meeting a new friend. That new friend doesn't need to know your whole backstory in order to decide whether to engage in conversation with you. And you as the author are trying to engage in conversation, as it were with the reader, and you're just presenting the story now.
And over time, if the friendship grows or if the reader keeps reading the novel, you may reveal some of your backstory. Something about your family. It's like if you meet somebody new and you've been talking to them for a couple of hours, 'cause you're having a great conversation at a coffee shop and after you depart from them and you feel pretty good and you have, you know, you, I think this is gonna be a good friendship, you can start to think there were some things they never mentioned. Like they didn't mention kids, it's probably because they don't have kids. But you didn't ask them and they didn't volunteer that. But next time you might say, you know, do you have kids? Or they would know from you that you have kids because that's the most important thing in your life, so you talk about them. But you don't sit down to a new, you the individual, not you personally, Rachelle, don't sit down to a coffee date with a new friend and have a little note about, well, here's my life story.
Rachelle Ramirez: Right.
Anne Hawley: You are meeting them in the moment. And that's the same way the reader is meeting your character at the beginning of the story.
You're meeting them in the moment. They don't need to know everything about the character. They just need to wonder so that they'll keep reading.
Now you could come to the end of your story and not have given the reader enough, like there's absolutely this character's motivations for acting this way are completely obscure and they seem to be evil For the sake of being evil or something, then you probably need to do a little fixing in the next draft, give them a little more sense of why they're behaving so badly, but you don't do it by trotting out their whole backstory in a series of facts and figures about their life. You do it by having them say certain things, react a certain way to certain circumstances, that clues the reader in that, oh, maybe they have a traumatic brain injury or something.
You know, you don't have to lay out their medical record to start with.
Rachelle Ramirez: So we're learning about the character's motivations based on what they're going after, what they desire, and how they react to the obstacles. And then I'm assuming, also, in some dialogue, you might have a line or two of dialogue there that gives reference to maybe something that happened in the past, but we don't need to go into a full flashback or backstory of that character.
Anne Hawley: Yeah, and dialogue is action. The character is gonna reveal what they want, what they need, what's at stake for them, through how they act, what actions they take, including what they say in response to something someone else has said in dialogue, in other words, or how they react to a storm coming or someone knocking at the door, or the phone ringing, or whatever it may be.
How they act, when they act, what they say, is going to reveal enough about them that the reader can surmise, oh, this must be what they want. I'm really trying to get out the door here because I've got a date and the phone's ringing. It's like, "What?" is gonna be a very different set of information for the reader, gonna clue the reader in, to something very different than, "Hello, darling."
Different actions communicate different motivations, which are the desires and the needs, and the wants and what's at stake.
Rachelle Ramirez: All right. I am gonna give you another pushback. Here's one that I'll hear: "But Rachelle, when I gave this to my critique group and my beta readers, they put in the margins here, 'I'm wondering about this...I'm wondering about this...', I'd Like to know about why she's making these choices even after I've shared the information that you've shared there.
And there are a lot of. Reasons why not. I would say to add the things that your readers are putting in the margins or telling you, oh yeah, but what if about this and what about this and could you explore this? This is a common thing that I've heard you say and say, yep, that's exactly what I want you to be wondering.
Anne Hawley: Yeah, that's where I want you. Turn the page, keep reading. It is very tempting and I've had this happen earlier in my career where a writing group member would say I don't understand this. Why is she doing-- and often it's character motivation, why is she doing this? Why is he doing this? And I would kinda, oh God, I better take it back and explain it some more.
No, the answer to that is, that's exactly where I want you. Keep reading, you'll find out more in the next chapter.
Rachelle Ramirez: Now that's different than being confused about what's happening in the story, right? Wondering what the motivations are or what happened that brought them there is different than saying, I don't understand what's happening in this scene.
Anne Hawley: And very often that sense of confusion really is coming down to the line writing. You know, are your sentences just not very clear? Have you not given enough little bit of setup? And when I say setup, I don't mean backstory, I just mean, let me go back to my example here. Once on a dark winter's day when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy-- you're giving a little setup there. You're setting the scene, and very often that just brings the reader in sharply focused into the here and now of the story, and they won't feel confused because you're bringing them along with the current reality of the story and confusion often does arise from just, I forgot to put in a little scene setting, or the sentence structure is ambiguous.
Sometimes it's really down at the line level.
Rachelle Ramirez: Are there any other big things that you see when somebody's coming to you with, say, a manuscript or looking for kind of book coaching? When they're moving from nonfiction to fiction?
Anne Hawley: It is almost entirely what we've been talking about, this really strong fear that if I don't explain and drop backstory in some clever way, where she paused and reflected or she woke up from a dream and thought about blah, blah, blah, that the reader won't be able to understand this character.
That's, that is like the biggest obstacle that I see. Everything else, if you're a good nonfiction writer, you know how to write and clear playing prose, you're a master of the English language, you're gonna be fine.
Rachelle Ramirez: And would you say that's more of a challenge for those who are writing more character driven internal stories than the more plot driven kind of external stories? Or does it go.
Anne Hawley: Yeah. I tend to work more with writers who are working in character driven areas. But even for, you know, my thriller clients, there is a tendency to, a little bit wanna explain. And a lot of that, the person experienced in nonfiction can get it out of their system in a sort of, I don't wanna say science fiction way, but sometimes, especially in a thriller, you get some technology and you get to explain it a little bit. That's a little bit different than explaining the character's backstory. So, sometimes, if you're a, say a thriller writer or a mystery crime type of writer, you can indulge in a little the way this works in the gritty city of, you know.
London or whatever is you can, your narrator can do a little bit of explaining, but when it comes to introducing characters and what they want and need and what's at stake and what kind of story you're reading, backstory, isn't it?
Rachelle Ramirez: Well thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation today.
Anne Hawley: This was fun.
Rachelle Ramirez: And I hope this will help those listening.
Anne Hawley: Thank you, Rachelle.
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