Writers should Read Nonfiction
I’m a sucker for war stories. A month ago or so I grabbed “Halsey’s Typhoon” on CD at my library. For those of you who didn’t spend your childhood watching Victory at Sea reruns (and why not?), Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s entire fleet was caught in the middle of a super typhoon while supporting the invasion of the Phillipines. Three modern Navy destroyers went down in that storm, hundreds of men died. Now, some of you roll your eyes at the discussion of any history, but there’s a key to good documentary: tell the personal stories. That’s what the author did. He used the stories of the survivors to paint very vivid pictures of the horrific circumstances those men found themselves in.
And, of course, guys like me start thinking, “Now there’s a good story idea.” Good fiction always has some factual bits and pieces, consciously or not. After all, Gone With the Wind wouldn’t have seen the light of day had the Civil War never occurred. We, as writers, can never dream up drama as gripping as what has already occurred in the history of our world. We dare not be so proud as to think it even possible. Yes, maybe we could have dreamt up a story about a worldwide flood, or a small boy killing a giant, or an innocent man convicted in a kangaroo court and nailed to a cross. But does any man or woman have the wisdom to tie every one of those stories together into a single overlying plot to save all of mankind? That’s one of my favorite arguments for the validity of the Bible, by the way. No human being could have pulled off a story like that.
I digress. My point is that reading of non-fiction is not just an educational drudgery. It’s dramatic, funny, tragic, and real. In the book mentioned above we see through the eyes of a nineteen year old kid who grew up on midwestern farm, had never even seen the ocean, but suddenly finds himself bobbing alone, fighting one-hundred foot waves, sharks, and rain driven so hard it peels the skin from his body. Boring? I think not.
History is real. It’s not forgiving. It’s raw. It could be events of thousands of years past or last week. Read it. Use it to create the background for your fiction that will fill in the gaps of your story like nothing you could ever invent.
