The Nonfiction NIT Bracket of Expectations
What type of nonfiction book do readers go into with the highest expectations? And one Moby metaphor.
Editor Breakdown: Expectations Part II
In this reoccurring segment we embrace the double meaning
You’re a new writer and you can’t help but want to make a career out of writing. Do you want to make money and go for the path of least resistance? Do you want your name to enter the history books and have your book read hundreds of years from now? Books are judged by quality first, but the rubric for judging quality is based on expectations based on category. If you’re trying to write the great American novel your book will be judged at a higher standard than if you are trying to write a cozy mystery.
Last week we tackled the absurd question of whether fiction or nonfiction books carry higher expectations (with higher expectations we are also assuming that it is more difficult to write or make successful on the page). Fiction came out on top as more difficult and a higher expectation pursuit. For glory and a proper headache, write fiction. This week we go into the subcategories of fiction and nonfiction, forming two tournaments, the main event and the equivalent to the NIT in college basketball—a weird thing they do in college basketball where they have one tournament of the 64 “best” teams and an identical tournament, the NIT, of the next 64 best teams (meaning the NIT is theoretically played to decide the 65th best team in college basketball).
Again, the goal here is to answer the question: what do readers expect the most out of when they plunk their money down and purchase a book and, concurrently, what is the hardest category to write a book in to impress literary agents, editors and readers?
The Bracket and Seeding: Nonfiction
First, we’re going to seed nonfiction categories based on critical perception before pitting them against each other to determine which has the higher expectations/degree of difficulty.
1-History
Prestige meets popularity, definitely the front runner. When I think Pulitzer Prize, for example, I think fiction and then history.
2-Journalism
A large umbrella category, journalism books are like history, but more current and with a little bit of edge.
3-Narrative Nonfiction
Moving away from tradition in terms of history or journalism, but still very much revered.
4-Academic
Requires lots of credentials, but gets be protected from expectations by inaccessibility.
5-Essays/Criticism
Shares many things with all of the above, but doesn’t have as much authority as a more definitive book form.
6-Memoir
Gaining in reputation, but still has a “make-believe” stigma.
7-Self Help
Routinely mocked but not so secretly beloved by readers.
8-How-to
Known for utility over reputation.
ROUND 1
3 Narrative Nonfiction vs 6 Memoir
Memoir beating out Narrative Nonfiction is the only upset in round 1. And it exemplifies the push and pull in this conversation around nonfiction. In this instance narrative nonfiction, which encompasses a wide range of nonfiction that mixes in elements of other nonfiction (journalism, memoir, history, criticism) but puts the story telling first—hence the narrative part. In this case it’s the pure possibility and range of narrative nonfiction that allows memoir to edge it out in this competition of expectation. Narrative nonfiction can take on so many forms, and so many topics, that largely readers don’t even probably notice this category designation. The same cannot be said for memoir. Memoir has a long history and an extraordinarily high bar from readers, especially for the type of memoir by non-famous people, it takes both an amazing story and an extraordinary amount of skill to get people to care at all. While there’s much less research involved with memoir, since the same topics come up again and again—family issues, illness, addiction, childhood, coming-of-age, violence, trauma—it makes it nearly impossible to say something new and interesting, and very easy to say something trite and cliché. It’s easier for writers to pick a great story or topic, do research, and let it ride so to speak in a work of narrative nonfiction than it is to make the events of one’s own life noteworthy. There are transcendent memoirs out there that are extremely popular and perennial—The Year of Magical Thinking, Liar’s Club, Angela’s Ashes—and adding to that cannon is extremely difficult.
4 Academic vs. 5 Essays/Criticism
Two sides of the same coin, but the matchup comes down to a pure barrier-to-entry comparison. While one requires more climbing the ranks of a rigorous system—academia—the other one only technically requires the writer to have smart thoughts and fire up their laptop. From a reader’s perspective, they are probably dead even in terms of expectations—with the right topic or angle, more sins of style or rigor are forgiven for both.
ROUND 2
1 History vs. 4 Academic
What’s the difference between history books and academic ones? History starts in academia to a certain extent, but has the added challenge of bringing a subject outside of the protective bubble of academia. History for a general audience not only requires the same deep knowledge but an added layer of understanding about how to deftly convey that knowledge and weave a clear-cut story or thesis. History has high expectations not only for the rigor put into it, but for the potential audience it has to reach and the authority with which it has to do so.
2 Journalism vs. 6 Memoir
Memoir achieves another upset. Once again, it’s the same argument that narrative nonfiction faced, the difference being that journalism entails a higher level of investigation than your typical narrative nonfiction work. A deeply reported book is simply one of the hardest skills to build and acquire. But for the same reason memoir narrowly wins here again, journalism has the same advantages as narrative nonfiction—journalists are able to follow any story and have a sea of topics and facts at their disposal. As readers and editors we consume journalistic content more readily than almost everything—if there’s an interesting fact or story, we want to hear it. Our expectations as readers actually aren’t as high as many journalists put on themselves.
FINAL
History 1 vs. 6 Memoir
In the surprise of the century, although the signs were there in its run thus far, memoir comes out on top as the single category of nonfiction with the highest expectations and degree of difficulty. If you are a writer reading this, make no mistake: if you sit down to write a nonfiction book, no kind of book requires a higher level of execution than a memoir. There is of course a mile-wide caveat here in that there’s also celebrity memoir, which notoriously has a much lower set of expectations. But celebrity memoir is more like autobiography, which would fall under the category of history…technically. Okay, it’s a stretch. But the fact is that history is closer to a utility for readers than memoir is. People read history to glean lessons from the past, while memoirs have to stand on their own to impress and move readers. That’s the definition of higher expectations, so congratulations to memoirs.
LOSERS BRAKET
7 Self-Help vs. 8 How-To
Look, it was always going to come down to this. Telling people how to fix things verses telling people how to fix themselves. Both have a simple job to do, and the expectations are not high. Tell people what they want to hear or tell them how to do something. This is how the For Dummies series was birthed. Not to pick on it, but self-help wins (loses?) in the end as the type of book with the least expectations. Frankly when it comes to self-help many of the ideas are the same repackaged in different configurations. Solid financial advice, for example, hasn’t changed for 30 or 40 years, but how to save your way to being a millionaire continues to be rewritten and read anew. At least with how-to books you have to go out and learn something new and explain it fairly coherently.
Next week, we’ll tackle fiction as we hold the first and only championship of expectations in Part III.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 41, Pages 214
The Moby Metaphor
Did you know that the word “moby” originates from Moby-Dick and means exactly what it sounds like (at least according to Technopedia, which is the first Google result). In honor of Melville’s free association style, which this week included three chapters written in the form almost like a play that basically did nothing to further anything in the novel, I’m going to share with you the brilliant MF Doom lyric, which itself is a reference to a Shakespeare play, that I can’t get out of my head after finishing the final chapter this week “Hark!”:
"Hark who goes there?"
"It's V, the MC who's nasty as nose hair"
But now that we’ve digressed in a way Melville would approve of, it’s also important to touch on the main theme of this weeks reading, which is the two chapters on our big bad whale. It’s nearly impossible to read Moby-Dick without knowing the central cultural mark the book has left, which is the White Whale as a metaphor for something that people are helpless to pursue for some ill-considered gain that is both large and dangerous. It’s why big investors or big targets for professional gamblers are both called whales (aka a large reward, but you have to mess with someone powerful and dangerous to get it).
What struck me about the chapter titled, bluntly as always, “Moby-Dick” is that I’m not entirely sure the metaphor Melville is most famous for is intentional, or at least that’s not how it reads. Moby-Dick is a part of the story and Melville doesn’t treat him as a fabrication, but as an actual creature who has killed lots of men and taken Ahab’s leg. This is what the best fiction writers do, show don’t tell and all of that. This signature Melville-can’t-help-himself honesty and plainness is probably what makes the White Whale all the more powerful of a metaphor. The whale in question never comes off as a thought exercise. It’s an important reminder to all fiction writers that by getting down into the nitty gritty detail of the story—where the White Whale was spotted, how far whales can travel, how dangerous Sperm Whales are in general—the metaphor actually emerges more clearly than if he had written in exposition as to why Moby-Dick represented a large risk, large reward proposition. Showing and not telling leaves readers the space to make these inferences on their own.
Then of course Melville steps all over this notion of teasing out the metaphor though fine detailed story in the very next chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” by explaining the symbolism of the color white and how fearsome it is and thus his choice to make the whale white was. This would be like having a character put a flower in their hair and then taking several pages in the next chapter, without ever mentioning the character, to explain the myriad of ways that flowers have been used over history to symbolize beauty. Moby-Dick remains a whiplash of soaring heights of language and theme alongside a startling goofiness borne of the same type of oddball obsessiveness.