While people have been telling stories and delivering speeches for thousands of years, the history of nonfiction book writing is fairly brief. Still, over the last 500 years or so, patterns have begun to emerge, tried and true ways of writing nonfiction books, depending on the author’s goals.
Read on to discover the 7 types of nonfiction books and the structures each uses to reach readers.
So you wrote a story or a novel or a book. You’re proud. You’re excited. Visions of publishing dance in your head. Then you go back and read your story or novel or book, and you think, “Well, this is good and I feel proud of it. But it doesn’t match up to the stories/novels/books I know and love.”
You wrote a GOOD story, but not a GREAT one. Worse, you don’t know why. It might be that you’re missing a crisis.
If you’ve ever told a good story—one that has your friends or family on the floor laughing, or else on the edge of their seat asking, “What happened next?!”—then you know that you can’t get to the point of the story too quickly.
Instead, you draw out interest. You talk about all the things that went wrong. You make jokes and accentuate the best details. When you’re done, it’s not the punchline people remember; it’s everything leading up to it.
The same is true when you’re writing a story, particularly in novels, memoirs, and screenplays. It’s called the Rising Action, and it’s essential to get it right IF you want to write entertaining, informative, and deeply connecting stories.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the rising action: what it is, how it works in a story, how it’s been treated by scholars who study story structure throughout history, and finally how you can use it to write a great story.
If you are planning on writing a story, there is something you need to consider besides basic plot structure. You need to determine your Inciting Incident.
What incident will compel your protagonist to act, prompting them to move through a meaningful story?
Let’s take a look at what an inciting incident is and how to write one.
How do good stories start? In the middle of the action? With a slow buildup to the action?
Exposition is a literary term that deals with how to start a story.
In this article, I’ll define exposition, talk about how it fits into the dramatic structure, give examples of expositions from popular novels, plays, and films, and then give a few tips on how to use the exposition best in your writing.
