Unlike their fictional counterparts, non-fiction books don’t need characters or linear story arcs to succeed. Non-fiction books can simply be about ideas, which last time I checked aren’t privy to the three-act structure taught in so many creative writing courses. Non-fiction books can also be about living people, dead people, the structure of science, and new theories about the world hitherto untested. Some of these ideas can change course of history forever (looking at you, Origins of Species). Nobody has ever put down a non-fiction book because “the plot is too ludicrous”, giving non-fiction a diversity of reading material that fiction, for all its many genres, can’t match.
Of course if you look at the stats, you’d realise something: fiction outsells non-fiction…by a lot. The linked study also provides a good explanation for this state of affairs: fiction authors publish more material than their non-fiction counterparts. After all, there isn’t one Lord of the Rings book but three. A multi-volume series gives those authors a clear mathematical advantage. After all, you can only write one memoir or one summation of your entire life’s work.
But another reason for the sales discrepancy you won’t arrive at purely by crunching numbers is the fact that non-fiction books are about ideas and not characters and stories.
Though I praised non-fiction for breaking out of fiction’s character-based storytelling, I also failed to mention that ideas do not drive stories forward and as such it can be much harder to understand a non-fiction book. Fiction, if edited and structured properly I hasten to add, is cognitively easy. If you can follow the character’s journey, you can learn everything about them and relate to that character on a deeper level. It’s like having an imaginary friend.
Non-fiction is not so easy. Understanding and enjoying some books might require formal education in the subject they are about. And the non-fiction books aimed at a general reader can still struggle to get their meaning across because of constant need to provide context, sometimes in staggering amounts. Examples of these brilliant but baffling reads include many a science book like the aforementioned Origin of Species, history books about certain complex events (see just about any book about World War I), and books in the ‘smart thinking’ section of the book store, which often commit a host of logical fallacies to shove their square theories in the round hole of reality.
But one genre of non-fiction is different: biography.
Three Reasons It Works
The biography genre, when done well, cuts across all of non-fiction’s storytelling failures and makes the act of understanding certain fields, notably history and science, a much easier task. In my experience, three elements found within the best biographies skew towards my liking and I wager the same applies to you.
1) Ideas and events are forced into a narrative structure.
Ideas like the supremely unintuitive Theory of General Relativity are hard to understand, there’s no getting around it. I’ve listened to the most informed experts explain the subject in a lecture designed for schoolchildren and I still struggled to understand them. This isn’t to pick on Physics or even science in general. History, which I’m stronger with, can be a similar struggle. How did the Battle of Stalingrad happen? I’ve got a partial answer, but nothing that would satisfy a historian. Sure I can list the end outcome (General Paulus lost), but not how or why it mattered to the overall war effort. A deeper understanding would require something more.
Non-fiction, simply by basing its subject matter in reality, is prone to confusion, contradictions, and uncertainties. But in the world of (good) fiction, confusion, contradiction, and uncertainties are non-starters. A novel I can’t understand is objectively terrible, a plot that contradicts itself in the middle is sloppy, and a mystery novel that doesn’t resolve its mystery is a waste of time.
Biography, by chronicling a person’s life, is not susceptible to the usual non-fiction difficulties because there’s a centre of gravity that even the most abstruse of ideas can’t escape from. For instance, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is hard to grasp by looking at a pure description of it, but biographies of Einstein are forced by chronological structure to review Einstein’s scientific influences and reconstruct his thought pattern. By doing so, the reader is brought along with Einstein and can see how the theory came to be alongside its final form for themselves.
You can repeat this thought experiment by thinking about anything of historical significance. For example, reading about the sublime nature of the Declaration of Independence from a history book on 1776 is one thing, but reading through the thought process from Thomas Jefferson’s eyes in a Jefferson biography is ten times better because you’ll see the whole document in the context of the life of its author and his compatriots.
Biography’s structure is pseudo-novelistic because it’s linear and follows a compelling central character. Any extreme deviation from the biography’s subject will quickly arouse the reader’s anger. But though biography is close to novelistic, it isn’t exactly the same because the reader still needs context of the times and history in which the biographical subject lived, which leads me to…
2) The right amount of historical context is always provided, distilling key lessons in the process.
A book listing a person’s life in dates and numbers would be very boring, and a book talking about historical achievements without providing contexts of the times in which they were set would be baffling. Therefore, by the genre’s design, a good biographer needs to provide the reader with just the right amount of historical context and nothing else.
For example, in a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, simply talking about Roosevelt’s reaction to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would feel like reading your eighth-grade history textbook again. Instead, a good biographer would show Roosevelt’s growing antagonism towards the Japanese because of certain trade deals and also provide an overture of the worsening diplomatic relationship between Washington and Tokyo in the buildup to the attack. Context like this, when distilled to a few pages, can be a revelation to somebody like me who knew nothing about it. Your middle-school textbook made it sound like the Japanese attacked “just because”. However, because a biography of Franklin Roosevelt already has a main subject, the biographer doesn’t have the luxury of going into a huge tangent about US-Japanese relations. If they did, they would annoy their editor, who would force the author to chop such a tedious section.
Reasons like this one are what make biographies a superior way to study history, science, philosophy or indeed whatever discipline the biographical subject is affiliated with. Decisions made back then become less arbitrary and the conditions the person operated under become illuminated. The relevant historical context leaves the reader grounded by keeping them abreast of key dates and names that, ironically, might get lost in a book purely about the events taking place on those dates. A biographer who doesn’t get bogged down in the weeds will be doing their book and their reader a great service.
But biography has one more trick up its sleeve besides context and a clear writing topic…
3) Presentism is limited.
Structuring a good biography relies on the historical evidence left behind in archives and interviews. Since biography is ultimately non-fiction, the author isn’t allowed to fabricate quotes or pretend their subject did something when they in fact did not. The evidence available to the author forces them to admit uncertainties in a straightforward way. For example, going back to Franklin Roosevelt for a moment, it has been alleged he knew Pearl Harbor would happen in advance and he let it happen so he’d have a perfect excuse to join the raging world war. Any Roosvelt biographer reading Roosevelt’s archived papers would quickly realise such a claim has no evidence to support it. So any Roosevelt biographer repeating the claims would be roundly castigated for their stupidity.
But even if the biographer did not engage in outright fabrication, any editorialising or prejudice on the author’s part would also be spotted immediately. A biography is the story of a person’s life, not a doctoral thesis arguing about if they behaved virtuously in life. Of course, no biographer can be truly neutral, but every biographer can be balanced in their assessment. Syrupy praise and hostile criticism coming from the author will make them guilty of a sin called presentism. For those unfamiliar, presentism is the fallacy by which historical people and events are judged by modern day standards and attitudes. Presentism is frowned upon because it unfairly loads the dice against historical subjects by examining them for things that they couldn’t know anything about in the times through which they lived. Biography, moreso than most history books, shines a light on the scourge of presentism because the author’s relationship with their subject is more intimate than a general history book.
Conclusion
Fiction books provide entertainment that’s more in line with how people process information but suffer from the unfortunate reality that the story is fictitious. Wouldn’t it be nice if The Hobbit was a true story? Non-fiction books can be more exciting in this regard because everything in them purports to be the truth. However, the messiness of reality can translate into a choppy and unpleasant reading experience.
Biography meets the two in the middle by providing a non-fiction genre that is forced to have linearity and characters which ensures important ideas are given the right amount of context.
As such, it is the best non-fiction genre.