When Facts Aren’t Enough: Finding Truth Between Fiction and Reality
Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Bob Reiss breaks down the differences between storytelling in fiction and nonfiction.
As a boy, I enjoyed two dreams of becoming a professional writer. In one, I was a foreign correspondent, traveling the globe, meeting interesting people, witnessing fascinating events. In the other, as a novelist, I wrote speculative works about dangers in our world, warning readers about possible futures.
These seemed like opposing visions at the time. I thought I had to choose one path or the other. Today, after writing both kinds of tales for years, I’ve come to see that good storytelling is exactly the same when writing fiction or nonfiction.
In both, you need clearly defined characters who make hard choices, the best ones being between good and good. You need big issues. You need to hook a reader right away and keep them hooked with line-by-line tension. You need to go beyond what factually happened in a story and show how humans feel about it. John Irving once told me, as we chatted about journalists writing fiction, that IF a journalist is going to make a mistake in fiction, it will be that the journalist thinks that just because something happened in a story, it is enough.
It’s not. You need to show how characters react.
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These days the journalist in me collects facts. The novelist collects possibility. When I look back at my novels, all have roots in reporting. Hanging out with gangs as a Chicago Tribune reporter gave me gang scenes in my first novel, Summer Fires. Spending weeks on a coast guard icebreaker while researching my nonfiction The Eskimo and The Oil Man, gave me the idea for the novel White Plague, set on an icebreaker. Covering an Amazon Rainforest gold rush for Outside Magazine provided the opening scene for the novel, Vector, which deals with a new danger we might face some day.
I write nonfiction when a problem has already arrived: climate change, rainforest destruction, US/Russian friction. I write fiction when the problem has not happened yet. Where will the next plague come from? What happens when AI becomes fully aware? What happens when the Arctic opens to military activity?
When it came to real dangers poised by climate change, for instance, I spent a year traveling the world, speaking with victims of extreme weather, politicians fighting over it, and scientists studying climate. The result was the nonfiction book, The Coming Storm: Extreme Weather and Our Terrifying Future. But the same trips created scenes for novels set in the Arctic and in Sudan.
When it came to global dependence on oil, the journalist in me has covered efforts to open up new fields in Alaska, but the novelist imagined what would happen if oil suddenly stopped and the world went cold turkey. In my novel Black Monday, planes fall from the sky. Food deliveries cease. Chaos reigns. We have 30 days to figure it out or a new dark age begins.
Back and forth, always. Fiction to nonfiction.
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Although the dynamics of storytelling are the same when writing fiction or nonfiction, the research is different. After all, how do you research something that has not happened yet? The answer is, you find experts and hope they won’t mind speculating about possibilities. Approach them with respect. Explain what you are trying to do. Over the years, I’ve emailed or cold called federal prosecutors, scientists who study microbes, AI experts in the Mideast, to ask them if they’d mind speculating about future possibilities. Some say no. Some never reply. But don’t give up. The kind ones, the imaginative ones, say yes.
But even if they do say yes, they may not buy your premise right away. In several instances, experts—hearing my premise—told me that it was out of the question. I should give up. “Impossible!” they said. But as we kept talking, they paused. Looked at the ceiling. “Actually, it might be possible if you...”
Bingo!
For Black Monday, in order to suddenly stop oil flowing all over the world, I needed to invent a bacteria that could migrate through oil fields, survive the heat of refining and defy all efforts to kill it. This logistical problem lasted for months.
In that case, I found an expert on heat resistant bacteria in Texas. I dug up a scientist who’d analyzed an anthrax attack on Congress. I pored over research on bacteria, virus, and prions. I needed to combine DNA of existing bacteria in a way audiences would accept. I needed to find accepted bacterial behavior that would explain what I did.
I won’t tell you how exactly, in the end, my fictional bacteria entered Black Monday to wreck havoc on the world, but I will tell you that when the book came out I was contacted by an Alaskan book club.
“We’re a new club and have chosen your novel as the first we’re going to read,” the caller said.
When I thanked her, she added, “Don’t get too excited. The purpose of our club is to find mistakes in books. Our readers work in the oil industry and we’re sick of errors in the way we’re portrayed.”
Great, I thought, dreading the end of this story. Weeks went by. I did not hear back. Unable to stand it, I called Alaska. “Did you guys read the book?” I asked.
The morose reply was, “We couldn’t find any mistakes.
When it comes to fictional “facts,” you can make them up as long as your made-up world stays consistent. When it comes to nonfiction facts, NEVER make them up. But once you have the “facts” on which you’re basing your tale, storytelling is the same.
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Speculative, thriller fiction, when it accurately portrays danger, can change our world in ways that flow charts, academic studies, and political speeches cannot. By dramatizing possibility, novels humanize our future. The nuclear thriller Fail Safe convinced millions of readers to get involved in anti-war activity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin galvanized the anti-slavery movement. If you want to look at it from the bad guy perspective, the racist film, Birth of a Nation, helped recruit millions to the Ku Klux Klan.
I wish that political and thriller fiction was taught in colleges as effective political theater, no different than political advertising or marketing. I have yet to see a writing course that combines fiction and nonfiction writing, but fiction writers can learn a lot about research from the other side of the family. Nonfiction folks can learn more about storytelling. One discipline feeds the other.
From the storytelling end, stop a false distinction.
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These days my researched fiction focuses on AI. I hate AI. Eight of my books are helping to train AI models, I’ve learned, without my permission. And on a daily basis, I want to talk to human beings on the phone, not AI. I want a human to determine which books land up in a store, not AI. I feel like techies—the most asocial people on the planet—have hijacked communication.
Hey, now YOU don’t need to talk to real people either! YOU don’t need real friends either! YOU can stay in your room for days at a time too! Isn’t this GREAT?
Oh, I know AI helps with medical research and will accelerate scientific knowledge. But I also know that China is using it to enhance the surveillance state. That it is causing thousands of workers to lose jobs. That it is involved in weaponry and increased surveillance and is creating a new class of billionaires dragging us toward disaster. And when it comes to fictionalizing AI, I know that throughout history, debate has erupted with each new invention over whether it will help or hurt society. But AI is the first invention in history that will be able to make choices for itself.
Which gets us to my current preoccupation.
What will AI do in that very first moment when it achieves actual awareness, that millisecond when it has choice and power but no human being knows it yet?
Hmmm. This sounds like an issue to deal with in fiction, not nonfiction.
Sounds like a case for The Impossible Detective.
Check out Bob Reiss' The Impossible Detective here:
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