Some of the most common advice for authors looking to improve their writing is to write more and read more. Reading critically—with the intention of improving your writing—becomes a tool to inform your voice and style, sentence construction, and vocabulary.

Reading within your genre is a great way to understand the shape of your particular niche and who else is working in it, which is essential for writing a book publishers want to sell. But reading fiction for nonfiction writers offers a host of less obvious benefits and nonfiction writing tips that can elevate the quality, depth, and breadth of your work.

From developing richer prose and questioning assumptions to exploring the boundaries of narrative storytelling, fiction offers nonfiction authors new ways to approach their craft.

How Reading Fiction Improves Nonfiction Writing

Nonfiction writers tend to focus on the “five W’s”: the who, what, when, where, and why of a story. This applies to both faster-paced, short-form journalism as well as long-form narrative writing, like memoirs and narrative nonfiction.

The five W’s are important for a reason. They paint a scene and give the reader context for proper comprehension of the events or accounts that unfold in a text. The five W’s focus on the present: what is happening and how things are in a specific moment. While fiction often offers the same information, fiction writers are less likely to assume that circumstances have always been the way they are in the present.

Especially in science fiction and fantasy writing, the rules of particular environments and social structures are explained and broken down. Worlds are built, and their rules are explored in detail to give readers the cultural, historical, and physical background that allows a given world to make sense.

Questioning Assumptions Through World-Building

In nonfiction writing—especially for authors without a background in journalism—it can be tempting to attend to the five W’s without conducting sufficient research to understand and question the history and evolving circumstances that inform current conditions.

Good long-form nonfiction writing is layered. It might move between exploring a first-person account of an event or experience, detailing its chronology and history, and outlining any current or potential consequences.

Reading fiction can help you approach these layers more mindfully. When approached with this goal in mind, fiction invites you to look beneath the five W’s and discover information that may be hidden below.

Science fiction’s approach to world-building can become a template for thinking systematically about why things are the way they are instead of taking current political, socioeconomic, or cultural conditions as de facto truths. Reading for the way fiction questions current assumptions and avoids dependence on axioms can inspire further inquiry and research into histories, cultures, and countercultures.

World-Building Reading List

For books with a focus on world-building, try the following:

• Fiction: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Nonfiction: Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash

What Fiction Teaches Us About Writing Style and Voice

Nonfiction centers on informing the reader about a phenomenon or set of facts. The motivation behind writing fiction is often less obvious and therefore broader or more nuanced.

Developing Beautiful Prose

One important motivation that can inform the writing of a work of fiction is beautiful prose. Here the language and structure of the text are keyed to the reader’s enjoyment and entertainment.

Nonfiction is often written to inform, educate, or, in the case of narrative nonfiction and memoir, communicate the experiences of an individual or community within a particular time and place. Reading fiction where an immaculate voice and style is the work’s primary motivation can help nonfiction writers develop their vocabulary, improve sentence construction, and cultivate a more creative approach to descriptive language. It can also inspire additional research that will help a writer approach the five W’s with a more metaphorical or lyrical mindset.

Prose-Based Reading List:

For books with well-developed prose, try the following:

• Fiction: Orbital by Samantha Harvey 
• Nonfiction: Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

Exploring the Human Condition

Compared with nonfiction, fiction pushes the envelope in terms of how it tells stories. This allows readers to access emotions and feelings within an experience that nonfiction writers might suppress or be unable to illustrate with the information at hand.

Especially when writing memoirs, it can be tempting to self-censor emotional experiences, intense reactions, or difficult struggles. This is especially true for writers whose professions require a high degree of objectivity and impartiality, like doctors and scientists.

By reading fiction that focuses on less-explored or unattractive sides of the human condition, including taboos or other forms of transgression, nonfiction writers can gauge their own level of comfort with truth-telling. It’s good to have boundaries: some things should be kept private and remain undisclosed. But in order to know where that line sits, it’s helpful to explore your own edge before publication to determine what feels both safe and important to disclose.

Human Condition–Based Reading List

For books centering on the human condition, try the following:

Fiction:

• The First Bad Man by Miranda July
• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
• Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Nonfiction:

• The Diary of Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Learning From Translated Works

Reading books originally written in a language other than English can open a writer’s mind to different modes of lyricism and logic at the sentence level. It can also provide a fresh perspective on larger rhythms, such as paragraph and chapter flows or even the way an argument is laid out across an entire text.

Reading English-language translations can reveal how authors and their editors bend grammatical rules or conventions, and how such liberties can shape a distinct atmosphere. Readers may also be able to trace how people who speak and think in a language other than English conceptualize topics or concepts from a different angle. For example, nonfiction and journalistic approaches in the United States place high value on maintaining objective neutrality, whereas widely-read international political authors in both fiction and nonfiction, such as Albert Camus or Franz Fanon, often take a more critical, active, or philosophical approach.

Translated Reading List

For translated works, try the following:

Fiction:

• Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima
• Joy of Man’s Desiring by Jean Giono

Nonfiction:

• Mythologies by Roland Barthes
• Down to Earth by Bruno Latour

The Space Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Nonfiction writers often feel a commitment to objectivity, impartiality, and truth. Exploring genres that straddle the space between fiction and nonfiction can open space for nonfiction authors to approach storytelling and shape narratives in more flexible ways.

Creative Nonfiction and Narrative Storytelling

Creative nonfiction writing is also known as literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, and the nonfiction novel. While this kind of text is based on real events, the writing style is modeled after fiction to help make the material more accessible and dynamic to a general reader.

Experimentation is a keystone in creative nonfiction genres, as it invites authors to try new techniques or model their nonfiction prose after particular works of fiction or authors. Some authors reimagine scenes and interpersonal dynamics, although the overall narrative remains firmly rooted in factual events. What distinguishes this approach from traditional nonfiction is its departure from verifiable events and facts to foreground internal, subjective experiences as major throughlines. This expansion of scope, however, does not absolve writers of the responsibility to use research, interviews, and other means of investigation to arrive at the most accurate reconstruction of events possible.

Understanding the options for experimentation offered by narrative nonfiction techniques can aid writers in sculpting prose with a style and approach that feels engaging but doesn’t sacrifice nonfiction’s ethical commitment to accuracy.

Creative Nonfiction Reading List

For nonfiction narrative novels, try the following:

• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Gonzo Journalism and Subjective Reporting

The most famous author in this subgenre is Hunter S. Thompson, who is considered the inventor of gonzo journalism and a pioneer of the New Journalism movement of the 1970s. Gonzo journalism details events and occurrences like those featured in traditional news reporting, but does not claim an objective approach or perspective. This genre commonly makes extensive use of humor, hyperbole, sarcasm, and profanity.

Gonzo Journalism Reading List

For gonzo journalism and related genres, try the following:

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
• “Shipping Out” by David Foster Wallace
• Gonzo Girl by Cheryl Della Pietra [Note: Gonzo Girl is a novel inspired by gonzo journalism rather than a straightforward example of nonfiction gonzo reporting.]

Why Nonfiction Writers Should Read Beyond Their Genre

Taking advantage of the benefits of reading fiction doesn’t mean abandoning the conventions of nonfiction. Instead, it offers authors new ways to understand and experiment with them. Whether you’re writing a memoir, researching a historical narrative, or developing a nonfiction book, reading beyond your genre can challenge familiar assumptions, expand your creative options, and help you discover a more distinctive writing voice.

The next book that transforms your nonfiction writing might not be nonfiction at all.