Why is fiction better than nonfiction

A contract for a work of nonfiction is a more precise affair. The writer says, I am telling you, and to the best of my ability, what I believe to be true.

This is a contract not to be broken lightly. There are those writers of what is published under the heading nonfiction who freely confess to inventing some of their material. Clearly they have a different kind of contract with the reader from mine, or perhaps no contract at all. Whenever I am on stage with memoirists who do this, they start by explaining how the story was improved by those additions and that none of it mattered much anyway.

Sebald and more recently Karl Ove Knausgaard who deliberately place their work in the twilight zone between fact and fiction. For the memoirist who purports to be telling only the truth and then is caught lying a special kind of fury is reserved.

Norma was fun, she seemed to have survived her ordeal well, too well some said later, but I know many people who have faced extreme situations and they are often perfectly cheerful. All in all I spent maybe two hours in her company. I flew back to the UK and a month or two later I received an email from the panel chair David Leser, a well known Australian journalist and feature writer.

He wrote that he had stayed up with Khouri late into the night after we had left the bar, had been deeply moved by her fragility and courage, even, he admitted later in an article, fallen a little in love with her.

Khouri was a fraud. She had left Jordan for Chicago at the age of three and had not set foot in her homeland since. The whole story had been a hoax. No best friend, no Christian lover, no honor killing. The rage at Khouri lasted for months. To Leser she admitted she had lied but, she said, for the right reasons. Those who met her including Leser and me never could decide whether she was a trickster, a fantasist or even a woman with some hidden trauma of her own.

Everyone, even Norma Khouri, has their own reasons to write, their own justifications for the choices they make, their contract with their readers, their contract with themselves. I ask my students of both fiction and nonfiction, but most of all those who wish to write personal memoirs perhaps because of all the forms of writing it is the one most often confused with therapy : Why do people need to hear this story?

Not, Why do you want to write this story? When I come to a begin a book it is usually with a question in mind, something I have been thinking about and I want to ask the reader to think about too. What turns the book into a novel is the arrival of a character. Elias Cole, the ambitious, morally equivocating coward in The Memory of Love came to me through a chance remark by a friend about her father, a successful academic who had somehow survived a villainous regime where his colleagues had not.

I hired a man to paint my house who I discovered on the last day was a thrice imprisoned violent offender. Out of that encounter came Duro, the handyman Laura unthinkingly allows into her holiday home in The Hired Man.

My nonfiction begins with a question too. The difference, if I can pinpoint it, is that with nonfiction when I start to write I believe I may have come up with an answer, an answer of sorts at least.

Don DeLillo once quipped that a fiction writer starts with meaning and manufactures events to represent it; the writer of creative nonfiction starts with events, then derives meaning from them. I think there is truth in both statements. The best stories can arrive quite by chance, replete with meaning and maybe even with a great character through whom to tell them.

Some years ago a stray dog I had adopted in Sierra Leone and given to a friend was hit by a car. I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at.

If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. Reading literary fiction develops your vocabulary, strengthens your speech, and makes you a better writer. This is the primary reason that I read in general, besides the pure enjoyment gained from reading. Literary fiction, rather than easy-to-read fiction, has the potential to expand your vocabulary because while it exposes you to new thoughts and ideas, it does so through a plethora of grammatical styles, forms of diction, and undiscovered words.

Fiction authors write in a very different manner than non-fiction authors. Have you ever noticed how a nonfiction textbook is sometimes bland and dull although full of information? On the other hand, the writing style of a fiction author is entirely based on presenting a story in the most structurally beautiful and engaging way possible.

However, in non-fiction, the object of the book is not so much writing technique to keep the reader engaged as much as it is the ability to present concise and relevant information. In nonfiction, writing style is not so much a central point as it is in poetry, a drama, or novel. A great work of fiction is just as much a piece of artwork as an oil on canvas. Just as each painting tells a story, so does a novel — literally.

Reading reveals different cultures and attitudes from a variety of people from various time periods and places. An epic poem like the Iliad by Homer can tell us a lot about conflict and war in fantasy-like classical Greece while a novel like The Call of the Wild by Jack London can illustrate life on the Yukon during the s Klondike Gold Rush.

Each great work of fiction is beautiful and an important piece of culture that shapes the different cultures which treasure it. As such, the Iliad and The Call of the Wild both serve as outstanding historical pieces. Most fiction novels contain real settings and perhaps even real characters but tell a made-up story, or include fictitious elements into a real-life timeline.

Yet, there are major differences between bestsellers: some pop up on the list for a singe week while others retain their bestselling status for months and even years. To illustrate this, we measured the length of stay on the list for all New York Times bestsellers Figs. Longevity of bestsellers. Distribution of A fiction and B nonfiction bestsellers based on the number of weeks they stayed on the list. The number of weeks is shown in logarithmic scale to account for both the large number of short stays and the few exceptionally longer presence.

We marked on the first columns the corresponding linear scale numbers for clarity. The size of the dots indicates the number of books with the same attributes. In fact, only 10 of the fiction bestsellers stayed on the list for more than a year. The longest presence during our observation period is The Help , the book by Kathryn Stockett, which has been featured on the bestseller list for subsequent weeks.

Its continuous presence was helped by a movie adaptation nominated for the Academy Award in Highly anticipated books in ongoing popular series tend to stay longer in the list, like the fifth book A Dance With Dragons in George R.

Finally, literary awards can also sustain bestseller status: All the Lights We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, having won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, was on the list for 99 weeks at the time of data collection.

In comparison, the nonfiction bestseller list shows slightly less variation from week to week, indicating that it is more common for nonfiction books to sustain their bestseller status.

This is why we have fewer nonfiction books in our dataset than fiction books nonfiction bestsellers compared to in fiction. Still there are a few exceptions, books that were ranked low on the list yet remained there for a long time. In summary, most books stay on the NYTBL for only a week, and books lasting more than a year are extremely rare. That said, books reaching better ranks on the list stay on for longer periods compared to books ranked lower, many of the top ten books staying for several months at least.

The number of copies a hardcover sells in its first year is an important measure of its commercial success. As after one year a cheaper paperback edition of the same title is likely to be released, the hardcover will no longer be the only print option.

Therefore, in this section we focus on the first year sales of bestsellers, allowing us to explore their variability and the factors that determine their popularity. The one year sales distribution of all bestsellers indicates that the majority of bestsellers sell between 10, and , copies in their first year Figs.

The distribution of the number of copies sold in a year for all hardcover bestsellers in A fiction and B nonfiction. Most hardcover bestsellers sell between 10, and , copies in their first year for both fiction and nonfiction, and the higher they get in the list and the longer they stay on, the more copies they sell in a year. These two books were anticipated for different reasons, the former being the third book in an ongoing successful series and the latter being the long-awaited second book of Harper Lee, published 55 years after her classic To Kill A Mockingbird There are also several books that even though made it to the NYTBL with high first week sales, could not sustain those numbers over the course of a year, such as The Famous And The Dead , being the conclusion to T.

In nonfiction, the autobiography of former president George W. Bush, Decision Points sold the most copies in a single year, followed by the biography Steve Jobs by journalist Walter Isaacson, the basis for the movie of the same title. Occasionally nonfiction authors explore their themes throughout several books, resembling serialized novels of fiction, also resulting in high sales. To understand the dynamics of sustained sales, we looked into the relationship between the number of copies sold within a year and best ranking the book achieved on the list Figs.

Obviously, the more copies a book sells in a single week, the better is its ranking in the bestseller list. For most books we also observe a direct correlation between the best ranking and the number of copies sold within a year. The most remarkable are The Lost Symbol and Decision Points , books ranked number one on the NYTBL in their category fiction and nonfiction respectively selling more than a million copies in their first year after publication.

Grain Brain by neurologist David Perlmutter is also an interesting case showcasing the seasonality of the bestseller lists. The book first came out in September and hit the NYTBL soon after, reaching its highest sales in December when book sales are typically the highest see the following section. Hence, despite the impressive sales numbers, in those weeks it did not qualify for better rankings in the NYTBL, even dropping entirely from the list.

Not surprisingly, we also observe a direct correlation between the length of stay on the bestseller list and the number of copies sold in a year Figs. The only two exceptional cases are in the nonfiction category.

Yet the sales accumulated in the 16 weeks the book was on the list were sufficiently high to make the book an outlier among bestsellers. In summary, the number of copies a NYTBL book sells in its first year spans over two orders of magnitude. Overall, the best rank a book achieves on the list is a good predictor of its yearly sales: the better the rank, the higher the total sales.

The length of stay of a book on the list is another good indicator of the number of copies sold, as longer stays mean larger number of copies sold every week. Since , books on the hardcover NYTBL have sold anywhere between a thousand to a million copies in a single week. We show the distribution of the weekly sales that have gotten these books to the list in Fig. Of course a book ranked first must sell far more copies than a book ranked 20 or Accordingly, the high end outliers in Fig. The low outliers are included on the list either by mistake, or BookScan has a different record of their sales from New York Times.

They are all books with much higher sales on other weeks, but on those particular weeks, their sale numbers recorded by BookScan were much lower than what is typically needed to hit the NYTBL. Aside from the extremes and differences between ranks, there may be several causes for the general high variability, as we discuss next. C The number of copies bestselling books have sold in a single week in mid August week number 33 that got them to the list over different years. D Explanation of the box plot technique used in C.

The median number of copies the bestselling books sold to hit the NYTBL during different weeks throughout a year, for E fiction and F nonfiction. In general, books need to sell between and , copies in a single week to hit the NYTBL, a range that has been fairly stable over the years.

Fiction book sales are higher in summer and all sale numbers are significantly elevated from December to early January. Fiction sells more than nonfiction throughout the year but the gap is smallest in early January. First, we looked into the sales needed to make it to the bestseller list since In Fig.

We see that fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction books, in other words, fewer copies are needed to qualify a book for the nonfiction list than the fiction one.

Also the stability of the year-by-year sales pattern is remarkable: today a book needs to sell between a to 10, copies to make it to the bestseller list, a range that stayed roughly the same during the past eight years. Next, we looked into the seasonal fluctuations in the sales patterns during a year.

To explore how these fluctuations affect the bestseller list, we measured the median number of sales that got the books on the list at different times of the year Figs. The dots correspond to the median sales of all books on the NYTBL at any given week each year, the line indicating the median over all years. We focus on the median instead of the average given the high variability amplified by record-breaking sales highlighted in Figs.

Overall, we find that median sales mostly fluctuate between — in fiction and — in nonfiction. Yet, there is a significant increase in sales late-December during holiday shopping, a pattern persisting into early January, likely due to delays in sales reporting.

In early January, the lowest median sales over the years is close to 15, copies a week, a number higher than the highest median sales of any other time of the year except late December. For fiction, a similar but less pronounced peak is observed during the summer months with median sales surpassing 10,, likely due to book purchases in preparation for the summer vacation.

In nonfiction, there is no such summer peak. During these periods of elevated sales a book needs to sell more copies to make it to the New York Times bestseller list than during other months. We also note that in general, fiction books sell more copies than nonfiction, a gap which is largest during summer and decreases considerably during the holiday season, where the sales of both fiction and nonfiction are significantly elevated.

In summary, we find that books featured in the NYTBL over the years hit the list by selling anywhere between thousands and tens of thousands copies, a range that has been stable since Seasonal fluctuations within a year matter much more, books needing higher sales during the holidays to stand out, even though more books are purchased in that period. Additionally, a book on the fiction list needs to sell more copies on average compared to the nonfiction bestseller list, due to the fact that on average, fiction sales are higher than nonfiction sales.

Yet, not all bestselling authors are alike. There are those with a single high selling book in their career, like Kathryn Stockett The Help , and there are authors with over fifty books with varying sale numbers under their belt, like James Patterson or Stephen King.

Additionally, some authors build their readership over time, achieving bestseller status with their later work while others enter the NYTBL with their first book. The success of a book is deeply linked to the previous success and the name recognition of its author, prompting us to explore in this section the dynamics of success for authors, quantifying the differences between authors in terms of productivity, repeat success and gender among authors within different bestseller categories.

To understand the patterns of productivity among bestselling authors, we collected all unique titles published by them in hardcover since , regardless of whether they made the bestseller list or not. After eliminating new editions of older titles, we ended up with books of them bestsellers by authors with bestsellers in fiction and books of them bestsellers by authors with bestsellers in nonfiction categories.

These numbers already indicate that fiction authors are more prolific than nonfiction ones, with half the number of fiction authors having written 1. As indicated by Figs. The vast majority of them have at least two books, but having close to 10 books is also common.

Some authors are significantly more productive than others, with James Patterson being an outlier: he published 94 hardcovers since , often with coauthors and in a variety of genres such as mystery, suspense, romance and even nonfiction. With stars indicating bestseller status, we see that more than half 51 of his books were bestsellers. Fiction authors who also write graphic novels, like Neil Gaiman 48 books and Warren Ellis 42 , are also productive due to the usual high volume of publications in the graphic novel category.

Other exceptionally prolific authors are mystery, thriller and fantasy author Ted Dekker 42 , romance author Danielle Steel 37 and thriller author Clive Cussler Productivity and repeat success. The number of unique hardcovers published by A fiction and B nonfiction authors since , including their bestsellers.

Keller, the line height indicating one year sales and stars marking bestseller status. The number of E fiction and F nonfiction bestsellers per author. While most authors in both fiction and nonfiction have only one bestseller, repeat success is more common for fiction authors than for nonfiction ones. Additionally, having one or two hardcovers published since is the norm for most authors, yet bestselling fiction authors publish significantly more compared to nonfiction authors.

In nonfiction, high productivity is rare Fig. The most prolific author in nonfiction is pastor and theologian Timothy Keller, having written 21 books about spiritual topics. He had 4 bestsellers, starting with the book The Reason For God , with the most successful first year sales.

Even though several more of his books sold quite well over the course of a year, their individual weekly sales were not sufficiently high for them to make the NYTBL in any particular week. Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz is the next most productive nonfiction author with 18 books, including several textbooks. The editors of Life Magazine have curated 18 books since , primarily focusing on events and people of public interest, like the sinking of Titanic or the life of Barack Obama.

Five of them became bestsellers in nonfiction category. Next, we look at the repeat success by only considering bestsellers Figs. In fiction, we find that the hardcovers on the NYTBL are written by only authors, indicating that the list is dominated by a small number of authors with multiple bestsellers.

We have already seen that James Patterson takes the lead in both repeat success and productivity. Similarly, Clive Cussler with 31 bestsellers and Danielle Steel with 25 bestsellers are also especially successful, in addition to being rather prolific. In general, bestselling authors with multiple books will often have multiple bestsellers. This is partly because fiction authors commonly write novels in serialized form and once a series builds up an audience, the subsequent books in the series also receive substantial attention.

In nonfiction NYTBL, repeated authorship is less common: the nonfiction books are written by authors, indicating fewer recurrent authors. The distribution in Fig. In summary, fiction authors are likely to write multiple books in quick succession and often in serialized format, and they often have multiple bestsellers.

In nonfiction however, the norm is one bestseller per author, which is typically the only hardcover they published since This is partly due to the fact that most nonfiction bestsellers are memoirs, books written by or about famous individuals, without repeat authorship. Yet higher productivity and repeat success does happen in nonfiction as well, albeit less frequently. To understand the patterns of writing a bestselling book, we need to explore the careers of individual authors.

In this section we ask if it is more common for authors to reach bestseller status with their first book, or if bestselling status is something built up through the increasing popularity of multiple books. To address this question, we focused on bestselling authors who started publishing in and after, a cohort of authors in fiction and authors in nonfiction. In fiction, the author with the most hardcovers is Taylor Anderson, with 10 books in The Destroyermen series Fig.

The first three books in the series sold relatively poorly, yet we observe increasing sales with each new book. It was the 4th book that reached a mass audience, doubling the weekly sales at its release, yet still not enough to land on the bestseller list. The fifth book of the series finally became a bestseller, yet for a single week.

His following 3 books, although selling strongly, did not make the list any longer. Another fiction author achieving success with late books is the author of the young-adult steampunk Finishing School series Gail Carriger Fig. She already had moderate success in paperback form with her adult oriented Parasol Protectorate series, yet none of her four hard cover format Finishing School novels shown in blue, green, red and orange made the NYTBL. Her hardcover Prudence purple was the book that finally landed her on the list.

When do authors succeed? A The sales history of The Destroyermen series author Taylor Anderson, showing for each book the weekly hardcover sales. Curves marked with a star on top indicate bestsellers. E Heatmap showing the number of hardcovers a fiction author has published in their career vs the order i of one that became the first bestseller, F same for nonfiction authors.

Only authors who started their career in and after are considered and boxes the authors shown in A — D belong to are marked accordingly. We see that while most bestselling authors first get on the NYTBL with their first book, later success is not uncommon. In nonfiction, Christian evangelist and motivational speaker born with tetra-amelia syndrome a rare disorder characterized by the absence of arms and legs Nick Vujicic is one of the more productive authors starting his writing career in Fig.

His first book, Life Without Limits , was an international success, being translated into more than 20 languages. His second book, Unstoppable , got there two years later, helped by the buzz created by his first book and possibly his motivational speaking engagements. He went on to write three more books, none of them matching the success of his first two. Another nonfiction author, columnist and businessman John Gerzema writing about impact of leadership ethics, had his success grow steadily with each subsequent book, finally getting the third one, The Athena Doctrine , into the NYTBL Fig.

We see that many corresponding to the sum of the first row in the Figs. This is partly due to the fact that debut novels are over-represented in this selection, since we did not consider authors with previous publishing history even if their first bestseller was published after Many 2-book authors got into the NYTBL with their second book 8 in fiction and 44 in nonfiction and even later success is achieved by several 12 in fiction and 5 in nonfiction. Additionally, there are 2 fiction authors like Gail Carriger with 5 books whose 4th book was their first bestseller and 3 nonfiction authors like John Gerzema who built up to bestselling status with the first two of their three books.

In general, we find that most bestselling authors who started their careers on or after were successful with their first book, yet getting into the NYTBL with a second or later book is possible as well.

As we established earlier, repeat authorship is common on the bestseller list, particularly in fiction. To quantify how the sales of a previous hardcover affect the sales of the subsequent book, in Figs.