Write research-led page turners that you can’t put down

Want to write your research up with joy and excitement? Can journal articles and textbooks ever be page-turners that you can’t put down?

For years, I believed I could never be an author because I didn’t want to write a novel. As a child this put me off writing altogether. I knew I wanted to be an author from about the age of seven or eight, but I never seemed to have ideas for fictional stories, although I filled my head with ones written by others. When I tried to write, my plots were wooden and cliched, and I could never think of a good ending. ”…And then I woke up and it was all a dream!” became an exclamation of amusement we use in our family when we don’t know how things are going to turn out – based on something I wrote at junior school.

It never occurred to me that I could write excitedly about real life instead, because ‘non-fiction’ was the realm of encyclopaedias and schoolbooks. In the 1970s and 80s these were rarely engaging as texts, or read for enjoyment. Can you remember the name of a single school book, besides a novel or play, that has stayed with you? Even the name ‘non-fiction’ decides it's a poor relation to fiction – a ‘non’, a ‘less-than’. It’s like calling a cat a ‘non-dog’, or referring to women as ‘non-men’. ‘Non-fiction’ tells us there is a hierarchy ,and that research-led writing is subordinate to the real business of writing – the fictional novel in all her rich and creative forms.

So what is research-led writing and can it be special and full of magic? I use this term to describe writing that communicates the findings of systematic, robust investigations into real world issues to an interested audience. It’s a style that grown hugely in popularity in recent years, encompassing genres such as journalistic essays, memoir, (auto)biography, travel-writing, academic journal articles, narrative non-fiction, creative, or literary non-fiction and even magical realism – the latter of which truly blurs the boundaries between what ‘really happened’ and flights of fancy. At the end of this post, is a glossary of how I understand each of these forms with links to examples.

What unites all these forms is an author’s intense curiosity about the world. About people, places, phenomena, events, and experiences. But while these texts are research-led, their authors’ beliefs that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, don’t stop them writing about it as engagingly as any novel or fairy tale. What is also important – for me at least – is that sources of evidence are cited, at least to some degree, so that the reader can trust the arguments being made and follow-up on what particularly piques their interest.

But non-fiction writing – especially of the academic kind – has a terrible reputation for being dry, boring, and tedious to read. To say ‘it’s all academic’ is a disparaging observation that a point is too abstract (and therefore unimportant) to have any bearing on the real world. Writing in ‘an academic style’ is often understood by the writers I work with as: ‘Writing in a way that makes me sound clever’, and which usually generates turgid, unreadable and inaccessible texts. Once you wade your way through this kind of writing, it’s dense and brain-hurty text sneers at you for not being smart enough to understand it. I’ll share my thoughts about how academic writing has come to be regarded like this in another post, but for now what’s important is that schools and universities don’t teach students to write beautiful texts in subjects beyond literature, creative writing and journalism. And I’m on a mission to do something about that.

7 kinds of research-led writing, with links to examples:

Journalistic essays – short(ish) form evocative reports usually about pressing contemporary issues, or exposing truths that need to be told.

Memoir and (Auto)biography – life history writing that may or may not be authored by the subject themselves, and catering for the voyeuristic tendencies in all of us, I would argue!

Travel-writing – as its name suggests, these are accounts of people’s journeys and adventures. Can be factually informative, or more expressive and intended for reading pleasure as ends in themselves.

Academic papers – journal articles, reports and discussion about phenomena that makes a novel contribution to theory, practice, method or knowledge more generally. Often peer-reviewed repeatedly, to (arguably) assure quality.

Narrative non-fiction – research-driven writing that follows some or all of the tropes and techniques of novel writing. The term ‘New, new journalism’ is a label that seems to be emerging to describe this kind of writing, and it's a broad church.

Creative/ literary non-fiction – texts about real-life phenomena more or less written as if they were a novel (this is my favourite kind, and a genre I am keen to write more of myself). Sometimes advertised as ‘based on a true story’.

Magical realism – a blend of truth, fact and imaginative fiction (often fantasy) written as if it were all true. Citing sources is less important here since the intention is to disorient the reader and deliberately play with what is real and what is not.