What about non-fiction? Should that have a narrative hook? Of course it should. Here’s the very best non-fiction narrative hook I’ve ever read:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

Here’s where you have room to play. Once you’ve attracted the reader’s interest they will stick with you all the way through, unless you make a complete mess of it of course. This part is where you elaborate on your opening and really get things moving.

A lot of people think that a piece of writing always has to have some kind of a twist in the tail. That’s because at the beginning of the twentieth century, an American writer called O. Henry published a huge number of short stories all of which had an ending that made you see the events of the story in a completely different light. They are very clever stories which were (and which remain) very popular. But twist endings like that are fiendishly difficult to do. O. Henry was a genius and, as I’ve said before, you and I are not. If you can reach a twist ending, it’s just icing on the cake. I’ve written one or two and it does feel good, but really it’s just a gimmick and your stories, whether fiction or non-fiction, shouldn’t really need gimmicks to succeed.

All that an ending needs to do is answer the questions raised in the middle. The questions don’t all have to be answered in detail of course. Answers can be hinted at, left to the imagination. And, unless you are writing a trilogy, you shouldn’t end your story on a cliff hanger. That’s too frustrating But you do need to invoke a sense of closure.

One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century is The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. After more than 1000 pages of rip-roaring narrative, adventure and deeds of derring-do we zero in on one of the main characters who has returned home. He says, “Well, I’m back.” And the story finishes there.

If that isn’t a perfect ending I don’t know what is. There’s an implied “happily ever after” which is always nice but there’s also the sense that everything important is over and done with.

So you’ve reached the end and you’ve finished what you were writing. How did you get there? Is there a better way of reaching the end? Of course there is. What you have written needs to be treated in much the same way that you treat the stuff you put outside your house once a week for the council to collect. There’s almost certainly a lot of rubbish that you can get rid of (including repetitions that don’t bear repeating). And there’s lots of good stuff that doesn’t really belong but which can be recycled for another piece. Or perhaps it just needs tweaking a bit to make it fit better.

Above all else, make sure you stick to the point. Don’t ramble, don’t get distracted, don’t follow random thoughts that take you away from the main thread. I once belonged to a writing group that limited all presentations to just two pages – anything longer than that meant that we didn’t have enough time to get through everybody’s work. But one person was completely incapable of controlling what they were writing within the imposed length. They simply couldn’t keep their mind focussed on what they were thinking about. It got distracted, and that distraction was reflected in the writing. Over the course of two years the writer never once managed to bring anything they wrote to a conclusion within the allowed word limit. I did a thorough analysis of a one piece that they presented and I showed that in less than 1500 words they had started eighteen separate stories and, of course, they hadn’t finished any of them. The whole thing was a complete mess. So here’s another rule:

5. Only deviants deviate

An implication of this rule is that you must decide what’s important to the story and what isn’t. Anything that’s irrelevant shouldn’t be there at all and you should delete it when you start revising the piece. It’s a principle known as Chekov’s Gun, named after the Russian playwright Anton Chekov who seems to have been the first person to articulate it. He said words to the effect of “If there’s a gun mounted over the fireplace then, before the end of the play, someone must take it down and shoot it”. If you think about that it makes perfect sense. If you don’t make use of something that you mention in the piece then why did you mention it at all? When you make a shopping list before you go to the supermarket you only write down things that you intend to buy, you never write down the things you have no intention of buying. Unless it’s chocolate, of course.

Fiction has a fairly formulaic structure. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a short story or a novel, the structure is always broadly the same. The protagonist is faced with a problem. Attempting to solve it causes complications. The complications get resolved, not necessarily for the better, and the story ends.

Again, these are golden rules that you should never break. All successful stories follow them.

If you are writing a short story this structure needs to be kept very simple. Restrict your story to small, simple problems that can be dealt with in a small number of words. You can’t tackle any big themes directly in a short story because you simply don’t have room to do it. You can address the human condition, you can introduce big issues like love, death and taxes but you can only do it indirectly in simple (though not necessarily superficial) ways.

Suppose, for example, that we have a character called John whose mother has just died.

If we are writing a short story around this idea perhaps we’d zero in on one small part of John’s responsibilities. As he is getting dressed to attend the funeral John is horrified to discover that none of his ties are suitable. In the stress of dealing with all the ramifications of his mother’s death he has overlooked that one small detail. And now he finds that all his ties are novelty ties, festooned with odd decorations and patterns. One tie has a flock of white sheep with one black sheep in the middle of the flock. One tie shows a cat proudly eating a (computer) mouse. Another shows Botticelli’s Venus Arising from the Waves in all her stark naked glory. Obviously John can’t wear any of those ties to his mother’s funeral! What would she think? She’d be mortified. She’d probably come back and haunt him for the rest of life. And after it as well… The ceremony begins in less than an hour. How can John find a suitable tie in such a short time?

The big themes are all there in the background but the story itself is very simple. John has to find a tie. We’ve given him a good reason for needing to find a tie and he doesn’t have much time to find one. So how can he find a tie and still get to the church on time? I imagine that this story will probably be a fairly light-hearted piece, given the silly ties that John has hanging in his wardrobe, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore John’s feelings about letting his mother down. You can make the reader laugh at John’s dilemma but John himself won’t find it funny at all. This sense of conflict or contradiction is what will give the story its strength.

So it will be short and simple. You could probably write it in about 2000 words and I think it would work well.

However if we were writing a novel with the same theme, it probably wouldn’t be light-hearted at all, though exactly the same conflict would remain, because we’d have a lot more room to explore things above and beyond John’s immediate problem with his ties. This would change the emphasis completely. Because we have many more words to play with, we will be able to talk in a lot more detail about the relationship between John and his mother, something we could only hint at it a short story. Perhaps she was a domineering character and John never really escaped from under her thumb. Does he feel relieved now that she’s dead and he’s finally free of her? Does he feel guilty because he feels relieved? When you’ve got 100,000 words to play with, you can look into a lot of things much more deeply.

So let’s think about three different kinds of novels that we could write about John and his mum:

Maybe we’re writing a murder mystery novel – so did John kill her or did he arrange to have her killed by someone else? Or is he completely innocent? Perhaps his mother has upset a lot of people over the years. Who are these people and what direct motives do they have for wanting to kill her?

Or maybe we’re writing a novel about family life. John’s father died years ago fighting in Vietnam. His mother remarried and has always been deeply in love with her new husband. But John has never accepted his stepfather and tensions between them have caused a lot of ill feeling and quarrels in the family. Now, after a long illness, his mother has died. Both John and his stepfather have a clear duty towards her. Can they reconcile their differences, at least temporarily?

Or maybe we are writing a historical novel. It’s 1199 and John has just become the King of England. His mother, Eleanor of Acquitaine, is the real power behind the throne and she guides and controls all his decisions. When she dies in 1204, John is left helpless and floundering. The remaining twelve years of his reign (John died in 1216) will be very difficult for him as he fails to cope with catastrophe after catastrophe, the loss of England’s lands in France, the revolt of his barons, the loss of the crown jewels in the tidal estuary of The Wash. How will he cope without the support of his powerful, experienced mother?

In summary, I’ve discussed how to start writing a short story and three novels. And every single one of them can be described as being a story about a man called John whose mother has just died.

So remember:

Short stories are about small, simple problems. Novels are more discursive and use a lot more material so they paint on larger canvases.

Ideally non-fiction should have a similar structure to fiction, though you do have rather more latitude. Nevertheless the idea of a narrative hook at the beginning, a more discursive middle and a conclusion at the end still applies.

One of the most cogent essayists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was Joan Didion. Her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a masterpiece. She deliberately structures her essays as if they were stories and presents non-fictional realities with invented details and colourful metaphors in order to make the stories more vivid. Some people call this approach creative non-fiction though that’s a controversial term which itself probably needs to be examined in a few essays, though not by me. At least not here and not now. But if you are considering this approach to non-fiction writing you need to be very aware that the techniques used to write fiction are fundamental to it. Everything I said in the last section will apply here.

Outside of that, a more general non-fiction piece (not involving people) will likely be more of an essay than anything else; much like the piece that you are reading now. But it still needs structure, it still needs to progress logically from the beginning, through the middle to the conclusion at the end.

If nobody except you will ever see what you have written then who cares what it looks like? But if you are going to give it to other people to read then you need to lay it out properly so that it’s easy to read. Good layout is just as important as good grammar and proper spelling.

At the very least you should have a header on every page which contains your name, the title of the piece, a page number (and perhaps an indication of how many pages there are in total). You might also want to include a word count. Round the word count up (or down) to the nearest hundred words.

Your paragraphs should be left justified and separated one from another by a blank line. Never right justify your text. Unless you are a professional typesetter, you’ll just make a mess of it and you’ll get ugly gaps that will put your readers off.

I’ve done all of these things in this essay and as a result I’m sure you find it easy to read and easy to absorb the information I’ve presented in it.

If you are going to submit your work to a professional outlet (a magazine or whatever) read their submission guidelines very closely and make sure you adhere to them to the letter. If the submission guidelines ask for double spacing with two blank lines between paragraphs (which they probably will – it’s pretty much an industry standard) then make sure that you do just that. If they want a monospace font such as Courier with emphasis indicated by underlines rather than specific font styles (which again, many of them will) then use a monospace font and make sure that you don’t have any bold or italic words. Just underlined.

Rest assured, if you submit a piece to a professional outlet and don’t follow their submission guidelines they won’t bother to read what you have sent them. They’ll take one brief glance at it and just throw it away.