Nonfiction In LivingWriter
LivingWriter is a writing platform that is constantly evolving and growing, hence its name. From its humble roots of providing robust tools to fiction writers, LivingWriter has matured into a powerful piece of software that can service even the other genre of literature, nonfiction.
Nonfiction can be a fickle genre, covering everything from autobiographies to self-help books. Where fiction has a plot, nonfiction has topics. Nonfiction can have a story or none at all. As long as it talks about real life, it is nonfiction.
How Well Does LivingWriter Handle Nonfiction?
Quite well, actually. Despite our marketing focusing on fiction writing, a lot of our features are powerful and flexible enough to be utilized in many other ways. In this article, we’ll show you all the ways nonfiction writers can feel at home and welcomed in LivingWriter.
Nonfiction:
Nonfiction is the broad genre of literature that deals with topics primarily grounded in reality. It is arguably larger than fiction, as everything that is not fiction immediately falls under nonfiction.
While fiction exists largely to entertain, nonfiction focuses on delivering facts and verified data to the readers. The way these facts are presented, on a scale from technical to colloquial, can break down nonfiction into two main categories: informative and literary, respectively. Mostly, literary nonfiction often talks about singular topics, while informative nonfiction can easily span into an entire branch of knowledge.
Being fact-based, nonfiction lives and dies upon the hill of research, without which, nonfiction ceases to mean anything. Works under nonfiction often serve as the culmination of an author’s painstaking research on subjects that they are competent on. As such, people use these books as references when they intend to do their research.
Where fiction prides itself on the creation of beautiful worlds and wonderfully-paced plots, nonfiction takes the world we live on and builds upon it. Where fiction places importance on storytelling first and researches second, verifiable facts come front and center while prose takes the sidelines.
The Genres Of Nonfiction
Unlike fiction, which often only exists as novels, poems, or scripts, nonfiction manifests into various genres.
Environment
For entirely constructed worlds, describing the environment can be one of the greatest undertakings in worldbuilding. You have to consider the flora and fauna, as well as the climate and the seasons. The geography and design of countries and continents in your world are often major considerations as they impact how your character moves across the world.
Autobiography, Biography, Memoir
These three works overlap in the fact that they all tell the story of a specific human’s life. Autobiographies and biographies differ in the relationship of the writer to the human subject: the former indicates that the writer is the subject themselves, while the latter indicates the contrary. A memoir is a special type of autobiography which fixates on a specific era of the person’s life.
Travel Literature
This broad genre covers all kinds of nonfiction that deal with traveling. Whether it be an informative travel guide with instructions to live daily life in specific regions/countries, or a literary retelling of the author’s escapades in a travelogue, travel literature aims to help the reader run through the world with words.
Journalism
Newspapers make up the bulk of journalistic nonfiction, aiming to provide accurate information about real-life events that are relevant to contemporary readers. Additionally, narrative nonfiction and true crime novels can also retell recent events to provide a complete narrative when ongoing events finish.
Academic Books
School textbooks form a large part of academic books, as many students would be familiar with them. These books tend to be very technical, as they primarily aim to become references for scholastic purposes.
Leadership and Self-help
Often topping book charts, self-help books gain popularity as they tend to advise people on how to become better versions of themselves. They can tackle different aspects of human life, from careers to mindsets.
History
Historical nonfiction talks about specific major points or eras in history, explaining the chronology or cause-effect relationships of significant events, often to provide important context to modern issues.
This list is, by no means, exhaustive, but we hope that it gives you an idea of the vast ocean of nonfiction.
Environment
For entirely constructed worlds, describing the environment can be one of the greatest undertakings in worldbuilding. You have to consider the flora and fauna, as well as the climate and the seasons. The geography and design of countries and continents in your world are often major considerations as they impact how your character moves across the world.
Autobiography, Biography, Memoir
These three works overlap in the fact that they all tell the story of a specific human’s life. Autobiographies and biographies differ in the relationship of the writer to the human subject: the former indicates that the writer is the subject themselves, while the latter indicates the contrary. A memoir is a special type of autobiography which fixates on a specific era of the person’s life.
Travel Literature
This broad genre covers all kinds of nonfiction that deal with traveling. Whether it be an informative travel guide with instructions to live daily life in specific regions/countries, or a literary retelling of the author’s escapades in a travelogue, travel literature aims to help the reader run through the world with words.
Journalism
Newspapers make up the bulk of journalistic nonfiction, aiming to provide accurate information about real-life events that are relevant to contemporary readers. Additionally, narrative nonfiction and true crime novels can also retell recent events to provide a complete narrative when ongoing events finish.
Academic Books
School textbooks form a large part of academic books, as many students would be familiar with them. These books tend to be very technical, as they primarily aim to become references for scholastic purposes.
Leadership and Self-help
Often topping book charts, self-help books gain popularity as they tend to advise people on how to become better versions of themselves. They can tackle different aspects of human life, from careers to mindsets.
History
Historical nonfiction talks about specific major points or eras in history, explaining the chronology or cause-effect relationships of significant events, often to provide important context to modern issues.
This list is, by no means, exhaustive, but we hope that it gives you an idea of the vast ocean of nonfiction.
Nonfiction In LivingWriter…?
LivingWriter has been largely marketed as great writing software for fiction writers, with many of its flagship features catered towards plot creation and character development. However, although these features were indeed designed for fiction, we have specifically developed them to be flexible tools that empower writers, irrelevant of the kind of book that they are writing.
Plus, the writing process for fiction and nonfiction books share uncanny resemblances. You might be surprised to know that many phases of the fiction writing process exist in the nonfiction writing process, only referred to differently.
We’ll show you how LivingWriter truly becomes an evolving and living software that grows with the writer, even for nonfiction.
Outlining Is Technically Plotting…
LivingWriter has been largely marketed as great writing software for fiction writers, with many of its flagship features catered towards plot creation and character development. However, although these features were indeed designed for fiction, we have specifically developed them to be flexible tools that empower writers, irrelevant of the kind of book that they are writing.
Plus, the writing process for fiction and nonfiction books share uncanny resemblances. You might be surprised to know that many phases of the fiction writing process exist in the nonfiction writing process, only referred to differently.
We’ll show you how LivingWriter truly becomes an evolving and living software that grows with the writer, even for nonfiction.
The Heaven For Research Materials
We cannot emphasize enough how important research is to nonfiction. It is the foundation of the genre itself, as the quality of research can directly affect the quality of the book. No amount of wordsmithing can save inaccurate information. Therefore, as a nonfiction writer, you should have an amazing stash to store all that research into.
Most writers would simply opt for a simple Word document, distilling their research into haphazard bullet points that would pile up topic after topic. For Internet research, bookmarks might suffice for now, and they may be foldered into topics for “good measure.” A good ol’ “Save file” should be fine for documents and important images.
However, LivingWriter is here to change the game of having way too many places to store your research. With the Research Board, all research can easily fit into a single place, no matter what format it may be in. Links, documents, images, and plain old text can coexist inside a single Research Board, and you don’t even have to leave LivingWriter.
The best part about the Research Board is that everything is stored in the cloud, so you don’t have to fear if you accidentally deleted that very specific document or spilled dark coffee onto your print materials. Wherever you are, whatever device you use, all your research materials will be safe in LivingWriter’s arms, as safe as your manuscript.
Nonfiction Templates
LivingWriter templates are powerful tools that give new writers an early edge by providing both an initial format and information about each point in the template. Right now, LivingWriter offers templates for both fiction and nonfiction, and we are striving to include more as time goes on.
The currently available nonfiction templates are Memoir, Biography, Self Help, Book Proposal, and Ph.D. Thesis. These templates contain named chapters and outlines as well as initial notes that explain what each chapter should have. Not only can writers get a kickstart, but they can also learn more about the manuscript that they’re trying to write and the important parts it may have.
Write Nonfiction With LivingWriter Today!
LivingWriter cannot be the world’s most amazing writing companion if we focus on a single group of writers. To be the best, we need to be bold enough to include everyone in our audience. Nonfiction writers should feel like first-rate citizens as much as fiction writers are in LivingWriter.
With our powerful and flexible tools that aim to enhance the writing experience of authors, irrelevant of the manuscript they’re making, we are living up to the dream that LivingWriter is truly shaping up to be the first choice for your writing software.