Worldbuilding in first person narrative nonfiction

Hello! This weekly Substack is mostly about my fixation on how a piece of journalism can be made to feel as distinctive as a novel or a painting - how it can inhabit its own universe and, if it’s a book, be such a one-off bookstores won’t even know which section to put it in.

(That, I confess, is the downside: If your book doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, bookstores may get bewildered and place you somewhere horrific like Wellness. But I think that’s their problem and you shouldn’t let it hamstring you, although publishers may disagree with me on that. But it IS a frustration: I remember all those years when the Costa Book Awards only had one nonfiction category - Biography. Were the rest of us just ineligible?)

Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking about that term ‘worldbuilding’ - that technique from fantasy writing where the writer creates an entire universe with its own set of rules, its own flora and fauna and customs and history that will never be completely evident to the reader. They’ll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, like a unicorn galloping by, or whatever. As you can see I’m no fantasy writer and am impressed with myself for even thinking of a unicorn.

I want to talk about worldbuilding within the context of first person narrative nonfiction. Specifically it’s about worldbuilding as a way to introduce yourself as a character early in your own story.

Let me give you some examples.

I’m reading John Safran’s very engaging book Squat, about his adventure squatting Kanye West’s abandoned mansion in LA. I love John Safran. He does what Louis Theroux and I do but with a twist – he’s Australian!

Squat is like an absurd, audacious comic version of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count. Like me, John wants to put the story first and let the themes emerge from it. He’s a storyteller, not a polemicist.

This is how chapter one starts:

I’ve been in Los Angeles half a day. This is seven months before the war in Gaza. I’m in the bumbling stage of book writing, driving to dead ends while the half-thoughts, the no-thoughts and the overthinking are congealing.

I think that’s beautifully put, a reminder that that massively dispiriting early part of the process when you don’t know what you’re doing and everything’s a dead end doesn’t mean you’ve lost your talent and your career is over, but is in fact part of the process. He goes on:

I’m riding shotgun. Antoinette is cutting through the woods, squinting through the windscreen of the Jeep.

‘I’m scared of being shot,’ Antoinette says.

He’s introducing a device here, of course. Antoinette – and we don’t know who she is yet - could be his foil, someone to bounce off, maybe a double act. I really like the confidence of this. This is John Safran being John Safran, not A Nonfiction Writer. He’s creating a John Safran Universe.

‘Oh, there’s a cat,’ Antoinette sings out, forgetting about Americans and guns. She likes cats. She likes all creatures in the animal kingdom besides mosquitos and her family. I’ve only known Antoinette five months.

This is an unconventional, fourth-wall-breaking kind of worldbuilding - a very shorthand, distilled way of indicating to the reader lots of things: This journey will be fun and funny, he’s no professional investigator but a guy ‘bumbling’ through LA with a woman he doesn’t know well, and they’re about to get out of their depth in an audacious and unprofessional way by squatting Kanye’s mansion.

He's telling us that his book is its own unique thing, he’s the right person to be writing it, and we’re in safe hands.

There’s a book called True Story by the journalist Michael Finkel. The backstory is very interesting. Finkel was a New York Times writer brought down by a scandal: He’d published a story - ‘Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?’ - about the slave trade in West Africa, but he didn’t reveal that the main character was in fact a composite of several boys he interviewed. He did it to make his story sharper. No single boy’s experience encapsulated the narrative he’d wanted to tell, so he took a bit from here and a bit from there. See what happens when you allow your preexisting hopes for your story to take over, rather than be satisfied with the nuances, the grey areas? Journalistic frauds almost always occur for that reason.

Anyway, Finkel introduces himself as a character in True Story just as his subterfuge is about to be exposed by the New York Times in the form of an Editor’s Note:

All day, I wore sweatpants and bedroom slippers. I didn’t watch TV or listen to music. I ate whatever canned foods were left in the house. More than once, I crawled into the cramped, dusty space underneath my writing desk and tore at the carpet, rubbing my fingers raw.

I read that paragraph years ago and never forgot it – that image of a man so ashamed of himself, and so terrified of the world closing in on him, that instead of sitting at his writing desk, he’s hiding underneath it.

This is what I mean by the power and brevity of worldbuilding. We’re getting just the tip of the iceberg of his life, and it’s exactly enough. (What happens next to Finkel is extraordinary by the way – just as his life collapses he learns there’s a murderer on the run who’s adopted his identity. Talk about a lucky break!)

Let me write a little about worldbuilding in my own books. Sometimes I think of them all as just one book, released episodically. I definitely think of them as markers in my life. In Them I’m young and free and on an adventure, getting out of my depth with extremists. By the time The Psychopath Test comes around I have a young family, and I’m getting more fraught and anxious as a human. There’s a moment of worldbuilding early on in The Psychopath Test about this. I’m spiraling with my wife about how an interviewee has threatened to sue me, and my son overhears:

“What’s happening?” yelled my son Joel, entering the room. “Why is everyone shouting?”

“I made a silly mistake. I called a man a psychopath, and now he’s angry,” I explained.

“What’s he going to do to us?” said Joel.

“Nothing,” I said.

“But if he’s not going to do anything to us, why are you worried?” said Joel.

“I’m just worried that I’ve made him angry,” I said. “I don’t like to make people upset or angry. That’s why I’m sad.”

“You’re lying,” said Joel, narrowing his eyes. “I know you don’t mind making people angry or upset. What is it that you aren’t telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything,” I said.

“Is he going to attack us?” said Joel.

“No!” I said. “No, no! That definitely won’t happen!”

“Are we in danger?” yelled Joel.

“He’s not going to attack us,” I yelled. “He’s just going to sue us. He just wants to take away my money.”

“Oh God,” said Joel.

I loved reading that back, especially the line: ‘“You’re lying,” said Joel, narrowing his eyes. “I know you don’t mind making people angry or upset.”’

I actually really do mind making people upset, so that made me laugh. There’s a LOT of worldbuilding going on there, mostly about how I’m the right person to be writing this book because I’m prone to spiraling, and full of anxieties, which makes me the neurological opposite of a psychopath.

There’s a moment at the very beginning of my next book where I’m interviewing some people in a very normal way when the following odd thing happens:

I nodded for them to continue, then I let out a scream.

The reason I scream is because I just came out of surgery and I moved in the wrong way, tearing at my scar. The world I’m building here is that this is an older and more fragile Jon than in my past books. But it’s also a Jon who is raging against the dying of the light - as Dylan Thomas wrote - too work focused to allow myself time to convalesce. The reader won’t know at this point if this will become thematically relevant later on. But it will.

If you have other favorite examples of ways nonfiction writers introduce themselves into their stories in this way, please add them in the comments.

Oh, two final things:

First: A cliche. I woke up the other day thinking about all the things I still had to do to deliver nine chapters of my book. I was thinking about them all at once, and I found it exhausting and debilitating. My brain felt totally overwhelmed and I almost wanted to go back to bed. And then I remembered the cliche - writing is a marathon not a sprint. You don’t need to fix everything all at once. One thing at a time.

When I remembered that I felt much better, and maybe there will be people out there who need that reminder.

And a quick recommendation: Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix is fantastic. I love how it captures the Wellness Influencer color schemes and use of language: “That’s not MY lived experience!”

Bye!