The late Tommy Thompson (Blood and Money, Serpentine and Hearts) once said there were three or four stories that would make good books every day in the Los Angeles Times. I don't know what edition of the paper he gets but the one that comes to my house sure doesn't deliver the goods that way. It seems to me that, at best, I see a story in the Times once a month that would make a good non-fiction book. In fact, I've always thought, newspapers are lousy places to look for book ideas. The criterion they use for selection a story has nothing to do with the criterion for a good book. First and foremost the LA Times is looking for news. Few books are news. And certainly no book I would want to write would be about the news. I'm about telling stories. Newspapers generally do that badly or not at all. It's not that the writers aren't gifted. It's rather that the constraints of their craft keep them from writing articles of lasting importance.

Even articles which knocked the world on its head when they were first published are unreadable today. Once in graduate journalism school we were assigned to read a book consisting of the greatest newspaper stories of all time: the Armenian Massacre, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and death of John Kennedy. None of them there readable today.

The reason is they contained news and only news. And once you’d read them there was no reason to read them again. On the other hand, stories give pleasure every time you read them. That’s why children ask for the same bedtime story over and over again.

What is the difference between a news story and a real story?

It’s not the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction stories, if done right, can give the same sort of lasting pleasure as fiction. They tell us not only what happened but also how the main characters felt about what was happening.

Okay, now a few rules.

If you are going to write about how the main characters felt, you have to have access to them. Don’t do stories where the main protagonist won’t talk to you. A good example is a murder story where the main character is in jail but still maintains he or she was innocent. On the other hand, stories where the main character admits the crime are great. One example would be a story I did 20 years ago, Murder in the Math Department. This was the story of a graduate student in math at Stanford who after 20 years still hadn't finished his degree. When his wife left him and later married another man he got so mad he went down to Stanford and killed one of his professors. He was happy to talk to me from his jail cell because he believed if people could fully understand his reasons for killing his professor they’d agree that what he’d done was both "morally and logically correct."

Make sure the story makes moral sense. For the last 250,000 years human beings have been sitting around the campfire at night, telling each other stories. The ones that have come down to use though the eons are the ones that have a moral point. These are the great myths. Not all stories make a moral point. It’s hard to write a great story about someone who was killed in an existential accident for instance. Suppose a poor farm boy fell in love with a rich city girl, a la Great Gatsby, and for ten years he worked day and night to prove himself worthy by amassing an empire of wealth and power and the day he plans to ask her to marry him, a child runs out on the road in front of his car. He swerves to avoid her. His car overturns and he is killed. She never learns that her rich and powerful neighbor who loves her from afar was the same poor farm boy that sat behind her in geometry class.

A young man becomes a detective to find out who murdered his mother when he was only 10. He spends 10 years working on the case. He solves it beyond all doubt. Then when he goes to confront the killer he finds he’d died 20 years previously from prostrate cancer. There’s no climax to the story. No great confrontation. And thus no great tension. And also no great story.

Non-fiction stories have to end "right." If they don’t, let them go. You’re writing non-fiction, you don’t have the option of rearranging the facts to find a more suitable ending. When the facts don’t add up to make a moral point, give it up and look for a better one.

Now the sophisticated writer at this point may argue, "Now, wait a minute. You are going to ignore a significant and major happening just because it didn't 'end right?' That's life. Lots of things don't end right. But you're going to forget about all those stories and only write about the ones where everything is tided up neat and well?"

This is a good point. I've thought about this long and hard myself. As have other non-fiction writers. In Serpentine, Tommy Thompson quotes a saying he saw inscribed on a temple wall in southeast Asia--"Coincidence, when traced back far enough, becomes inevitable."

What he's saying here is that when a non-fiction writer finds a story that doesn't seem to make moral sense his real problem isn't that it's a bad story but that he's done insuffient research. He has to dig deeper and deeper into the story until he finds the reasons it turned out the way that it did. And once he has those the story will make moral sense after all.

Much as I respect Tommy Thompson as a writer, I'm not sure he's right. I think this world is an existential one in which morality (right endings) does not exist. We look for stories with right endings because that gives us comfort in a cold and uncaring universe that doesn't even know we're here. But I find it very hard to believe that things happen for a reason. Bad things do happen to good people and oftentimes it makes no sense whatsoever. The universe isn't run by God. At best it's run by random chance.

In such a world, I take the position that the purpose of myth (and religion and all good fiction) is to tell us, however indirectly, that there is a plan to the universe in which good is rewarded and evil struck down. So I write non-fiction stories that "end right" with a clear conscience, just as fiction writers create stories that make moral sense. If I can find the moral ending to a story, then I go ahead and write it. If I can't find any ending that makes more sense, I conclude this is just another example where real life turns out badly (the fault of the existential universe we live in, not our lack of talent), and move on.