In Praise of a Front-Loaded Nonfiction Book

I learned a lot about structuring a nonfiction book this year, from reading the psychology bestseller No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz.

I can’t recommend the book itself highly enough, to everyone. One of its jacket blurbs reads, “this may be the most transformational book you’ll ever read.” That has been my experience, even if I wish it were the case for one of the many books I love dearly on spirituality.

Without delving too far into the book’s core thesis (that human minds are multiple rather than single, and that working directly with our minds’ different parts can heal psychological injury), I’d like to talk about how it delivers that thesis. No Bad Parts does an excellent job of front-loading the value it wishes to deliver. More than almost any other book I’ve read, it gets straight to the point.

As the book starts with the bold claim that “Our personalities are not single but multiple,” I expected an immediate breathless recitation of scientific evidence. Randomized controlled trial outcomes! Illustrative case studies! Clinical interventions that improved general malaise by 31%! This “Trust Us.” section would look virtually identical whether the book’s premise was true or false; in either case, I expected it to be there.

Instead, No Bad Parts gives a bit of Schwartz’s general worldview and how his career led him to develop Internal Family Systems (IFS), the psychology practice based around his “parts” insights, then simply rolls into defining parts themselves. Parts are “many sub-minds that are constantly interacting inside of us”: the same thing as “alters” in people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but not a product of trauma and existing in all of us.

This simple definition immediately clicked with me, and as No Bad Parts proceeded without further throat-clearing, I became aware just how little flourishing of statistics I needed from a book that was saying something evidently true.

Thinking more, I’ve found four reasons for this trust, from least to most important:

First, friends’ recommendations had already led me to take IFS seriously.

Second, I was bought in because of the book’s title: No Bad Parts. From the title, I knew the book was aligned with my worldview, and that I needed to read it. I’ve never felt so “pulled” to a book before—it was a lovely experience.

Third, as I read through the opening chapter, I could feel it aligning elements of my experience that had never made sense to me before; I was reading non-obvious things that immediately became obvious in retrospect. An example of this from outside psychology would be, “The moon shines because it reflects light from the sun.” Statements like these definitely help one believe the speaker: one immediately realizes just how hard it would be to explain the moon’s previously mysterious shine in any other way (that would also explain why the moon waxes and wanes, why the sun is brighter than the moon, and so on).

And fourth, I could try the experiential exercises beginning in chapter 1, and immediately see that they worked for me and helped me. This is like how you don’t need to “believe” a pancake recipe once you’re eating the pancakes and they’re good.

There’s a broader conversation here around how we know things, particularly in the social sciences. The scientific method is much weaker where the complexity of human minds is involved, which is why these disciplines are constantly in the grip of fundamentalists—from Hoover’s macroeconomists to the reductive behaviorism of B. F. Skinner—all of whom use title of “scientist” as the bedrock for their mainly-wrong claims.

Because the arc of truth is longer in these disciplines, you can know something in them long before anyone else takes you seriously. Schwartz’s career arc followed this “knowledge-first” structure (he observed that his patients’ minds were multiple and was laughed at for decades for saying so), and he’s given readers the lovely gift of mirroring that structure in No Bad Parts.

Of course, in the long run, it’s very important that IFS’s findings are research-backed and repeatable (and they are); but I loved a book that skipped right to helping readers.

After its strong start, the rest of No Bad Parts is less life-changing per chapter. Some of this is definitely Schwartz’s fault (chapter four contains Schwartz’s random and instantly dated take on the Covid-19 pandemic), but much of it is simply that the book has now delivered its main idea, and is now elaborating and deepening. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with delivering the most value at the outset; in fact, I’d argue that there may be something wrong with not doing this.

And, about halfway through the book, I simply felt, “I don’t need to read this anymore”: I had what I needed, for now. That just the first half of the book changed my life feels like it celebrates No Bad Parts‘s reader-focused structure.

The Acknowledgments section near the back cover of No Bad Parts credits Schwartz’s editor for “a major reorganization that improved the book enormously.” Reading this, I felt certain that this reorganization was exactly the process of front-loading what Schwartz had to say. I hope we can all be our own editors in similar writing.

No Bad Starts: Suggestions for Front-Loading Our Nonfiction Writing

I think we can directly lift some of what Schwartz did well in No Bad Parts. If you are writing a general nonfiction piece, especially a book, these may be helpful exercises to try:

First, look at your title. To me, your title contains the most important words in your entire book: these are the words that everyone who encounters your book will read, whether or not they even open it.

I feel that No Bad Parts is a better title than Thinking, Fast and Slow (another psychology classic), because if you read only the title, you would understand what the author wishes to say. The title can also draw you in if you resonate with it, which is what happened to me with No Bad Parts. “Thinking, fast and slow” is interesting, but I’m not sure what it means, nor am I particularly compelled (by the title alone) to find out.

How much can you convey in just your title? The Body Keeps the Score is another example of a title that says a huge amount. That book could’ve been easily titled “Recent Findings on the Topic of Trauma,” which would’ve been a shame.

Is there something you want to scream at the world? (“Solar panels are affordable!”) Can you title your book that? Is there some central phrase or thesis that you’ll spend the whole book unpacking? (“A happy marriage starts with compromise!”) Can you title your book that (“It Starts with Compromise: How to Have a Happy Marriage”)? Don’t miss the opportunity to help everyone who’ll read your book title, even if they never read your book.

Second, when do you deliver your core thesis? Can this be in chapter one? How quickly can you begin to deliver the central value that your readers need to absorb? Obviously, you’ll be unpacking this throughout the book, so you can’t say it all at once; but consider minimizing throat-clearing, backstory, and other elements before you’ve begun to say what is most valuable.

Third, how can you make the material come alive for people? The experiential exercises in No Bad Parts and in other nonfiction books I’ve loved, like My Grandmother’s Hands, bring the material directly into experience. As a reader, I no longer believe or disbelieve the material; I know it, in my direct experience. Can you incorporate experiential exercises into your book?

If not (obviously, this works better for books about the human experience, and less well for books about solar panels), then how can you make what you have to share as obvious and absorbable as possible? Humans learn through story, so anecdotes are very powerful. Humans also like easy-to-understand visuals that show what you’re sharing—this is why “Before/After,” for example, has been such a powerful format for conveying (both true and false) things. Think how you take on new knowledge, and try to offer those elements to your readers.

Creative nonfiction pieces, such as memoirs, are more organized around story, which has its own rhythms; so your mileage may vary for more literary writing. Still, I feel some of the same dynamics hold in terms of the reader experience. In particular, it’s good to have good answers to the following questions:

1. If a reader begins by reading sentence 1, paragraph 1, page 1, or chapter 1, will they feel compelled to keep reading from there?

2. If a reader walks away before reading a certain part of the piece, will they have missed the meat of it, the main part?

In story structure, they say “start in the middle,” and I feel this is getting at something akin to what we’ve been discussing: start your writing with where the meat is. Immediately grip readers who really should be doing something else. You can fill in the rest later—or you might not even need to.