I’ve been teaching writing and helping people to write their non-fiction books since 2002, and I recognise that, these days, some genres of non-fiction books have much more in common with fiction. I blame this on reality TV. People are nosy, they like to see inside people’s lives, find out what makes them tick, share their pain and joy, empathise with them.

Readers too want to know about the people who write the books they read. If you share your stories this makes your writing authentic. It makes people believe in you.

So, what does this actually mean, then, you ask.

It means that if you are going to write about yourself in your books, you need to be able to write in stories. Think about fiction for a minute, that’s a ’story’, right? What ingredients do you have in a novel?

You have people. And people have character, they talk, feel and they do things.

You create a sense of place too, and if you are lucky, the reader can relate to some aspects of the story.

It is just the same with the pieces of life story, or anecdotes, that you share in your non-fiction.

Here are the seven ingredients that I believe you need to use to write a story that leaps off the page.

1. Character
2. Dialogue
3. Details
4. Scene setting
5. Emotion
6. Resonance
7. Narrative

So, next time you want to share a story from your life to illustrate a point, don’t do it like this:

My grumpy teenage son came on one day and told us he wanted to leave school.

But like this, using the ingredients above:

I stood at the kitchen window and watched James return from school. His blonde head was bowed, his narrow shoulders stooped and his black rucksack slumped against his lower back.  I moved to open the door for him. His face was devoid of expression.

“Hi love, had a good day?” I said cheerily, knowing that with his ears plugged by headphones he was unlikely to answer.

James shucked off his rucksack and kicked it to the side of the hallway. “I’m never going back there again. Not ever, right?”

OK, so it takes longer to write a piece of life story this way, but I think you will agree that it’s worth it.

I’ve been writing for more than 20 years now, and all 26 of my books have been non-fiction. They’ve all been the kinds of practical, how-to books that are published by Bookshaker. Two of them were cookbooks, 12 were computer manuals and the rest have been all about ’sharing what I know to help others to grow’. With the exception of the computer books, everything else I have written has included an element of life story. Of my story. Snippets from my life that illustrate the point I am making. Let me give you an example:

In my book ‘A Career in Your Suitcase’ I inspire and inform the reader to create and maintain a portable career, one that will move abroad with them. So, in order to illustrate how bad it made me feel to have given up my career when I married Ian and moved with him to live in Dubai I told a story.

First, I set the scene, describing my charmed life in a serviced apartment with its own health club and pool. I describe the endless sun, the opportunities for tennis and socialising by the pool. Then, I go on to explain that I have fair skin, burn easily and hate sport with a passion. The climax of my story tells of the day when Ian came home from work to find me crouched in the hall of our apartment, crying my eyes out and tearing a newspaper to shreds in frustration. I simply did not know how to cope without a job, without something to do.

That story is absolutely true. It is dramatic. It is filled with emotion. It shares something about me that may resonate with the reader. It makes me look real and maybe vulnerable. But most of all it makes it abundantly clear to the reader why a ‘career in a suitcase’ is so very important to me. It was hard to write about that moment, and in fact, in the first edition of the book I left it out. But then I started to be invited to run workshops and talk on the topic of portable careers all over the world. I’ll never forget the first time I dared to share my ‘tearing newspaper’ story with the audience. My knees wobbled and my voice went all croaky, but I could feel a hush fall on the lecture theatre as I spoke. Afterwards, people came up to congratulate me on sharing such a personal story. They told me that it helped them to realise they were not alone in their frustration and not having a career. From that moment, I have done my best to include personal stories in my work.

Today, readers want to find out about your theories, do your exercises and learn from your non-fiction book. You have written your book because you have, as Debs Jenkins says ‘muddy boots’. Your reader is going to want to find out how you got them dirty. So tell them.

Cathy Dobson is the author of Planet Germany. In this second interview Jo Parfitt talks to Cathy abhow she got published and how she promotes her book. You can find out more about the book at planetgermany.wordpress.com