When one chapter wants to be its own book
Hey everyone, looking for collective wisdom on the “crisis of concept” moment faced by writers working across a broad scope of time in narrative nonfiction. How do you decide when the material inside one chapter is big enough to be its own book? My specifics are below, but assume this is a tension that comes up often in this genre (and others) and any thoughts could be applied broadly.
I am finalizing a proposal for a literary nonfiction book (real people/events/documented). Debating which version of the story I should actually be writing. There are two books living inside the same research.
The first (the one I’ve been working on) is a multigenerational family narrative set in a midwestern industrial city. Late 1800s through the mid-20th century. An immigrant family arrives with nothing, assimilates through the trades, achieves a brief foothold in civic life, loses it to forces larger than themselves, and produces a lost generation of sons before one line survives into something resembling stability. The industrial corridor and its environmental impacts are the context the family moves through. The family is the lens, with trove of documented details which translate directly to the broader themes (a few fall close to the category of “too far fetched if were fiction”)
As I am finishing the proposal, part of me keeps wondering whether the better story is actually hiding inside one chapter of that book. There’s a section rooted in the industrial enterprises themselves, the competing personalities who built and controlled them, their rivalries, political gamesmanship, the science they developed and weaponized, and what they did to the land. The more I dig into it the more compelling it becomes. That material is expansive enough to be its own book.
My concern with the first concept is that jamming generations together in one book doesn’t allow for full attachments to characters and it fails to provide richness to the compelling enterprise section. The issue with the second is whether there’s a readership for it at all. It has plenty of human characters, owners, engineers, scientists, real personalities with real rivalries. But without the family baseline that anchors the first book emotionally, I worry it risks further narrowing the potential readership and sliding into advocacy storytelling rather than literary nonfiction.
My instinct is that they belong together, but the structural problem is real for the first concept. And yes, I’m aware that the readership for either of these books is probably not large. That’s okay by me and the realistic outlet has always been a smaller press.
Has anyone dealt with this kind of tension? Is this just a stress every writer hits at some point in a long project, or am I identifying something that actually needs to be resolved before I go further? Do I just write a 400 page book?
TLDR: Writing a literary nonfiction book about a Midwest immigrant family and the industrial forces that shaped them. Wondering if the corporate power story buried inside it is actually the better book, or whether I justo need to figure out how to make them one.