In my last post, we wrote about what documentary fiction is and why it matters. Today I want to get practical about the craft itself—specifically, how you build a documentary fiction structure that makes verifiable facts feel like inevitable story.
Because here’s what nobody tells you when you start writing documentary fiction: it’s not just “add some narrative to facts.” It’s architecture.
And like any architecture, if you get the foundation wrong, everything you build on top of it collapses.
Structure Isn’t Organization—It’s Argument
Let me show you what I mean with The Healing Physicians.
We could have written it chronologically: 1901 to 2025, from Rockefeller’s first medical grants through Bill Gates’s vaccine programs. Start at the beginning, proceed through the middle, end at the end. Logical, right? That’s how history books work.
But chronology isn’t the same as story. And in documentary fiction, the order you present facts shapes what those facts mean.
Instead, we structured The Healing Physicians like this:
1: The Victim’s Experience (Shelton)
- Dr. Herbert Shelton’s journals, 1928-1985
- Ground-level confusion and persecution
- A man repeatedly arrested, never understanding the machinery behind it
- First person, immediate, raw
2: The Architect’s Design (Rockefeller)
- John D. Rockefeller’s business journals, 1901-1937
- Strategic, methodical suppression of alternative medicine
- A man who sees himself building progress, not committing crimes
- Third person from his journals, satisfied, business-minded
3: The Global Replication (Gates)
- Contemporary evidence, 1999-2025
- The same playbook deployed worldwide
- Foundation documents, WHO reports, policy papers
- Documentary, analytical, devastating
Same facts. Completely different impact.
If we’d started with Rockefeller, readers would understand the system intellectually but wouldn’t feel why it matters. If we’d started with Gates, the contemporary relevance would feel like conspiracy theory without historical foundation.
By starting with Shelton’s confusion, readers experience the persecution emotionally before understanding it intellectually. Then Part 2 reveals the machinery, and suddenly the persecution makes terrible sense. Then Part 3 shows it happening again, and readers can’t unsee the pattern.
That’s not accident. That’s architecture.
The structure itself makes an argument: This isn’t random. This is systematic. This is replicable. And it’s still happening.
Choose Your Perspective(s) Like Your Life Depends On It
Here’s a question that will make or break your documentary fiction project: Whose perspective are you using, and why?
Not “whose story is this?” That’s too vague. I mean literally: Through whose eyes will readers experience these events? And what does that perspective reveal that other perspectives couldn’t?
Part 1: Why Shelton Had to Be First Person
Herbert Shelton kept journals. Personal, reflective, questioning journals where he tried to make sense of what kept happening to him. He documented his arrests, his confusion, his anger, his inability to understand why the government and medical establishment kept targeting him.
First person was the only choice that made sense.
Why? Because his not knowing is the story. If I’d written Part 1 in third person, readers would have gotten explanation and analysis. They would have understood the situation intellectually from the outside.
But we needed them inside Shelton’s head, experiencing his confusion directly. Feeling the rage of being arrested repeatedly without understanding the financial machinery driving those arrests. Living through the grinding persecution without the historical perspective that would make it make sense.
The evidence supported first person: we had his journals, his tape-recorded talks, his letters. We knew how he thought and what he felt because he documented it himself.
The emotional truth we needed: Ground-level victim experiencing persecution without understanding the machinery behind it.
The language that served that truth: Raw, immediate, questioning, sometimes bitter.
Part 2: Why Rockefeller Required Third Person from Journals
John D. Rockefeller kept business journals. Not personal reflections—business documents. Board meeting notes. Grant decisions. Strategic planning.
He saw himself as building the future of medicine, not suppressing alternatives. His journals show a man satisfied with his progress, confident in his decisions, thinking systematically about how to transform American healthcare.
First person would have been wrong here. It would have felt like I was speaking as Rockefeller, putting words in his mouth, claiming access to his inner life that I didn’t have.
Third person let me stay faithful to his documented thoughts while maintaining appropriate distance. I could quote directly from his journals, show his strategic thinking, and let readers see how a person could systematically eliminate an entire medical tradition while believing they were advancing scientific progress.
The emotional truth we needed: Architect-level builder who sees progress, not suppression.
The language that served that truth: Methodical, satisfied, business-minded. The tone of someone making sound investments and strategic decisions.
Part 3: Why the Epilogue Had to Shift to Documentary Analysis
By Part 3, we’re in contemporary times—Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, vaccine programs, the same playbook deployed globally.
Neither first person nor intimate third person made sense here. We needed distance and needed analysis. We needed readers to see the pattern across all three sections clearly.
So Part 3 shifts to documentary style: foundation documents, WHO reports, policy papers, funding flows. The language becomes more analytical, more investigative.
The emotional truth we needed: The reader finally seeing what none of the individual characters could see—the pattern repeating across a century.
The language that served that truth: Documentary, investigative, letting the documented facts create their own devastating implications.
The Discipline of Fact-Checking
Let me tell you about the least glamorous part of documentary fiction: the fact-checking discipline that will make or break your credibility.
This is where the work gets brutal. This is where you discover that writing 36,000 words is actually easier than verifying every single claim in those 36,000 words.
Here’s the method that saved my sanity:
Pass 1: Draft with [VERIFY] Markers
First pass through any section, I write what I think happened. I keep momentum going. I don’t stop to chase down every fact because if I did, I’d never finish a section.
But anything I’m not absolutely certain about gets marked: [VERIFY – Rockefeller grant amounts to orthodox schools 1910-1925]
The brackets make them searchable later. The specificity reminds me exactly what needs verification.
Pass 2: Hunt Down Primary Sources
This is the tedious part. This is where I relied on my AI collaborator Claude to track down foundation reports from 1913 to verify that yes, Rockefeller gave $45 million to medical education and no, homeopathic schools received none of it.
For important claims, I needed multiple sources. One biographical account saying “Rockefeller funded orthodox medicine” isn’t enough. I need foundation documents, board minutes, grant letters, contemporaneous accounts.
The Rikers Island story I mentioned in my last post? That’s what happens when you don’t do this work. Multiple secondary sources repeated it, so it felt documented. But when I actually looked for primary evidence, it didn’t exist.
I cut it. Because documentary fiction demands you can defend every claim.
Pass 3: Qualify or Cut
After verification, claims fall into three categories:
- Documented exactly: Use precise numbers and details. “Rockefeller’s foundations gave $180 million to orthodox medical schools between 1910 and 1930.”
- Documented approximately: Use ranges or qualifiers. “Approximately 15,000 homeopathic practitioners” when exact numbers aren’t available.
- Unverifiable: Cut it or move it to speculation marked as such.
The discipline here is admitting when you don’t know. “Exact dates of most arrests remain unknown” is stronger than inventing dates that feel plausible.
Building Your Facts Database (Spreadsheet Boring, But Essential)
Here’s something I resisted for weeks before finally surrendering to its necessity: you need a database.
Not some fancy software. A simple spreadsheet where every significant claim has its own row:
Column 1: Event/Claim
Column 2: Date (or “undated”)
Column 3: Source (primary or secondary)
Column 4: Verification Status (verified, approximate, unverified)
Column 5: Notes/Context
For example:
| Event/Claim | Date | Source | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shelton arrested 31 times | 1928-1981 | Multiple biographies, Natural Hygiene sources | Approximate | Exact dates for most arrests unknown |
| Rockefeller GEB medical grants | 1910-1930 | Rockefeller Foundation Annual Reports | Verified | $45 million by 1913, $180 million total |
| Rikers Island claim | 1932 | Natural Hygiene literature | UNVERIFIED – CUT | Timeline doesn’t match documented location |
This spreadsheet becomes your fact-checking bible. When you’re writing and need to verify something quickly, you check the database. When an editor or reader challenges a claim, you have your sources immediately available.
Is it tedious? Absolutely. Is it necessary? Only if you want your work to be defensible.
When to Use AI (And When to Absolutely Not)
Since I’m working with Claude on these projects, people always ask: what role does AI actually play in documentary fiction?
Here’s what I’ve learned works and what doesn’t:
What AI Can Help With…
- Drafting from detailed frameworks: Once I’ve done the research, verified the facts, and created the structure, AI can draft sections quickly. I give Claude the verified facts, the voice I want, the perspective that’s needed, and it generates draft text. But—and this is crucial—I’m making every creative decision. Which facts matter? What order? What tone? That’s all human decision-making.
- Maintaining consistency: When you’re working across 36,000 words with three different perspectives, AI helps catch inconsistencies. Did I say Shelton was arrested 31 times in Part 1 but 29 times in Part 3? AI spots that.
- Processing source material: I can give AI a 50-page foundation report and ask “What grants went to medical schools between 1910-1915?” It summarizes faster than I can read. But I still verify the summary against the original document.
What AI Absolutely Cannot Do
The research: AI can’t tell you which sources are credible or which claims are actually documented. It will confidently cite sources that don’t exist or facts that aren’t verifiable.
The verification: AI has no way to distinguish between “widely reported” and “documented in primary sources.” It will treat the Rikers Island myth as fact because it appears in multiple places online.
The ethical choices: Should you include this unflattering detail about a real person? Should you qualify this claim because evidence is thin? These are human decisions requiring human judgment.
The narrative architecture: Which perspective serves the story best? How should facts be ordered to create meaning? What structure makes the pattern undeniable? That’s where documentary fiction lives or dies, and AI can’t do it.
It’s best to use AI as a drafting assistant, not a research partner or fact-checker. The architecture, verification, and ethical responsibility remain entirely human work.
The Structural Choices That Made The Healing Physicians Work
Let me get specific about the structural decisions that shaped this project, because these principles apply to any documentary fiction.
Decision 1: Start with the victim, not the architect
I could have started with Rockefeller’s strategic thinking. It would have been intellectually interesting—watching a industrialist apply business principles to medical education.
But readers wouldn’t have cared. They needed to feel why it mattered first. Starting with Shelton’s persecution created emotional investment that made Rockefeller’s strategy feel sinister rather than merely interesting.
Decision 2: Let each section have its own voice
Shelton’s first-person journals sound nothing like Rockefeller’s third-person business thinking, which sounds nothing like the contemporary documentary analysis. This wasn’t inconsistency—it was intentional.
Each voice reveals what that perspective can show. Trying to smooth everything into one unified voice would have lost the power of seeing the same pattern through radically different eyes.
Decision 3: End with the pattern repeating
The epilogue doesn’t resolve anything. It shows Bill Gates deploying the same playbook Rockefeller perfected—WHO funding, vaccine programs, suppression of alternatives, the works.
This makes the reader’s job harder (they can’t close the book feeling like the problem is historical) but it makes the documentary more honest. The pattern isn’t past tense. It’s present continuous.
What I’d Do Differently Next Time
After finishing The Healing Physicians, here’s what I learned the hard way:
Start the facts database earlier: I waited until I was deep into drafting before creating my spreadsheet. This meant backtracking to verify claims I’d already written. Next time, database first, drafting second.
Accept that some stories can’t be told: I spent hours trying to document a particular incident that every source mentioned but nobody cited. Finally accepted it couldn’t be verified. Those hours would have been better spent on documented material.
Trust the structure more: I kept second-guessing whether readers would follow the three-part structure. I considered adding more transitions, more explanation. Ultimately, trusting the structure to speak for itself was the right call.
For Your First Documentary Fiction Project
If you’re thinking about trying documentary fiction, here’s my advice:
- Start smaller than you think: Don’t attempt three men across 125 years for your first project. One person, one decade, one transformation. Build your skills before taking on epic scope.
- Choose obsession over importance: You’ll spend months with this material. Pick something you’re genuinely fascinated by, not something you think you “should” write about.
- Build your source foundation before drafting: Identify primary sources, gather secondary sources, note gaps, create your database. Only then start writing.
- Accept that verification is 50% of the work: Maybe more. The writing might take three months. The fact-checking might take three months. Budget for both.
In my next post, I’ll get even more practical—walking through the specific process of writing documentary fiction solo, with or without AI collaboration, including the ethical responsibilities that come with trafficking in real lives and real consequences.
Because documentary fiction isn’t just a genre. It’s a responsibility.