You know that moment when you’re reading a history book and you think, “This is fascinating, but I’m falling asleep”? And then you pick up a novel and think, “This is gripping, but is any of it true?”
I’ve been wrestling with this problem for months while working on The Healing Physicians—a project that tracked Dr. Herbert Shelton’s persecution across decades, John D. Rockefeller’s systematic suppression of alternative medicine, and the architecture that still operates today, thanks to the Gates Foundation. Three men, 125 years, 36,000 words, and every single fact verifiable.
What I discovered along the way is a genre most writers have never heard of and most readers don’t know exists: documentary fiction.
Let me tell you what it is, why it matters, and why it’s both harder and more important than most people realize.
What Documentary Fiction Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Let’s start by clearing away the confusion, because “documentary fiction” sounds like an oxymoron until you understand what it’s actually doing.
Documentary fiction is NOT:
- Historical fiction with “based on a true story” slapped on
- Biography with dialogue added to make it interesting
- Journalism with the boring parts removed
- An excuse to make stuff up because “the emotional truth matters more”
Documentary fiction IS:
- Documented facts presented through narrative techniques
- Reconstructed scenes grounded in verifiable evidence
- Inferred thoughts and dialogue based on documented behavior and context
- Truth-telling that recognizes how narrative choices shape meaning
The key distinction that separates this from everything else: In documentary fiction, every claim must trace to evidence. When I write that Shelton was “confused and angry,” I’d better have journal entries showing that confusion. When I write that Rockefeller deployed “$180 million,” I’d better have foundation records documenting those grants.
But unlike straight documentary, I’m allowed—required, even—to make those facts mean something through structure, perspective, and narrative choice.
That’s the sweet spot. Documented truth meeting narrative power.
Why This Matters Right Now
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: we’re drowning in information and starving for meaning.
I’ve been writing about natural health and institutional suppression for close to 50 years. I’ve read the academic papers, the foundation reports, the biographical accounts. The information exists. It’s all out there, buried in archives and medical journals and forgotten testimonies.
But nobody reads it.
Why? Because it’s presented as data, not story. As chronology, not meaning. As “what happened” without “why it matters.”
Regular documentary gives you facts but often buries the story in academese. You need a Ph.D. just to parse the sentences, and by page three you’re wondering if you need more coffee or just a nap.
Fiction gives you story but you’re always wondering “did any of this actually happen?” You get swept up in the narrative and then remember you’re reading about dragons or space stations or a murder that never occurred. The emotional investment feels wasted when you close the book and return to actual reality.
Documentary fiction says: “This happened. Here’s how it felt. Here’s what it meant. And here’s why it matters now.”
The Healing Physicians works (when it works) because every arrest, every grant, every school closure is documented—but Shelton’s confusion reads like a thriller, Rockefeller’s methodical suppression reads like a crime, and the pattern repeating today becomes unavoidable.
The facts alone wouldn’t hit this hard. The narrative alone wouldn’t be trustworthy. Together, they create something neither journalism nor fiction can do on its own.
The Three Tensions You’re Always Balancing
Documentary fiction isn’t just “write some facts but make them interesting.” It’s architecture. And like any architecture, it requires balancing competing forces that want to pull the structure apart.
Tension 1: Accuracy vs. Readability
Here’s what straight documentary sounds like:
“On April 27, 1911, Frederick Taylor Gates, advisor to John D. Rockefeller and former Baptist minister turned business strategist, composed a letter to…”
Accurate? Yes. Readable? Absolutely not. It reads like a phone book having an affair with a grant application.
Here’s documentary fiction:
“Frederick Gates picked up his pen on April 27, 1911, and wrote the sentence that would eliminate an entire medical tradition: ‘We must deliver a mortal blow to the homeopaths.'”
Same facts. One version makes you check your watch. The other makes you lean forward.
The trick—and it is a trick, one that takes practice—is knowing which facts matter for the story and which ones belong in footnotes. The date matters because it establishes timeline. Gates’s former career as a Baptist minister? Interesting trivia, maybe relevant somewhere, but not in this sentence where you’re building toward his declaration of war on homeopathy.
Every sentence becomes a negotiation: What does the reader absolutely need to know right here, and what’s just you showing off your research?
Tension 2: What Happened vs. What It Meant
Let me give you a documented fact from The Healing Physicians that stopped me cold when I discovered it:
- John D. Rockefeller used a homeopathic physician—Dr. Hamilton Biggar—for over 40 years. Personally. For his own health care. Meanwhile, his foundations gave $180 million to orthodox medical schools and exactly zero dollars to homeopathic institutions.
That’s not random. It’s not even hypocritical in the simple sense. That was a man who knew homeopathy worked for him personally but believed it couldn’t scale to industrial medicine—and was willing to eliminate it institutionally.
Now, here’s where documentary fiction gets interesting: I can show you that pattern without editorializing about it. I don’t need to tell you “Rockefeller was a hypocrite” or “Rockefeller was pragmatic” or “Rockefeller was evil.” I just show you what he did, in what order, with what results.
The meaning emerges from the facts themselves when you arrange them properly.
That’s the second tension: resisting the urge to explain what the reader should feel and trusting that documented facts, properly structured, will create their own inevitable meaning.
Tension 3: Evidence vs. Gaps
You’ll have documented facts. You’ll also have huge gaps. This is unavoidable.
Herbert Shelton kept journals—I know his thoughts. John D. Rockefeller kept business journals—I know his strategy. But there are conversations, moments, reactions I can only infer.
Herbert Shelton was arrested 31 times. I know this. It’s documented across multiple sources. But I don’t know the exact dates of most arrests, the specific charges in each case, or how long he spent in jail each time.
Documentary fiction demands you distinguish between:
- What’s documented (quote it, cite it, lean on it)
- What’s reasonably inferred (based on documented behavior and context)
- What’s speculation (don’t do this—ever)
Here’s a perfect example of how this plays out in practice: The “30 days on Rikers Island” claim.
This story appears everywhere in Shelton literature. Wikipedia mentions it. Biographical sites repeat it. Natural Hygiene publications treat it as established fact. It’s been repeated so often it feels like verified history.
But when I dug deeper: no primary documentation. No court records. No newspaper accounts. And the timeline doesn’t even make sense—Shelton was in Texas in 1932, not New York.
The Natural Hygiene community mythologized him, and the myth spread until it became indistinguishable from fact.
I cut it from The Healing Physicians.
Not because it wasn’t a good story. Not because it didn’t fit my narrative. But because documentary fiction demands you can defend every claim, and I couldn’t defend that one.
This is the brutal discipline of the form: If you can’t verify it, you can’t use it. Period.
When Documentary Fiction Fails (And Why)
Let me be honest about where this genre falls apart, because it fails often and for predictable reasons.
Failure Mode 1: The Author Gets Lazy
You find one good source and treat it as gospel, assuming that because something appears in multiple secondary sources, it must be true. You stop distinguishing between “documented” and “widely reported.”
This is how myths become history. This is how the Rikers Island story almost made it into The Healing Physicians.
The fix: Multiple sources for important claims. Primary sources whenever possible. Ruthless verification even when it’s tedious.
Failure Mode 2: The Author Gets Preachy
You’re so excited about the meaning you’ve discovered that you stop trusting the facts to speak for themselves. You start inserting editorial commentary, explaining what readers should think, hammering your thesis until it’s dead.
Documentary fiction works because the facts create their own argument. When you editorialize, you break that spell. You remind readers that a human with an agenda is selecting and arranging these facts.
The fix: Trust the structure. Trust the reader. If your facts don’t support your argument without you explaining them, either your argument is wrong or your structure needs work.
Failure Mode 3: The Boring Parts Win
Some documented facts are essential but deadly dull. Foundation charter dates. Grant amounts. Committee structures. You need this information for the story to make sense, but presented straight, it kills momentum.
Bad version: “The General Education Board, established in 1903 and funded with an initial endowment of $1 million which later grew to…”
Good version: “Rockefeller created the General Education Board in 1903 with $1 million—enough to reshape American medicine. By 1913, he’d increased that to $45 million specifically for medical education. Not one dollar went to homeopathic schools.”
Same information. One reads like a grant application. The other reads like a crime being committed.
The fix: Every fact needs narrative work. If you can’t make it matter, cut it or move it to an appendix.
The Question Everyone Ask
“Isn’t documentary fiction just an excuse to make stuff up?”
No. It’s the opposite.
It’s choosing to work under stricter constraints than either documentary or fiction requires.
Fiction lets you invent whatever serves the story. Need a dramatic confrontation that never happened? Add it. Want a character who didn’t exist? Create them. Need a more satisfying ending than reality provided? Write it.
Documentary lets you be dry and academic. You can hide behind passive voice and jargon. You can present facts without making them mean anything. You’re accountable to accuracy but not to engagement.
Documentary fiction demands you make documented facts read like a thriller while defending every claim.
That’s not easier. That’s masochistic.
But when you pull it off—when you create something that’s both verifiably true and emotionally gripping—you’ve done something neither form can do alone.
You’ve made history matter now.
Where This Leaves Me
After spending months learning about Shelton’s persecution, Rockefeller’s systematic suppression, and Bill Gates’s replication of the same playbook a century later, I’m convinced documentary fiction is one of the most important genres nobody’s writing.
We need stories that are true. Not “based on a true story” with all the hedging that implies. Actually true, verifiably documented, defensibly factual.
But we also need those stories to matter emotionally, to hit readers in the gut, to make the past feel urgent and relevant to right now.
Documentary fiction does both. When it works.
In my next post, I’ll dig into the architecture of documentary fiction—how you choose perspectives, structure facts to create meaning, and build the framework that makes 36,000 words of three men’s lives across 125 years feel inevitable rather than overwhelming.
Because structure isn’t just organization. Structure is argument. And getting it right is 70% of the work.
Have you encountered documentary fiction that hit you differently than straight history or pure fiction? What made it work? I’d love to hear about it through the contact page.