3 Key Takeaways: Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepherd

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7349220166342839584

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my key takeaways from Unnatural Causes by Dr. Richard Shepard. This book is very good and you don’t need me to tell you that it’s very good because it’s a huge bestseller, so let’s get into it. So my first key takeaway is this, if you’re writing a non-fiction book, a memoir, something that is fact-driven, start with the biggest story.

So in this book, in chapter two, okay, because in chapter one he does something else which I’m going to get back into in my next point, but in chapter two, very early on in the book, he starts with the Hungerford Massacre. So a huge, huge story, a huge nationally known, certainly probably internationally known event that he was part of. He has an actual eyewitness retelling of being the forensic pathologist that went to that site and dealt with that case.

That’s huge, that tells us right out of the gate that this book is going to be full of exciting stories, even if that’s the only famous case he ever worked on. Wow, right out of the gate we know that this is going to be good and the power of that one really good story can actually take us all the way through the book because we had such an amazing time reading that first story that we want to go through the whole of the rest of the book to see if there are any more like it. And even if that was the only good story in the book, you’re probably going to get a higher percentage of people finishing the book.

That means you will get a higher percentage of people leaving reviews, higher percentage of people leaving good reviews, and if you’re using a program like Kindle Unlimited, obviously you get paid per page read, so you want people to finish the book, or even go back and re-read sections.

My second key takeaway from Unnatural Causes is to leave a trail of mysteries. This is what he’s doing in chapter one.

This is what I was alluding to in my previous point. In chapter one, he talks about being a pilot, which is very different to being a forensic pathologist, and having this kind of attack, almost anxiety attack, panic attack, about his career. And we as the reader instantly want to know what caused that panic attack, what caused him to feel that way, and also he leaves us as the reader, he is in a plane, in the air, he is flying it himself, and he’s having a panic attack.

Obviously, he’s still alive because he wrote the book, but we definitely want to find out what happened on the rest of that flight. Did he get it under control? Did he crash and survive somehow? Did he have a heart attack in the air? What happened? What happened? And that’s something that goes through a lot of the book, and we only find out closer towards the end what actually happened on that flight, and that’s really compelling, and he keeps bringing it up over and over again. It isn’t something that’s mentioned at the beginning and then left, he keeps bringing it up over and over again so that we remember that there’s this mystery we’re looking forward to finding out about.

And he weaves in these bits about his personal life as well, which end up contributing to that mystery.

My third key takeaway from Unnatural Causes is humanise your big lessons and your big cases. The events that take place in this book are things that have made national news.

There are terrorist attacks, I shouldn’t say that on TikTok. They are big events, things that people have read about, but what he does is he humanises everything that’s going on. So when we’re in the mortuary looking at a dead body, he will talk about how the police officers around him were turning green and wanting to throw up, and how they had to leave the room, or what they talked about.

When we’re talking about victims, he gives us these details that humanise them. He talks about their lives and their backstory and how they came to be on his table. Rather than just clinically stating the facts, he makes sure that we’re relating to real people, humans that existed, that had lives and thoughts and feelings, and this allows us to get deeper into the book.

And of course, by sharing his own emotional responses to what he was seeing in front of him, that allows us to really empathise with him as the author, and to get deeper into the book as well on that level. This is a really great technique for making sure that the reader stays with you, cares about what you’re writing about, cares about what you care about, and takes away a bigger lesson at the end of the book. Those are my three key takeaways from Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepard.

If you’ve read this book and you had other key takeaways, do let me know in the comments, and if there’s anything else you think I should read and analyse, let me know and I’ll do my best to check it out.