I was having drinks with a friend when she asked me how I
put a nonfiction book together. I
thought it was an odd question because, like often happens when people ask us
about things we do all the time, I thought everyone knew. I took my knowledge for granted. In my mind it was just a simple process of
getting the information and putting it down in a narrative way.
But the more I got to telling her what I do, the more I
realized how complicated it is, so I decided to put down, albeit a bit briefly,
what my process is for writing nonfiction.
Obviously, the first step is getting the
information. The very first things I
need to do is get the bare basics of the story; the one page pitch, as it were,
to figure out what the overall story is, why it’s worth telling, and how I
would describe it briefly to someone.
This often winds up being the majority of the back cover
description. I take the time here to
find out if there’s enough information to cover a full length book. Sometimes a topic is fascinating, but you can’t
make a full book out of it without making things up.
The next thing I do is dive into the information. I will read everything and watch ever documentary
I can. I take sources of information I
already knew existed, including experts on the topic, and I also look at the
sources of the books, documentaries, etc. to add to the list. For instance, I’ll look in the bibliographies
of books to get names, places, etc. Of
course, I’ll also Google information as well, though I don’t simply take the
information I see on the internet.
Again, I look at the sources and I go to look at them.
I don’t write for a long time. I’ll spend weeks diving through all of this
information. The difference between
writing fiction and nonfiction is in fiction you lay back and think; in
nonfiction you sit up and read.
When I finally feel I understand the topic well enough, I
still don’t start writing. I make a very
basic outline of how I intend to approach the topic. I then take that outline and break it down
into chapters. This is the most
important organizational tool I can use.
Though these chapters do usually wind up being the actual chapter breaks
in the book, they don’t have to be.
The reason for my breaking the book into chapters at this
point is simply to categorize where all the information will go. It’s too much to tackle all the information
at once, so I need to have a category for each chapter. I actually create a separate folder in my
computer for each chapter, and I’ll drop the information for that chapter only
into that bin. Sometimes I’ll have
physical folders for each chapter for the physical information I have as well.
For example, in the book I’m currently writing, Two Gun
Hart, I have a folder in my computer with the title of the book and the word “Chapters”. Inside of this folder are 13 folders, each
with a title number and name. The book
is being organized by dates, so I put those dates on the folder names. This makes it MUCH easier for me to know
where new information goes. If I find
something that happened in 1933, it goes in the chapter titled “1932-1939”.
I can then bite off smaller chunks at a time. So when I write chapter 1, I’m thinking only
of the information in that chapter.
Everything is made much easier. The
one problem with this is that it causes me to repeat myself in various
chapters, or mention something in one chapter, then not follow it up in a next.
This fixed in the next step. Once all the information has been placed in
the appropriate chapters, and each chapter is “written” on its own, I then go
through the whole book, reading through every chapter, and making corrections
as I go along. This is when I connect
thoughts from one chapter to the next, take out places where I repeat myself,
etc. When this is done, I have a first
draft.
The next step is basically going through the book and
making corrections the way you would with any story; correcting grammar and
making the flow of the story work, making everything clear, improving the way
characters are developed, etc. I call
this step smoothing out.
So far, I’ve had two basic types of narrative in my
historical books, one I like to call linear, the other I like to call character
pieces.
Pro Bono – The 18-Year Defense of Caril Ann Fugate was a
linear book. The story began with the
murders that started the whole incident, then went through the investigation,
the preparation of the defense, the first trial, between the trials, the second
trial, and on to the appeals. I broke up
the chapters into these parts of the story, putting in everything I knew about
the media and the public during the murder spree in one folder, everything I
could find about the investigation in the next, the trial transcripts into
their respective trials, etc.
The Great Heist was a character piece. Though there is a linear story, it’s told
through describing each character and telling about their part in the
story. I bookended it with the first
chapter being the bank robbery, and the last chapter being how it was solved
and the wrap up. I then had a folder
with each main character’s name and I put in all the information about that
person in that folder. Since these
characters each took part in one aspect of the story, I was also able to divide
up the story elements into their names.
For instance, Gus Winkeler was responsible for getting the money back to
authorities in Lincoln, Nebraska, so the information about the return of the
money went into his folder. Al Capone
was dealing with the mobsters who robbed the bank, so information about the mob
went into his folder, etc.
As you go through the book, you get to know the subject
matter intimately, so you’ll just know what goes where, even when some things
overlap, as they did in The Great Heist where sometimes a couple characters did
the same thing. However you do it,
organizing the information is the main part of creating the story. The next part, smoothing it out, is just as
you would with any story, and is really the easy part, in my opinion.
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