Researching Pro Bono

When researching my first non-fiction book, Pro Bono, I had a slightly unfair advantage.  I was starting with a story that my family has been involved with for decades.  I drew from stories I had grown up with, some of which I had lived through.  And a large amount of it came when I was doing a small documentary about my family.  It just happened to be when my grandmother was diagnosed with a fatal tumor, and everyone from the family flocked into town.  I never finished the documentary, but I did get a very thorough record of everyone, especially my grandfather, who everyone worshipped.

This was a baseline.  But I needed to be fair in the story.  This was about a controversial story that my grandfather happened to be wrapped up in.  I needed to do as much as possible to be objective, and see the opposite side’s point of view.

The first thing I did, as I do with most of my books, and all my non-fiction works, is I broke it into chapters.  I thought of what made appropriate breaks in the story, and I started each chapter at these points.  I determined the basic concept of each, then wrote down all the information that I would need for them.  By each piece of information, I wrote down every source I could think of for it.  I then approached those sources.

When it comes to a case that’s nearly 60 years old, it’s hard to get first-hand accounts.  Usually, you have to go to people who were assistants, or the children of one of the people.  Each time, I tried to get any documentation they had, such as phots or records.  Luckily, one of the most important people, Ninette Beaver, (who was a reporter that followed the story from beginning to end and even wrote a book about it,) was still alive and was able to tell me a lot about her experiences and what she saw.  I also got the only remaining copy of her documentary Growing Up in Prison.  It was on a format of tape that no longer exists, and there are only a couple places in the world that could even transfer it.  It was expensive, but worth the price as it was a piece of Nebraska history.  (I later placed this documentary on Youtube and have so far gotten more than 10,000 views.)

Perhaps the most important aspect of getting the story straight and unbiased was going to the Nebraska Historical Society where I was able to look at the original trial transcripts.  Purchasing this was, again, expensive, but well worth it, as it’s the only record of a case of great historic significance.  It’s also lucky, as most cases do not have their records preserved so well.

The problem at this point was I had the microfilm, but no way to look at it.  The best way to be able to would be to have it on PDF.  That meant scanning each page at the library and saving it as a JPEG, then combining them all into one big PDF… All 1,000 + pages.  I was luckily on unemployment at the time, so I went to the library for a full week, 40 hours, and scanned one page after another.  It was one of the most tedious things I ever did, but I got the entire thing on PDF.  I placed the first hundred pages on a website and offered to send it to anyone who wanted to see it so people could check my book for accuracy.  I then made sure to include this public record in the book in several chapters.

It took a lot more bringing together of several sources than I thought it would, but it was worth it.  On that book, more than any other, I want to be able to show everyone my sources, because I’m claiming that someone who many think was guilty was actually innocent.

How I Organize and Write Nonfiction

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.

Bandwagon Network in Progress

Last year I started making some battle reports of my own game, Command Combat: Civil War, to spread word of the game and hopefully build interest.  Unfortunately, no one watched because no one knew the game.  I figured I'd do a video of a game they do like, Flames of War.  I figured this would bring people to the channel, then they'd watch more about my own game.  This didn't really work in that they didn't come and switch over to my game, but tons of people watched our Flames of War videos.  In fact, Battlefront, which makes Flames of War, placed our videos on their site and we started getting thousands of hits.

I also saw how a lot of videos based on computer games were getting a lot of hits, so I did those.  My girlfriend and I got to having so much fun doing these things that we branched out into several other videos, until it became unclear what our channel was about.  Some who had come to look at Civil War stuff were particularly confused.

And so we're making a new channel called Bandwagon which will include everything from the battle reports to the video games to a review show to board games to history lessons to ways to build and paint miniatures.  We've taped almost everything, and it goes live at the beginning of October.

The Great Heist cover

I am currently working on the book The Great Heist, about the largest bank robbery in history, which took place September 17, 1930 in Lincoln, Nebraska.  The book will be available in late October.  This is the cover I'm currently going with.  Any and all suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome.