My method for writing 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.