You can develop a personality within a nonfiction book aimed at higher thought level. I think personality and nonfiction are not mutually exclusive. Especially if the author’s got confidence in who they are and where they’re from. It’s exciting to think that you are going to bring your experience from the field, if you want to call it that, when the field includes how you got there.
For example, I started expressing myself in the theatre. Performance is very different from dancing with language — except when it’s not. Theatre is full of deadline (we called them curtain up) and revisions (those were rehearsals, with notes just like you’d get from an editor) and interpretations (multiple takes for the director) and collaborations (like those from a writing group you trust, the equivalent of a little theatre company where the players all make one another better.)
What’s that got to do with nonfiction? Theatre’s my field experience that I bring to my Real Self Publishing book, the one you’ll be able to download next year. I won’t drone on about how theatre made me a better storyteller and a better publisher. But being an actor was good field work, delivered in a personal way
What I tell nonfiction writers, and novelists too, is to imagine you’re a reader. When you have a strong vision and an image of who’s gonna be reading your book, it makes it so much easier to turn the stuff out on the first draft because you know somebody’s listening. It might be somebody who’s just a friend and likes a discussion about important subjects. Even if they don’t look at your book at first, if you think of them reading it, then that’s one of the things that can help propel you through the dry spells, or the places where you have all these pieces and you’re assembling them.
Assemble shiny treasure troves
I read advice from another author coach who said, all writers have to go through what he calls a raccoon phase. So raccoons gather shiny objects. And they put ’em out in places and then they sort of make something out of them after a while. You know, the shiny object phase I think is essential and fun. A New York Times article this week talked about a fantasy writer who’s overcoming an attention disorder. She’s already famous, to the fantasy readers. Now Susanna Clarke “writes the way a magpie collects sparkly objects. Images and scenes arrive, unbidden, and Clarke writes down the fragments, and later pieces them together into a narrative, or several.”
Susanna only has a second book in her because her editor saw the fragments that became a 60-page short story of a book. The editor Alexandra Pringle remembered that talent that made Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a book that sold four million copies.
Perhaps you’ve worked with an editor before. But you may be wondering if you need somebody who’s a development coach and can edit. That’s me. You might think of me like I work as a director in a play. The text is already there, the play, your writing. You want to express it so that it changes things in the world. Entertain people, or engage them, always. Also, to make the shifts start to occur that might make us all better, more at peace — yeah, happier.
A director puts players together. You’re the actor, so you’re in charge of the pieces of prose. You can get the pieces together with an outline of some kind. I don’t know whether writers work from them or not. Sometimes I ask nonfiction writers if they’re comfortable creating a first draft of a table of table of contents — so you can lay out all the pieces that you know you wanna work with.
I’ve got good software that helps organize those sparkly objects for a writer, but I don’t expect any authors to wade into a tool that they don’t know. If you are working with me, I’ll be building with that tool. It manages and focuses on structure, keeping track of things. Scrivener is what it’s called, and lots of people use it. It’s especially powerful for nonfiction, where it seems like everything is set, but there’s oh so much of it. Showing off the best parts gets easier when you have comfort with your personality on the page.
