I'm alternating a chapter of a non-fiction book we jokingly call "the care and feeding of roleplayers" -- it's a book to help people preparing disaster exercises how to handle the various aspects of roleplayer involvement, including moulage. (Just as a reminder, moulage -- or casualty simulation -- is the art of making roleplayers look injured, often severely so. It's one of my hobbies.)
What I'm finding is that writing non-fiction takes a different approach and skill set. It's not that I haven't written non-fiction before -- I have several research articles under my name, not to mention a 67-page dissertation. It's just that I've never concentrated on both in the same day, and I didn't write anything longer than short stories at the time. Now -- I have a goal to write on both the novel and the article daily, and I'm quickly switching up between the two items.
When I write non-fiction, such as the chapter I'm writing, I have to outline the article so that my writing flows from idea to idea. I have to do research in order to support the points I'm making in the paper, so that I am grounded in realism. My observations have to be grounded in facts, because my observations might be biased and not substantive. As I tick through the outline, I note that I make progress toward the whole, and that motivates me further.
Writing the novel, as I've found out from previous novels, takes not only imagination but discipline, because imagination doesn't necessarily believe in deadlines. If I set a goal of, say, 1000 pages, my imagination is more likely to deliver. Likewise, if I have an outline of where the action's going to go, my imagination has something to embellish it. I can't escape research when writing fiction because the laws of physics, the names of places, and the technology doesn't change with a slightly alternative Earth.
Strangely, it looks like writing non-fiction and writing fiction have a lot in common when it comes to the importance of structure, of research, and of goals. Where they're different is imagination -- and even then, non-fiction requires a certain amount of describing examples to illustrate concepts -- and that's imagination.
Oh, well, so much for today's essay.
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