The Essayist's Secret Sauce

How and Why to Write Nonfiction

Arthur Conan Doyle hated his creation Sherlock Holmes because Sherlock outshone what Doyle considered his more important work—his psychic research and his history writing. His hatred of Sherlock was so deep and bitter that he not only killed off his main character after only a few outings, he also reputedly nearly refused his knighthood until the King assured him that he was being knighted for his treatise on the Boer War rather than because of his creation of one of Britain’s most beloved heroes.

This is not an uncommon boat for writers—or, really, creatives of any kind—to wind up in. Isaac Newton famously considered his work on physics to be incidental to his more important work on theology and alchemy (work that his family found so embarrassing that it was lost to history until the mid twentieth century when his descendants auctioned off his notebooks for a bit of ready cash).

I am, alas, in the same boat. Although my greatest love is fiction, and I write quiet a lot of it, the bulk of my readership is in nonfiction—whether through this column, or through my various how-to books or through my studies of art and literature.

Since the publication of my study of the founding works of Young Adult Science Fiction, I’ve had a number of requests to detail my nonfiction writing process. Since some of you here are interested in how such things are done, and others are writers yourselves, I offer my best stab at a coherent guide.

Two Approaches to Writing Nonfiction

Broadly speaking, you can approach nonfiction from one of two directions:

1) You can write about something you don’t know much about

2) You can write about something you already know a lot about

In the first case, the bulk of your work goes into learning enough about the subject that you can have something useful or interesting to say about it. That angle of interest may come from your new ideas on the subject, because you are re-packaging old ideas for a new audience, or are from detailing the experience of learning as a way to bring your audience along on a journey you’re experiencing (this latter is a species of narrative nonfiction, which is a vast country all on its own).

In the second case, your task is to take the things you already know and figure out how to make them interesting for people. If you’re a good conversationalist, you already have the skills required to do this—you simply have to translate the skills you’d use to hold court at a cocktail party to the printed page. If you can enthrall others with your words when spoken aloud, you can do it when written down (even if you need to use a dictation-transcription app to do the hard work).

Hybridizing to Keep it Interesting

Any of you who have followed my endeavors for any length of time will not be surprised to discover that I am a nerd of Cthonic proportions. If there’s a new subject, and I run into it, I’ll usually find a way to be interested in it. I find mapping the universe to be the ultimate adventure, so I’ve spent my entire life reading and acquiring books at a rate of about 1:20 (in other words, for every 20 books I buy, I’ll read one before buying another twenty). This helps maintain my deep and thoroughly delusional conviction that I can’t possibly die today because there are still books to read.

My relationship with hobbies isn’t much healthier. I acquire them like an abandoned boat in shallow water acquires barnacles, moss, sea gulls, and squatters.

An artifact of one of those hobbies: a hair pin and barrette forged from scrap metal

On the upside, this is fantastic for my writing gig. There’s always a new angle from which to look at things, and if I get stuck I don’t have to worry because I know that when I pick up the next hobby, or book, or article, or conversation partner, or [CENSORED], it will spark new connections and frontiers for exploration. The resulting emotional and intellectual churn is what I call “the monster.” Feeding the monster keeps me in a more-or-less perpetual state of “Eek! I gotta find a piece of paper and write this new idea down before I lose it!”

This constant churn means that, any time I sit down to write a book, an article, or a story, two things are certain:

1) I have very little idea of what I’m about to say, but
2) I’m going to have a fantastic time finding out as I write.

The Actual Writing Process

What does this actually mean for my writing process?

Typically I’ll sit down and start writing, and then hit a wall. I won’t know why I hit a wall, so I’ll go off and feed the chickens or make a coat rack or something, and while I’m doing that I’ll be thinking about what I just wrote.

Somewhere in the process of swinging my forge hammer at a chicken or throwing corn kernels at my anvil (hey, I’m dyslexic. Sometimes I mix things up! Don’t look at me like that!), I’ll realize “Oh! What I thought I wanted to say is wrong, because I didn’t think of things from this other angle!” at which point I will return to the office and continue until the cycle repeats itself.

This, of course, assumes that we’re on a subject where I actually know what I’m talking about.

If I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll frequently write straight through in order to clear my mental buffer, then I’ll go and dive deeply into the topic in question, reading and listening to everything about it that I can get my hands on, until I’m so sick of it I just want to be done with it already (this is the bet case scenario. If I actually fall in love with the topic and become obsessed with it, it haunts my dreams for years or decades. I have, no joke, run across a phrase or quote that annoyed me, meditated on it for decades, and finally exorcised it by writing about it. Four of my novels came about this way, as well as major sections in every nonfiction book I’ve written, and at least a dozen articles).

Marinating in the Secret Sauce

Either way, if I had to boil down the secret to writing nonfiction, I would have to call it “marination.” Take as an example the writing process for The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile. Published in 2021, the whole rigmarole started in 1997 when I watched the film Starship Troopers. For the bulk of the run time, I was enjoying it as a fluffy and serrated satire of a war film, even though it didn’t have much in common with the novel upon which it was allegedly based.

Then, in the final moments, I was struck by an eerie feeling; a spiritual echo of the original author’s work. What was I noticing? I had no idea. But the question sat in the back of my mind for ten years, before I encountered two other books (Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell, and Crudrat by Gail Carriger) which rang that same bell in my consciousness. Excited, I started re-reading the books it was reminding me of.

For the next five years I read at least one of the twelve Heinlein Juveniles every month, sometimes rotating in related works to give myself a break. I kept them in my consciousness and started taking notes to learn the tricks of the author who invented Young Adult Science Fiction. Once I thought I had learned all I could—and formed a private theory that there was a unique and unstudied literary form set forth in those twelve original books—I tested my theory by writing novels to the form. They were successful experiments, and they were successful with their audiences. Over the next few years, I kept up my acquaintance with Heinlein’s original corpus to try to wring more tricks out of it, but it was a background obsession.

Until I started getting questions from other authors about how to write to the form.

So I sat down and started a book explaining the form, its history, its development, and the not-inconsiderable effects that it had on the world-at-large.

Once the words started flowing, I got to enjoy what I consider the most delightful aspect of teaching and writing:

Latent knowledge discovery.

Thinking Out Loud

Writing essays and long-form nonfiction allows you to “express yourself” just as the arts do. You can use your words to advocate for what you’re interested in, to argue against those things you find objectionable, and to do what you think is right as you strive and struggle over the future of culture.

But as laudable as all these things—and monetizing them—might be, they don’t hold a candle to what I consider the best reason to learn to write well:

Latent knowledge discovery.

No matter who you are, no matter how learned you are, you don’t know everything that you know. You don’t know it’s there, and you couldn’t identify it if forced to at gunpoint, because most of what you know is latent rather than actualized.

Latent knowledge is that knowledge that emerges when you look at two or more things you know at the same time. You know that sugar is a carbohydrate, and you know that plants use chlorophyll to produce sugar from sunlight, but have you ever noticed that this means you should expect the nutritional value of a spinach salad to be mostly carbohydrates? Or that this implies that the energy you get out of a campfire is the result of burning carbohydrates?

When you write on a subject that you’ve marinated in for a long time, your brain organizes what you know, and you begin to learn new things that were implicit in everything you already knew, but that you had never noticed before. Without ever being exposed to a new fact, you can vastly increase your own expertise.

Much of the process of writing a nonfiction book is the process of moving that knowledge from latent to crystallized, and doing so in public, and then (if you’re smart) checking over what you’ve written for errors so that you don’t get publicly humiliated by someone who knows more about the subject than you—because there’s always such a person, and sooner or later they will notice your mistakes (this happens frequently to me—one of the bonuses you get for supporting this substack is that I correct articles when I am justly chastised in the comments).

Writing nonfiction is a process of thinking out loud. No matter how closely you outline, you will always discover new things as you bring your ideas and thoughts to the surface and get them into an intelligible order. As a result, your planned project will change in the writing, at least in some measure (it even happened to me with this essay).

So whether you’re a student trying to figure out why to bother learning to write essays instead of just using ChatGPT to do your homework, or you’re wanting to write how-to books, or start blogging, or otherwise dip your toes in the nonfictional waters, here is the process and the value in the same brief set of rules:

1) Start with a question—any question.

2) Marinate in the subject.

3) Think out loud about the subject through the lens of the question.

4) Don’t be dismayed if you derail yourself and go off at a strange tangent—it means you’ve discovered latent knowledge, and it might be a bit of knowledge that you are the first to notice (or to commit to the public record).

5) Check your work for errors of fact and reasoning.

6) Release your work into the wild where it can do some good (however you define that).

Do this, and keep at it long enough, and you will find the quality and complexity of your thoughts growing far beyond what you originally thought possible—and you’ll have a great deal of fun in the bargain.

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This essay grew out of questions from The Every Day Novelist (my daily podcast on writing, art, and creativity), and from my work writing Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible, which will see publication this April.

If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?

When not haunting your substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.