Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go.
This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they pop into my head. I can take all the time I want to stew on them and have a structure bubbling up all on its own.
I suppose some of the beauty of this is that the "notes" are easy. Whereas writing is hard. So the more you can leverage these fragments, the better.
I wonder how the non-fiction element plays into it. I guess if you have a lot of fragments the hard part is organizing and then glueing them together. But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missing is probably relatively obvious ("why did they do this?") and you can get that information and include it, or you cant and there is nothing to be done about it ("the motive is unknown" etc).
Whereas in fiction these are all unknown. You have to decide. And you have to make it compelling, and believable, and maybe astonishing and otherworldly at the same time.
In some limited experience in fictional writing, this is the hard part. I have all these fragments (this happened, this happens, there is this dynamic with 2 characters, some broad themes I want to hit on, etc). Makes me think about if non-fiction stories could be used as a sort of "seed" for the glue. I feel like the content is pretty highly coupled to that sort of pattern though.
> But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missing is probably relatively obvious ("why did they do this?") and you can get that information and include it, or you cant and there is nothing to be done about it ("the motive is unknown" etc).
I published a long time ago and ended up doing some deep reporting on a couple of issues. And honestly, it’s a lot closer to writing fiction than I would have thought going in. In ways, it’s actually a lot harder.
Starting out, I believed roughly what your quote said - that I could get into a deep piece and all the glue would be there. In practice, it’s a lot messier because you try to tell the truth related by witnesses with unpredictable self interests. So as you go through the process, you find multiple truths that can each be corroborated with other sources.
It’s a lot more like building with Lego. A piece could be the nose of a horse or the gutter of a house. It’s where judgment, ethics and good note taking practices come in. Witness problems are a big reason why journalists develop their own note taking style to code interviews - an outlining style gives the freedom to consider each fact as a piece of a larger build.
Edit - If it makes you feel better about writing fiction, I wouldn’t worry so much about plausibility. I wasn’t a great journalist but have heard (and verified) stories that the most creative minds would call impossible. Good characters can make the implausible into magic.
As another Emacs user it'll remain immensely funny to me how Emacs can be shoe-horned into almost any conversation. Probably due to the fact that even when it's not the best tool for the job, by any stretch, it can be kludged into something useful enough.
This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they pop into my head. I can take all the time I want to stew on them and have a structure bubbling up all on its own.