How to Write Non-Fiction: Gather existing material

“A notetaker becomes a writer when his or her need to write is sustained by a subject that allows, in fact demands, that this be organised into a project.”

—André Gorz, Letter to D

If you’re an expert on your topic, you might already have a lot of material that could form the basis of your book, for example:

•   Recordings of talks or workshops or interviews ready for transcription

•   Blog posts and articles

•   Slide decks from speaking engagements or presentations

•   Workbooks, handouts, or papers from events

•   Journals and notebooks with handwritten notes

•   Evernote or Notion folders or other online note-taking apps with saved information

•   Surveys and feedback forms from your audience

•   Comments and questions from your website, YouTube, or social media

•   Notes from books or ebook highlights you can export for analysis

This gathering process can be overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of material, but you might find rich seams of information and personal stories if you examine what you already have before jumping into writing.

Here are some other approaches.

Dig into your past

I use excerpts from my journals in many of my non-fiction self-help books, snippets from a time when I poured my heart out onto the page without knowing that I might later share those words in public. Of course, you need to be selective in what you share, but your vulnerability can bring a topic alive and help the reader hear your authentic voice.

Mining my journals has been a challenge since I’ve been keeping them sporadically from aged fifteen, and pretty consistently for the last few decades. I have a lot of them, so it was hard to find relevant moments in many years’ worth of writing.

I started by allocating dedicated time to the process and then paged through the journals, marking useful pages. Not just for a specific project, but those that perhaps might be useful in the future, too.

For The Healthy Writer, I remembered a poem I’d written years ago about my migraines, so I hunted specifically for that. I finally found it in a cardboard folder in a box I hadn’t opened for many years. It was worth digging out because those lines of pure pain helped me remember what life used to be like when I suffered from migraines and then how I solved that problem.

Sharing your personal transformation is one of the most powerful aspects of writing, so spend some time digging out the perspective of your previous self if you can.

This is also where AI tools can be useful.

Take a picture of a page of handwriting, upload it to ChatGPT (or another AI tool) and ask it to transcribe into plain text. It does a pretty good job, even with my terrible handwriting!

You could also use dictation, covered further in chapter 2.7.

Capture your experience as you go through it

Sometimes you decide to write a book on a topic and then you go through an experience that shapes the material, so you can write notes while you’re doing it. This was the case for my travel memoir, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned From Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Although I didn’t know exactly what I would write, I was definitely going to write something, so I captured the experiences along the way with photos and also by writing a journal.

I prepared in advance by making a list of questions to consider as I walked. If you don’t help yourself with some prompts, it’s hard to pay attention to specific details, especially if you’re tired and not in the mood to write. My questions included: What am I escaping from? What is ancient, and what is modern? What can I be curious about today? What is the shadow or the darkness here?

I printed the questions and stuck them into my journal as a reminder of what I wanted to think about.

If you’d like some ideas for your own questions, you can find the full list at:

www.BooksAndTravel.page/pilgrimage-questions

I walked in the northern hemisphere autumn (September, October) for all three of my solo walking pilgrimages, and woke before dawn most days. I went to bed early, so I wrote every morning as I was usually too exhausted by the evenings.

For journal geeks, I mainly use Leuchtturm A5 hardbacks with plain paper and a teal or blue cover. They are not cheap, but my words are worth it! I have some beautiful fountain pens, but I mostly write with a plain black Biro.

As a backup, I took pictures of my journal pages every night and synced them to my Apple Photos, so even if I lost the physical journal, I’d still have my thoughts.

While walking during the day, I added notes into the Things app on my phone as a reminder of what I wanted to write about later.

There are lots of different note-taking apps, and you can find some of my daily notes as an example at:

www.TheCreativePenn.com/dailynotes

I also took a lot of pictures of different kinds on my phone and shared some of them every day on Instagram @jfpennauthor. These included beautiful or interesting pictures of the route, architecture, nature, landscapes, as well as selfies for social media. I also took specific photos of details to write about like plants or signs, food, my blisters and rashes and minor injuries so I knew what day I got them, my gear, receipts from places I visited, screenshots of the map so I could pinpoint where I was when things happened, and many more.

It’s better to capture more than you might need. Minor things — like the Estrella Galicia beer I had at the end of a particularly hot day, or the rickety stile I used to climb over a sheep fence, or the elderly man who told me a rainstorm was coming over the mountain range — may end up more important than you think in the finished book.

I also had maps and guidebooks, which I referred to before, during, and after each trip.

You could use audio recording for voice dictation or to capture the sounds of a place, or for interviewing people. You could also use video for personal recollection, social media, or to produce marketing material later.

A good example is Alastair Humphreys’ book trailer for My Midsummer Morning, made from snippets of film before and during his adventure to busk across northern Spain in the footsteps of Laurie Lee.

You can find it at:

www.TheCreativePenn.com/midsummer-trailer

Process what happened soon afterwards

In order to figure out meaning and deeper layers, you need processing time for each experience. Sometimes you can turn your notes into a book more quickly, but it might also take years, depending on your situation.

I walked my first pilgrimage in October 2020 and did the next two in 2021 and 2022. For each walk, I processed my notes and photos on return and shared the day-by-day experience on my blog, as well as creating stand-alone podcast episodes about them. I did this within a month or so of each trip and this helped my initial thoughts coalesce towards what I wanted the final book to be.

When I sat down to write the book, I already had a lot of the material processed and was able to spend time thinking about themes rather than trying to organise it all.

These examples might give you ideas for how you process and share your experiences, and you can find everything linked at:

www.BooksAndTravel.page/pilgrimage-resources

Of course, it might be years before you revisit a trip or an experience, and you may have ‘lost’ elements of meaning or reframed them based on a new perspective. That doesn’t mean a book written much later is invalid, it just means it will be different — as you are different.

A good example is Cheryl Strayed who wrote her memoir, Wild, more than a decade after finishing the Pacific Crest Trail. The book has gone on to sell many millions of copies, win multiple awards, and become a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.

Questions:

•   What existing material do you have already that could be used in the writing process?

•   Do you want to use this existing material, or would you prefer to start from scratch on this topic? Why do you feel that way?

Resources:

•   Pilgrimage Resources — www.BooksAndTravel.page/pilgrimage-resources

•   Alastair Humphreys’ book trailer for My Midsummer Morning — www.TheCreativePenn.com/midsummer-trailer

•   Examples of my daily notes — www.TheCreativePenn.com/dailynotes

•   Letter to D: A Love Story — André Gorz