Developing Your Text and

Managing the Writing Process

Never ignore, never refuse to see, what may be

thought against your thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche^1

F

or creative non-fiction the heart of the authoring process is

a person sitting at a desk, surrounded by information, notes,

scribbles and sources, or otherwise jammed with ideas, and strug-

gling to organize their thoughts on a blank screen or sheet of

paper. This particular image is so dominant in our thinking about

authoring because it is so awe-full, so hard to manage your way

through at the time, so difficult to capture what you were doing

afterwards, and so psychologically stressful or unnerving to con-

template at almost any time. In another field, writing novels, its

practitioners’ collective obsession with the angst of an author

imagining something out of nothing has gone even further, as

John Fowles noted ironically:

Serious modern fiction has only one subject, the difficulty

of writing serious modern fiction .... The natural conse-

quence of this is that writing about fiction has become a

far more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s

one of the best ways you can tell a true novelist nowadays.

He’s not going to waste his time over the messy garage-

mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters

on paper ... Yes, all right. Obviously he has at some point

to write something, just to show how irrelevant and

unnecessary the actual writing part of it is. But that’s all.^2

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