This fall I attended a non-fiction workshop put on by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. It was a talk by Jacques Poitras, CBC journalist and the author of Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy and The Right Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma.
Jacques Poitras said he’s used to talking to audiences about the content of his books, so he was excited to be able to talk to us about his process, his method for putting a non-fiction work together. He said that the Beaverbrook book was a very specific non-fiction book, since it was a journalistic work and was done under a tight deadline. Due to his role at the CBC, he needed to be balanced and not take a side strongly in the controversy he was covering. He writes 2,000 – 5,000 words a day for his job, so he was used to the pace of writing a lot very quickly. To write the book, Poitras took 3 months off of work without pay. Teaching a course at STU that semester (which took one day a week) helped, but his savings still took a big hit. He joked that having a wife who works full time helps.
He had a lot more time to write his first book (The Right Fight), and was able to prepare maps and outlines in the planning stages. For non-fiction you really need a plan or formula in order to get the story out – then you can add layers (beauty, meaning, lessons) as you edit it later. Poitras said his books have been relatively straight-forward to research and organize. With the Beaverbrook book, there was so much material so far away (in Britain!), he was thinking at first of writing it in the first person, like his own journey to find the truth. But, due to lack of time, it became easier to tell the story as it was.
He was really helped out in the research stage since both sides of the legal team agreed to share their research with him. So he was sent CDs of digitized research that he could go through at his leisure – hundreds of hours of research for free and at his fingertips! This made his job a lot easier.
Colour-coded system: Pierre Burton uses file cards to organize his writing – put a fact or quote on each card, put them in the proper order, and then start writing. Poitras had written all of his notes in notebooks, however, and couldn’t use that method. Instead, Poitras used colour highlighters. Ex. Green for chapter 7, pink for chapter 8, blue for chapter 9. Then he went though his notebooks and colour highlighted everything relevant to each chapter. Then when he sat down to write each chapter, he would go through the notebooks again looking for the correct colour in order to put together an outline for that chapter.
He also had a secret blog, which he shared with a few friends. Here he would write rough notes about what he found. He used references in the blog posts so he knew where it was in his notes.
As he wrote, he would make notes about facts he didn’t have (research he needed to do). Once he got those facts or did that research, he would plop them in to the appropriate place in the narrative outline. When he started writing the Beaverbrook book, he did NOT have the second half of the book, but started writing about Beaverbrook’s life since it was fresh in his mind. When he hit a spot where he didn’t know something, he could put that on his to-do list.
He treated each chapter as a separate story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Generally this was linear, with some time overlap which was dealt with in the text. For his book excerpt for the Telegraph Journal, he chose the chapter on Lady Beaverbrook – it was easy to do since it was a coherent story on her life.
When talking about an event, you must tell the story through a person. People move the story. You’re adapting the storytelling mode of fiction – keep the story focused and the action moving. If information (that can’t be told through a personal story) doesn’t fit, skip it; if important, deal with it briefly.
If an event is thrilling but your account of it isn’t, then your account is false. To show desperation and frenzy of an event, you must show this in the writing – in the sentences and flow.
When you write the last parts of your book, go back into the earlier parts and throw in hints of foreshadowing. These are bits of payoff for the reader.
The search for the proper protagonist: In The Right Fight, the protagonist was a concept, not a person. (The book wasn’t really about Bernard Lord, as the title claims; it was about the right-wing movement in New Brunswick generally.) In the Beaverbrook book, Beaverbrook was the protagonist for most of the book (until his death). It was difficult to decide on a protagonist for the last part, about the fighting over the collection at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. The two sons both had compelling stories. Poitras initially thought he’d focus on the one son who had more of a, shall we say, dramatic persona in the media. But he ended up focusing on the other brother after interviewing him in Britain; there he was a compelling character and had many insightful things to say.
In the question period, one person asked about whether he used written permission forms for his interviews. Poitras responded that, per journalistic convention, if the person agrees to an interview, it is presumed that you will be using the material. Consent is implied and no written record is needed.
Another person asked about the length of his books, if he was clear how long they would be beforehand. Poitras said that his publisher asked for 80,000 words for his first book; he had 90,000 words in his first draft and ended up with 120,000 words, and the publisher didn’t cut it. For the Beaverbrook book, Poitras didn’t think he had enough material. He chose the number of chapters and divided the length – after he wrote a chapter or two, he knew he would have enough. His final count for that book was 88,000 words.
He pitched his first book, and his publisher pitched the second. After his first book he wasn’t burning to do another, but after the second, he is burning – thinking he should take advantage of the attention he’s gotten for this book.
Someone else asked if he ever had bad writing days. He said that, since he had an outline, if he was having trouble writing, he would at least spit something out on the page; when he got his groove back, he could then shape what he’d written. He wasn’t sitting there with writer’s block.
