[stylist] Story development/strategy

[Chris Kuell]

Jim,

One of my favorite books on writing came to mind as I read your post. It's 
called 'Bird by Bird' by Anne Lamott. The title for the book came from a 
story she tells about her brother when he was in high school. I read the 
book many years ago, so I may have the exact details wrong, but it went 
something like that he had to do a school project on the birds of North 
America. He was just overwhelmed by the project and didn't know how to 
start. Their father came over, put his hand on his shoulder and advised him 
to go 'bird by bird'.

Lamott is a fan of breaking down a project, especially a non-fiction 
project, into chunks. Here an outline is a necessity. What do you want the 
book to accomplish? What are the various big areas that will need to be 
discussed to cover this goal adequately? How can you break down the big 
areas into smaller ideas that support the big idea, and so on. I'm not a 
computer guy, but shooting from the hip, your web accessibility idea might 
have the main goal of helping blind people to fully utilize the power of the 
web. The big ideas might be search engines, social networks, online stores 
and information/data sites. Or, perhaps these would be sub-categories under 
various accessibility programs--screen readers, screen enlargers... Anyway, 
you would spend time figuring out how you think you might best convey the 
information, then start by setting writing goals and chipping away at it. 
Since you are working at this part-time, a modest goal might be 250 words 
per day. However, I should interject here that before you started writing a 
non-fiction book like this, you should first put your time and energy into 
writing a book proposal, which would cover most of the aforementioned 
outlining. Most non-fiction books are sold via the proposal, whereas novels 
are sold, especially by first-time novelists, as finished works.

chris