Bartography

A couple of weeks ago, I listed the documents that I’m using to coordinate my research efforts for my new nonfiction project, but I didn’t say how I’m using them, or think I might in the future. So, here goes:

Contacts: This spreadsheet contains two worksheets, “Potential Sources” and “Existing.” This is where I keep track of people I think I might want to get in touch with, or whom I already have contacted and may want to acknowledge come publication time.

Images: Until Pinterest allows for private pinboards, this is where I keep links to photographs and illustrations that might be helpful for my work in progress.

Patents: When the person I’m researching is a US inventor, a list of his or her patents — with dates and collaborators — comes in mighty handy.

Potential Titles: I don’t know yet what this book is going to be called, but some key words and phrases have come to mind, and I store those here along with various combinations of them.

Questions: What would I want to ask my subject? What would I want to ask other people about my subject?

Quotes: What did my subject actually say? Are any of these statements likely candidates for inclusion in my text? And even if not, what light do they shed on my subject’s personality?

Science: If I’d had this document when I was researching The Day-Glo Brothers, here’s where I would have kept multiple explanations of how light, color, fluorescence, and daylight fluorescence work so that I could refer to them again and again until I knew them well enough to confidently state them in my own words.

Search Terms: If my subject’s name is not unique, I’ll need to combine it with other words and phrases — the name of his or her hometown, for instance — to find articles that make more than just a passing reference. I keep those relevant words and phrases here, which makes my actual querying of databases a lot more efficient.

Source Types: This is a handy reminder to myself of all the different types of sources out there that I might be able to turn to for a nonfiction research project. It’s essentially a distillation of the far-reaching bibliography from Can I See Your I.D.?

Sources: Another spreadsheet, with worksheets for “Reviewed Already” (with sources already formatted for inclusion in a bibliography, plus a link to an online version, if available) and “Not Yet” (which is much less structured, since there’s no reason to spend time polishing that information if it turns out not to yield anything useful for my research).

Timeline/Anecdotes: This is my biggest document by far, as it includes a detailed chronology of my subject’s life, according to the sources in the “Reviewed Already” worksheet. Being thorough here pays off, because getting seemingly redundant information from multiple sources — and seeing it all side by side — highlights inconsistencies and errors perpetuated by those sources.

Those inconsistencies and errors will be the subject for a separate post soon.

Want to win a copy of Annette Simon’s new picture book Robot Zombie Frankenstein, or maybe a signed copy of one of my titles? Just go here and enter your email address where it says “Win a Book!” Two recipients of next Monday’s Bartography Express newsletter will be winners. Shouldn’t one of them be you?

Following last week’s post about my newfangled research process, teacher Paul Hankins had some questions for me:

What energy guides you to a particular subject? Do you find yourself asking, “I’m interested, but will others be?” Does this matter to you in the original subject gathering process?

I think I know a promising subject — for me (not necessarily for anyone else) — when I see it. The problem is, a lot of not-so-promising subjects can also look promising at first, so I’ve learned to let all potential subjects sit for a while — long enough, at least, for my initial rush of enthusiasm to wear off.

When it does, I can assess more clearly — a week, month, or year later — whether a subject still intrigues me and has the potential to do so for however long it would take to research and write a book. The best sign that a subject has that potential is when I find myself thinking about it while I’m working on another project that I’m perfectly happy with.

“Will others be interested?” is the trickiest of these questions. I’ve been wrong before, and even when I’ve been right, it’s taken a lot longer for that to become clear than I would have thought. But really, it’s my job to tell the story in a way that others will be interested in, and if I don’t see a way I can do that, I need to either research a little more until I figure out that way or else look for another subject for whom I can better convey my enthusiasm.

I recently embarked on the research for the next picture book biography I’m writing. It’s about an inventor whose success has come (as the success of most inventors does, I imagine) through trial and error and ongoing improvement, be it through small increments or large leaps.

It’s appropriate, then, that for this book I’ve been consciously trying to improve my own research processes — even before the actual beginning of this project.

In the past, I’ve typically juggled — tried to, anyway — multiple projects at a time. I’d write fiction while researching nonfiction, for example. The thing is, I’m not as good at that as I thought I was. Instead of getting more things done, I get more things partially done. And as you may have noticed, partially done books tend not to get published.

So, this spring I waited. I waited until I was at the right place to stop in my most recent fiction project — namely, the completion, revision, and submission of a full draft — before I lifted a finger on researching the next thing. I could tell I was getting closer to being able to begin my research by the growing ache and anticipation. It had been a really long time since I started fresh on a nonfiction project, and I was raring to go. But I also wanted to be able to give my full attention to it by not having anything undone from the previous project hanging over my head.

When the day to get started finally arrived, on Monday of last week, I sprang out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and dove right into… creating empty documents. Not actually looking up information, but organizing the documents — the containers — where I’d keep what I’d found already and my plans for what to look for later.

This was new.

I’ve long thought of myself as a methodical, organized writer. Each of the 23 rejected submissions of The Day-Glo Brothers came about through what had seemed to me to be careful, thoughtful, targeted planning — and that same planning had managed to overlook Charlesbridge Publishing, which turned out to be the perfect home for that book. So, I had a lot to learn about submissions then, and I recently came to realize that I still had a lot of room for improvement in my research methods even after The Day-Glo Brothers, Can I See Your I.D.?, and my upcoming book about John Roy Lynch.

So, what exactly did I do that first day? In Google Docs, I created a new folder bearing the name of my subject, and within that folder I created the following documents:

Contacts
Images
Patents
Potential Titles
Questions
Quotes
Science
Search Terms
Source Types
Sources
Timeline/Anecdotes

In the very productive two weeks since then, those documents have allowed me to make progress, maintain order, and lay the groundwork for my next steps, in equal measure. It’s requiring more discipline than I knew I had — to some extent, it’s slowing me down, but to a much greater extent, it’s saving me time in the long run. And my excitement for this project is stronger than ever.

I expect that I’ll write more here about my process and progress as I continue working on this book. (What, exactly, goes into each of those documents listed? Maybe that’s what I’ll go into next.) If there’s anything you’d like to know about what I’m up to, ask away in the comments, or drop me a line.

I’ll let you and my other readers know as much as I can. Maybe I’ll even surprise myself with my answers.

For the next few weeks, the April edition of my Bartography Express newsletter will be available online. In this issue, this focus is not on me but rather on my friend Sarah Warren and the giveaway of her debut picture book, Dolores Huerta: A Hero to Migrant Workers:

CB: What made you want to write Dolores Huerta?

SW: I am a Head Start teacher. I am always on the lookout for child-friendly biographies about diverse leaders. When I first started talking about Dolores in myDolores Huerta book cover classroom almost 10 years ago, we discussed unfairness, a four-year-old’s favorite subject. We practiced sticking up for our friends and using our voices in open, honest, proud ways. We staged an in-class strike to highlight things we wanted to change in our room. My kids had a blast…

Coming up in May’s Bartography Express: another giveaway, this time of Annette Simon’s new picture book about robo a robo oneupmanship, Robot Zombie Frankenstein! To get in the running, click the “Join Our Mailing List” link in the bottom right corner of the April newsletter, or enter your email address in the “Get On Board” section of my homepage.

In 1987, when I was a sophomore at Sulphur Springs (TX) High School, I interviewed country singer Dwight Yoakam for my school paper when he played the Hopkins County Regional Civic Center. I had not been paying attention to country music for a few years, was unfamiliar with him, but had made certain negative assumptions about him based on his Li’l Abner-evoking name and on his physical appearance, what with his cowboy hat pulled nearly down to his sternum.

As I’ve told many people over the years, I’ve never interviewed anyone more gracious or well-spoken. And I’m saying it again in this space because Don McLeese‘s new book, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, has accomplished the twin feat of reminding me vividly of the revelation of that interview and of deepening my love for the music I’ve loved from that night forward. I devoured the book, listening nonstop to Yoakam’s music the whole while and enjoying every minute of the experience.

McLeese’s book is also heartening to me as a nonfiction writer, for reasons he laid out in a blog post for Kirkus last month. “Writing a book can go so wrong in so many ways that it’s amazing when it turns out so right,” he began. Then came the marvelous details on things falling into place just so.

Things not only turned out all right, they proceeded to get much better than I’d ever dared hope. Yoakam was inexhaustibly quotable, attaching no strings to his cooperation, never asking to approve the manuscript. He made [Pete] Anderson seem like such an integral part of the story that I had to contact his former producer/guitarist/bandleader, who also agreed to talk. Between the two, I had a story that no one else had—not dirt, not he said/he said, but a detailed account of who did what, why things worked so well, how the partnership fell apart. Neither had discussed the other at any length since the split, and both expressed admiration for the other.

And then I really hit the jackpot. During the course of the writing, Yoakam resigned with Warner Bros., his label during the glory years, and would undoubtedly be receiving more promotion and publicity than he had in two decades with an album to be released around the time of the book. Even with the album delayed by a few months (it’s now due this summer), I couldn’t have anticipated such great fortune.

Impressive timing aside, McLeese did a terrific job. When Yoakam’s new record finally comes out, I look forward to rereading — redevouring — his book in that fresh new context.

In the past week, I’ve learned that Shark Vs. Train has won the 2012 Monarch Award, Illinois’ K-3 readers’ choice award, as well as the 2012 Colorado Children’s Book Award for picture books.

Wow. All of that, and I get to enjoy springtime in Austin, Texas. I’m a lucky, grateful guy.

In a guest post last week for the International Reading Association’s Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog, I wrote about a technique I use for getting to know my the characters in my nonfiction books.

(In the same post, YA novelist Jennifer Ziegler — Sass & Serendipity, How Not to Be Popular — wrote about how she gets inside the heads of her fictional characters, and vice versa. So, really, between the two of us, you’re all set.)

Check it out, and if what I had to say seems useful to you, I hope you’ll join me this June for “You Don’t Have to Choose: Balancing Playful Picture Books With Rigorous Research,” a one-day workshop I’ll be teaching through the Austin chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators.

Workshop Synopsis: Creatively and professionally alike, authors can enjoy big benefits from letting the silly stuff cross-pollinate with the seriously researched. In “You Don’t Have to Choose,” we’ll use the examples of picture book authors who have done both fiction and nonfiction as a springboard for discussing and honing skills and techniques applicable to both types of writing. We’ll examine the benefits — and potential drawbacks — of that sort of career cross-pollination with a goal of having each student leave the workshop inspired and equipped to create books in both realms, with some newly gained practical experience under their belts.

Details, including discount info, are available here.