I want to write a non-fiction book - part 2 - Outlining

By Brian Clegg

As I mentioned recently, not everyone is a writer – but plenty of people would like to write a book. I’ve had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series.

In the first part of this series I looked at deciding whether your idea was really a book – to do this I recommended listing around 10 headings that would set out your basic structure. Now we’re going to flesh those out. What we’ll get is the biggest part of a book proposal – the document you send to a publisher to sell your idea. It’s also extremely valuable once you starting writing the book. What you will do next is, for each heading, fill in some detail.

I’m going to show you two ways to do this – but before I do, I ought to warn you that putting together the outline is the hardest part of writing a book. It can be agony. If you do it properly, it should take you between half a day and a day, which doesn’t sound like a lot of effort. But the thing is, what I’m asking you to do is put together all the key topics covered under each heading, at a time you probably won’t have fully researched the contents. This really stretches your imagination to the limits. Also – like every forecast or budget – it will be wrong. Some things you list here won’t end up in the final book. Some will need to be added as you go along. But it’s still an essential part of putting a book proposal (or plan for self-publishing) together.

I’m going to give you two examples of (part of) an outline. In both cases, these are books that use a particular style of having an introductory chapter, then a step back chapter giving some background, then diving in for some more detail. Of course, your book may not be structured like this, but it is one effective way to draw readers in. 

The first example is a bullet point approach. Here we provide a series of subheadings (you could include sub-subheadings too, if it helps) – short phrases that take us through the main points that will be covered. It can be quite useful to have a summary couple of words, then a little more text rounding out the description as you will see here. This is the first three chapters of the original outline for my book on Gravitational Waves.

14 September 2015

·      The first hint – whispers of a detected event on the LIGO team network

·      Engineering runs – this version of LIGO was not live yet. They were still testing

·      Blind injections – even if there was a detection, it could have been a fake

·      Realisation – the reality hits the team: a gravitational wave has been detected

Waves?

·      On the beach – waves at their most familiar

·      Modelling the universe – how we make use of models, like waves to explain the unknown

·      Light fantastic – the wave theory of light and its current status

·      Ripples in the cosmos – other waves, leading to the possibility of gravitational waves

Einstein’s baby

·      Newtonian wobbles – how gravitational waves could exist even in Newton’s version

·      Einstein goes relativistic – the introduction of relativity

·      The general theory – Einstein takes on gravity

·      Warps and wefts – the implications of having warped spacetime and its ability to wave

·      Shaking it all about – Einstein’s prediction – but remembering he also said he expected they would be impossible to detect

In the second example, rather than use bullet points, I’ve written a couple of paragraphs describing the chapter. This can work better with a longer book, where the chapters can benefit from a more readable description. The text below is from the original outline for my book What Do You Think You Are? - note the way that each chapter summary ends with a sentence tying it to the next chapter, which makes it flow better for the reader. This is particularly useful if you are using the outline to sell to a publisher, as it’s particularly important then that your text reads well.

1. A Complex Web

Genealogy has never been more popular. Yet TV shows such as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and genealogy websites can only scratch the surface. This approach may give small insights into where we came from as individuals, yet the components that make you distinctively you form a complex web stretching into the far past that consists of so much more than the skeletal parental lines of genealogy

This introductory chapter prepares us for a dive into the different aspects and pathways of our individual pasts that make us the people that we are.

We can’t ignore genealogy though. It is embedded in our consciousness. However, what we uncover rarely does more than scratch the surface. As we shall discover, though, we can say that the reader is indubitably descended from royalty.

2. Your Ancestors Were Royal

Some of us delight in genealogy, others treat is as family trainspotting – but whatever your view, it has severe limitations. This chapter starts with the idea of a very simple family tree that ignores siblings and works backwards. Each generation, the number of people goes up exponentially: 1, 3, 7, 15… for n generations, it’s 2^n-1. It has been estimated that around 107 billion people have ever lived. This is less than 237. Yet 37 generations takes us back fewer than 1,000 years of the circa 200,000 humans have existed. And that’s just one person’s family tree out of 7 billion plus. There’s something very wrong here.

The flaw is in thinking that your real family tree is a neat branching structure – but in reality it’s entangled and intertwined. Whether it’s the intense inbreeding of historical royal families (and the medical problems that brought) or the historically limited gene pool from lack of mobility, such is the entanglement that show mathematically that you are related to everyone in the region you were born in alive 1,000 years ago or earlier (who has living descendants). That includes all the royalty. Just like Danny Dyer, you have royal blood.

This chapter goes on both to include the history of genealogy and the remarkable story of mitochondrial Eve – the result of using mitochondrial DNA, passed down through the female line, to trace back to the most recent common ancestor of all living humans. Going deeper we look at how using the complete genome goes back far further to LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all organisms now living, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years in the past. This, though, is as nothing to your true origin story – the origin of the atoms that makes you up.

To finish, here’s an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

1. Is my idea a book?
2. Outlining
3. Other parts of a proposal
4. The pitch letter
5. Finding a publisher
6. The contract
7. Self-publishing

Image by Corinne Kutz from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.