In the department of Books That Have Been Out A Long Time But That I Just Discovered How Awesome They Are, I would submit a Richard Preston title called The Hot Zone. It was not a bestseller because it pandered to the masses; it was a bestseller because it showed us how brilliant and page-turning the best nonfiction narrative can be. The first chapter alone -- in which a man in Africa goes deep in a cave and comes out with an almost unimaginable sickness -- is worth the price of the book. Here, from Preston's own Web site, are a few of his words about craft:
When I’m researching a book, I conduct large numbers of interviews with the people I'm writing about. I also try to experience their world from within. I take notes by hand in a reporter's notebook, using a mechanical pencil. These days, when I'm climbing redwoods, I keep the pencil tied to myself (a mechanical pencil falling 35 stories becomes a deadly missile.) In researching a book, I've ended up with as many as 60 notebooks full of scrawled notes.
I write many drafts. A book seems to reveal itself slowly. The characters come alive on their own, and they end up showing me where the story must go. "Nameless" and "Vertical Eden," the first two chapters of The Wild Trees, went through at least 20 drafts. I'm passionately interested in the relationship between the human species and nature. I like to reveal nature by showing human character engaged with nature, often in a life-or-death situation, such as Nancy Jaax's first meeting with Ebola virus (in The Hot Zone), or Steve Sillett's first climb of a redwood, (in the opening of The Wild Trees). What makes these scenes powerful is that the people are verifiably real and the universe is the actual one we live in, not the universe of a novelist's imagination. Thus the scenes have a versimilitude that can exceed that of the novel, and can take us into the heart of human experience.
I do a lot of fact-checking. I read passages aloud to my subjects on the telephone while asking them to correct facts and tiny details. Fact-checking is like sharpening the focus of a lens, revealing new detail. It is especially important with scientists, who expect and need accuracy from journalists. I rewrite passages based on what my subjects tell me. In this way, I try to maintain respect for nature, for narrative, and for the integrity of human achievement.
Twenty drafts.
What's the most you've ever written?
Who here has taken something that was really pretty good and scrapped it almost entirely because you knew it could be better?
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