By Jonathan Bach ’16

Many journalists strike on a story during their workaday reporting and think, I could make a book out of this.

One way we generate book ideas is to spin out an article we’ve already written. Famously, Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” — the saga of a Jack London-obsessed young college graduate who tried to outrun civilization into the Alaskan back country — began as a dispatch for Outside magazine before Krakauer drafted what became an internationally bestselling title.

All journalism is nonfiction, but not all nonfiction is journalism. That said, we draw on many of the same academic practices as other disciplines to enrich the stories we tell our readers and give them the heft of research.

If, in the course of your reporting, you stumble across a topic you think would make an intriguing book, here are three tips for turning your idea into a manuscript.

1. Find someone who knows how to write a nonfiction book.

Journalism is about getting to know people. How better to start the book journey than by tapping into the institutional knowledge of the reporter-authors around. The UO School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) is rich with published authors who can unpack the hows-and-whats of drafting a proposal and pitching to publishers, among the most fraught parts of the book-writing experience. The SOJC’s James N. Wallace Chair of Journalism Peter Laufer, whose book topics run the gamut from turtle smuggling to the Iraq war, helped me at many junctures. He shared his book proposals to give me a sense of their structure.

There’s an expected flow to a nonfiction book proposal. You try to prove why you’re the person to write this book, pen a sample chapter or two and mock up proposed chapters. Just like the cross-country trip you map out before climbing into your ramshackle Subaru, the course of these chapters will change during your reporting. But a publisher wants to know how you expect to get from A to Z, even if the steering fails, the engine overheats or you take the wrong off-ramp from I-84 now and then.

Outside the SOJC, break from your comfort zone and contact local authors who can also illuminate the road. Take Portland author Kale Williams, whose “The Loneliest Polar Bear” tells the harrowing story of an abandoned cub named Nora who was rehomed at the Oregon Zoo. Kale generously agreed to meet for coffee and talk through his own book-writing experience. He also shared his book proposal to give me a sense of how I should organize mine.

Developing connections and relationships with professors, advisers, fellow students and other professionals should be reciprocal. Keep an eye out for opportunities to elevate your peers and their work when the time comes.

2. Connect with the literature.

Flip to the back of your favorite nonfiction title. Does it have endnotes? They reflect the public records, datasets, books, news clippings and academic articles the writer sorted through to bring their contribution to store shelves.

Not everyone goes for the endnote style, but the lesson remains the same: to immerse yourself in a worthy topic and connect the compelling stories you report in the field to broader issues that scholars and other writers have explored before you.

Prepare to spend time with the literature of the field your book covers. Become well-versed enough to speak with the fluency you need to translate valuable insights for readers and understand how your unique story connects to the big picture.

There are many ways to access academic literature. For SOJC students, the Knight Library is a great place to sift through the complex literature that you, as a reporter, can then translate into material that resonates with nonexperts. And if you need help, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the SOJC’s dedicated librarian, Talia Paz. She can help you find databases, sources and all resources related to your subject.

Subject-matter experts are another resource, and you should interview these experts and cite their work. My editor, Kim Hogeland, and I figured out that part of my Bend housing book would deal with land planning, which influences how houses are built in Oregon. So Kim sent me a book by urban studies professor Sy Adler called “Oregon Plans,” which I cited extensively. I paired that with the work of SOJC Associate Professor Brent Walth, who wrote the authoritative biography of the late Tom McCall, the conservationist governor who signed land-use laws that still shape our state and its housing markets.

By framing the discussion around land planning and citing those texts, I tried to advance the narrative through my own original reporting, zooming in on Bend. In one chapter, the story flows through a funnel from the broad to the specific, the historical to the present.

3. Embrace the nonfiction book-writing process.

You have a road map thanks to your chapter outline, but the story is fleshed out as you rummage through reports and interview people. Sometimes that means you have too much to work with.

I found myself stuck so many times when I couldn’t separate what was important from what wasn’t. At one impasse, I got a piece of posterboard and drew a grade school narrative arc: exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. I scribbled in some of my characters — a woman worried about needing to move away due to high costs, a man evicted during COVID-19 — and placed them along the story arc. At times taking a break from the Word doc was all it took to push out of a writing rut.

Whether contracting with a publisher or self-publishing, we write because we’re energized by a story. To write a manuscript is to bare-handedly pull an anchor from the ocean, developing muscles and calluses that will serve your writing long past its publication. Some days we don’t know where the story is going. Some days our sources’ trials make us want to cry. Some days their circumstances take a surprise twist for the better. But in enough time, we emerge with a finished tome that we hope inspires readers with every emotion we felt during the writing.

Jonathan Bach, BA ’16 (journalism), covers housing and commercial real estate for the Oregonian. “High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West” is his first book. He previously wrote for the Portland Business Journal, where his reporting on home-lending disparities received an honorable mention from the nonprofit Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.