# The challenges of non-fiction book writing



## WildVirtue (Jun 21, 2022)

Hey all,

I've written some short travel stories and philosophical essays before, but I'm more of a researcher and librarian who enjoys creating whole archives of files with indexes related to a person’s life. Then what I do is extract quotes from those documents and organize them into the timeline of the person’s life which gives you a detailed view of the time they lived through.

The first biography I edited together was done like this also, it was all the persons own writing through her letters to her childhood friend, with a short introduction, and I simply called it 'The Unfinished Autobiography of Aileen Wuornos'. And obviously I made sure to get the letter owner’s permission.

Then the next project for me has been cataloguing documents on Ted Kaczynski, with the aim of simply getting a clear timeline in my head of all the key moments that lead up to him going off the rails and committing violence.

I've created two timelines, in the way that I described above, of both Ted and his brother David Kaczynskis' lives, but I'm less optimistic about getting their or their copyright heirs permission to publish. So, I'm contemplating how to write a book that is partly a biography and partly how this person’s life relates to my own philosophy and experiences. As there have been lots of biographies sticking closely to his life, I think I'm less interested in trying to give a detailed explanation of the timeline of their lives.

One subject I'd like to touch on in my book is that sadly I met a primitivist who had bought into the same violent ideology as Kaczynski, who after many years of feeling lost and hopeless died of a drug overdose.

I grew up in a hippie corner of North Wales and took myself off on my own to an Earth First Gathering when I was 17, then went on to joining activists who were trying to block open cast coal mine planning applications. It was here that I met the primitivist friend who would go on to overdose. I have also helped open squatted social centers for refugees in Calais, and volunteered in the kitchen that fed the 5000 there. I've been fairly reclusive the last few years, just living very rurally and devoting lots of time to learning website building and going from one online hobby project to another.

But yeah, knowing that I had been friendly with someone who went from open cast coal protest sites to being eco-extremist in ideas at least, and then basically committed suicide through a life of drugs is a disturbing reality. Obviously I wish I could have saved him.

So, I like to try and study all the rabbit holes that lead people down paths like this and therefore the best arguments for pulling them out. I’ve had a good podcast with one of the most renowned anti-tech philosophers on the subject of violence, and I've written an article on the journey some people take to anti-tech philosophy.

I'll stop here, as I'm sure I've gone on long enough, but my main problem at the moment is what subjects in the Kaczynski book to focus on, so how to lay out a clear structure to the book.

These are the main subject headings that are motivating my writing at the moment, but I'm aware they're not all going to have mainstream interest, so would need reframing to appeal to a larger readership:

The weakness of religious arguments
The burden on the family and friends of both good and evil revolutionaries
The call to revolution – Healthy vs. unhealthy outlets
Unhealthy outlets
Ted Kaczynski’s Unhealthy Outlet
Healthy Outlets
Everyone has to deal with the absurd
How getting hurt as a child lead me to have a strong skepticism of unjustified authority
Activism


Pragmatist vs. Idealist Strategy
Calling for anarchists on the radical fringe to not abandon all left-wing mass movements
Introduction
The term anarchist often evokes ridicule today
Why can we not just only be friendly with vaguely anti-authoritarian people who are easier to win over to anarchism?
Wouldn’t that mean sometimes walking shoulder to shoulder with left-authoritarians?
The importance of voting
Having solely anarchist organizations that use solely anarchist tactics is important too

And if you'd like to read or skim read the full document of main concept ideas I've written about so far, you can click here.

All the best


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