TL;DR: I don't know how to write books and need help to tell a story about recent historical events.
I've had this weird hobby for many years. I've read and studied certain sides of European post-war politics(post-colonial social democratic policy making and strategies during the cold war: what they did, why, and how they did it). I have read as much as I could, including recently declassified materials, and think that I've uncovered some interesting facts, and I want to summarize my finding for others to read. My problem is that I've never done anything similar in the past. I'm a STEM guy, not a historian.
I do know how to read and write, I have proper proof and sources, but I don't know how to present a very complex story in an entertaining and reader friendly way. I don't even know if I should write a book, a paper, article series, or something else.
The topic of my story is also a very touchy subject in today's Europe, so the result must be factually bulletproof and also readable and interesting for people who're less obsessed than I am :) At the same time, I really don't want to hype this or come across as some tin foil hat nut. So I'm reaching out for help here.
Here's what I've tried so far:
- Adding most facts to a wiki. That kinda worked OK, but people missed the point because I had very little control of the narrative. People just clicked on links they found interesting, which is good, but didn't necessarily ideal trying to stress a certain point.
- Writing everything down in chronological order. The idea was that readers would follow the time line and understand what happened and why it happened, and get that "This explains so much!" feeling I got. That was the most boring thing I've ever written, and I didn't even finish it. (There's so much material, and I don't know what to include and what to exclude, so I tried to add everything)
The last couple of years I haven't done much writing at all. Still, I think it's important to share the history with others and I want to give it another go, this time with input from professionals and experienced writers.
- Is there a textbook which describes how to write historical books? There are lots of books about "how to write your first novel," but I haven't seen any books named "Writing history books". (I'm not even sure a book is the right format, even if there's material enough for several books)
- A guy I know once wrote a book for Microsoft, who sent him a template document which he used when writing. Do similar templates exist for writing about other topics, e.g. history?
- Are there suitable online classes(YouTube, Khan) you guys recommend?
- Any other approaches, tools, literature, whatever? Anything is appreciated.
PS: Funny thing is that I don't even want to be a writer. I just feel this urge to tell people about this so they know what happened. Another motivation is to present my story so others can fact check it and find potential errors. I'm more than happy to provide all the sources and materials, credit and profits too, to anyone else interested in writing a book about this topic. (If I had any money, I'd hire a shadow writer to write it for me.)
While there is, in my opinion, absolutely no substitute for learning how to write history by actually "doing it," instructional books of the sort you are interested in do exist. Furay and Dalevouris, for example, have collaborated on a practical volume aimed at American undergraduate students which is called The Methods and Skills of History. For my money, however, this is a very inferior work relative to the more demanding (and less tightly focused) History: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice, by Claus and Marriott.
With this said, it might help if I briefly address some of the other questions you pose. There is really no "template" to turn to in our subject, and this is because history is a fairly unique discipline. It can be really quite usefully defined, I think, as "the study of complexity", and because of this historians tend to view every time, place and problem as unique in ways that aren't nearly so true of students of, say, social sciences such as politics or economics, who are much more likely to attempt to draw parallels between superficially similar sorts of events. For this reason, most historians would hesitate to embark on, say, a comparative study of the French and Russian revolutions, tending to see their differences and unique features as more significant and worthy of study than their (often rather superficial) similarities. It follows that the best way to write any history is going to depend very heavily on the problem or the subject being studied.
Looking at the details you've offered of your work to date, I'd like to make one other key suggestion to you. History, done academically rather than commercially at any rate, is never really about chronology or even "stories". History is interpretation. Your job as an historian who has completed some primary research is to offer your readers an interpretation of the material that you have pieced together. That interpretation ought to be based on as fair and detailed an evaluation of your evidence as you can write, and it ought to contextualise your findings, showing an awareness of the main ideas and issues, problems, beliefs and stresses and strains of the societies and cultures you are working on. But it is only going to be one interpretation – yours – and in time it will be subject to debate, argument and revision by other historians.
Your interpretation will, therefore, in effect, be an argument, one you make to try to persuade both your readers and other historians who'll come after you that you are correctly evaluating your sources and analysing a period or problem from the past. Thinking in these sorts of terms ought to have the welcome effect of helping you to sort and prioritise your material, and determine what to include, what to exclude, what to lay special stress on – and why.
What this means is that, as Lord Acton famously insisted, the proper task of an historian ought to be to study "problems, not periods". The most helpful first step that you can take in your own project is to define your problem. What is important about the "policy making and strategies" you have studied? Why do they matter? What different interpretations might be placed on the materials you have gathered and why is the one you favour the correct one?
If you look at the titles of most academic history books, you'll see they are very often written in terms of posing problems or, implicitly at least, posing questions about the past in exactly this sort of way. While I don't know an awful lot about the work you've done, I'd guess the most useful way of progressing from where you are now to setting down the first words of your own analysis might well be to come up with a title that best encapsulates the problem you have been working on.