Well, I finished the segmentation process for the book I’m writing. What is the segmentation process you ask? It is the process of taking a whole lot of disorganized information and cutting down to a manageable size and breaking it into pieces that make sense. The various pieces, or segments, make up a substantial portion of the book because it consists of the conversations I had with the people I interviewed. But the best part of all, is now that I am finished the segmentation process, I know what the chapters and subchapters of the book are going to be. (I at least know what they will be about, although I may not have settled on their names.)
The segmentation process is a way of organizing a book—be it fiction or non-fiction—because it identifies the chapters and their order. In fiction there is more flexibility because it is common practice to jump back and forth while telling a story. With non-fiction, the book needs a logical organization. Since my current project is about all the things that affect people’s decision to marry, I laid out the chapters temporally (i.e., in time) from who they were before they met their spouse, to who they had become after their divorce. Is it the right approach? I don’t know. But it works for me.
Have you ever had to go through the segmentation process as you wrote? Let me hear from you.
