When writing a novel, one of the first decisions I make is about time:  how much "real time" am I to cover?  A year, a summer, a Saturday night?  That relatively simple decision provides much comfort because, of course, writing is more about what you leave out that what you put in.  A decision on your narrative time-span creates automatic boundaries; it narrows your field--allows you to write more about less, which is also nearly always a good thing.

Point of view is another decision:  omniscient?  Limited?  First person?  Third person?  These are basic literary issues that must be clear in your head before beginning.  However, every book (every writing project!) has its own, unique, often subtle and sometimes elusive questions to be answered.  For example, an editor approached me to write text for a photo-essay book called BARNS OF MINNESOTA.  The historical society press wanted to highlight the tall old Midwestern barns "before they all fell down."  Good project, I replied, but how would I fit?  I'm a fiction writer.  But I knew that was a glib answer, and I was drawn in by the photos and the editorial vision of the book.  I signed on.  The editor and I strategized about approaches.  I wanted to write more than just photo captions, of course, and gradually negotiated my way into my strong suit:  a narrative approach (it's the fashion equivalent to when-in-doubt-wear-black). In the end, I wrote an imagined life of one barn:  from its raising, to its middle age full of life and cows and barn cats, to its sway-backed, missing-shingled decline and fall.  Real, literal fall.  The book has a been a big success for its small publisher, selling close to 15,000 copies and is still going strong.

Now the same editor wants me to do a book on hunting.

See what I mean?  How to approach THAT topic?.   I have the cred, the background (and the taxidermy)  to write this book, but there are no end to the approaches.  For example, I could make an argument for hunting, with an assumed audience of nonhunters--which would be a stupid approach because no non-hunter is going to read the book.   I could do the  "I-hunt-to-join-and-understand-nature" approach–which  has been done a hundred times.  Or, how about a more scholarly approach?  Look at what other famous writers/outdoorspeople have said about hunting; Thoreau in particular has some very provocative thoughts about the "evolution" of the hunter (he finally laid down his guns).

The great irony of this book-to-be is that I go to the woods with my gun to clear my head and not think at all.  For me, hunting is  about the unsaid, the unthought, the unwritten.  Bred-in-the-bone instincts without analysis.  Experience unrecorded. . . .

My pre-writing so far has been to gather up some books and essays on blood sports, and read them with one eye closed.  I don't want to be colored by anyone's vision.  I don't want any one quotation or image or rhetoric to get stuck inside my head.  

The one decision I have made is that hunting–real hunting, not the "horn porn" animal assassination shows on the Outdoor Channel–is beyond any single person's ken.  Beyond any single point of view.  There is no "I" consciousness in the world who can adequately explain the nature of hunting.  But I love a literary challenge, and this one is going to be one for sure.