Teaching non-fiction writing to a creative writer

[forty-two]

My oldest loves to write fiction; she spends the majority of her free time writing (she's currently aiming for 20,000 words in November to get a rough draft finished).  But she's pretty resistant to non-fiction writing.  In fact, she acts very much like a reluctant writer: resists starting, is slow coming up with ideas, and writes the bare minimum length.  If I drag her through some kind of writing process involving brainstorming and organizing, she can turn out a decent piece, but if I leave her to her own devices, it takes forever to come up with something barely adequate.  You'd think she hates to write, but then she'll spend hours on her stories; she's still not excessively fast, but she cares and can write something genuinely worth reading.  But it's probably fair to say that she hates to write non-fiction - and it shows.

Right now I'm trying daily timed writes on AP literature prompts (it's higher level analysis than she is really capable of, but she disdains "stupid" prompts and loves literature, and honestly I'm at my wit's end, here - she's hated every non-fiction writing program we've done).  But it's going so-so.  Some prompts she can generate a decent thesis and paragraph on, giving us a base to build on, while others (like today) she gets nothing.  But on the plus side she at least doesn't accuse the prompts of insulting her intelligence, so there's that. 

She's a very intuitive learner - she either gets it or she doesn't, and when she doesn't get it, she really resists being guided (dragged) through the learning process until something clicks and she gets it.  Steps and organization are either opaque torture or stating the bloody obvious to her (depending on whether she gets it or not), but when she can't get something, the only successful solution I've ever found is dragging her through the steps, trying extra hard to connect the process with her intuitive sense of things, till it clicks and becomes blindingly obvious; leaving her to her own devices just results in either avoidance or wailing and gnashing of teeth, and an unfinished assignment either way.  I've done years of haphazard attempts to drag her through some writing program or other, and I admit, I've let non-fiction writing slide more than I should have because of her resistance, using the justification/hope that with how much she writes in general it wouldn't hold her back too much.  (And last year I just let OYAN be her writing, which she absolutely loved.) 

IDK, I guess now is the time to buckle down and drag her through it till it clicks, but I was wondering if the Hive an any ideas on the best sort of thing to drag her through (my default plan is either working through Writing Revolution on the AP lit prompts, or pulling LToW back out), or other thoughts on how to get strong non-fiction writing out of a resistant-to-non-fiction but *very* enthusiastic creative writer?

[lewelma]

My son did creative non-fiction. Like a National Geographic article.  There are essay books available of the best of creative non-fiction. It is an awesome genre and gave my son an 'in' into nonfiction writing.  

[EKS]

There's a book called Habits of the Creative Mind that might be helpful to you.

[Malam]

Your daughter reminds me of this joke about a math professor: A math professor is giving a class and at a certain point in a proof on the blackboard he says that a given lemma is immediately obvious. A student puts up his hand and says, "I'm sorry but I don't see why that lemma is obvious. Can you explain it?" The professor frowns, looks at the board, walks in a circle, stares at the board, leaves the room, returns, stares at the board again, and finally his face lights up, and he says, "Oh, yes, it is obvious!"