I somethings think creative and critical thinking are mutually exclusive. When writers are most creative their judgment is often most poor. This isn't a bad thing. Trying to find a good non-fiction story is much like brainstorming. You don't want to be be critical when you're trying to come up up with new ideas. Newly formed ideas are like soap bubbles. They pop under the slightest pressure.

The downside is that sometimes a writer can be so nonjudgmental about his own ideas that he spends weeks researching something that never had the right elements to really work in the first place. To try and prevent this from happening to me, I used to write myself notes which I was supposed to read before starting on any new story. Naturally I lost them. But in hopes remembering to check them for the next story here they are again:

1. Don't do stories about people who are not sympathetic. This doesn't mean he or she can't be a criminal or a murder, just a sympathetic one. To say it in another way, find someone the reader can root for.

2. Don't waste your time trying to write about people who are not accessible. Even if you have all the facts at your command from other sources, you won't know how your key characters felt about what happened if you don't have access to them. Without knowing how your characters felt you'll end up writing a chronology, not a story.

3. Find people who want to tell their stories. If you're writing a story about a murderer (as I often have) be sure to come up with one who believes (such as Ted Streleski in "Murder in the Math Department") that his acts were fully justified. He may be mistaken (as he almost certainly is) but this is the sort of person who is eager to have his story heard. He will talk to you about everything and at great length. He wants to explain what happened. You don't have to convince him.

4. Do stories about intelligent sensitive passionate people. It's too hard to do interesting stories about people who haven't done anything with their lives. You may feel sorry for them, but that's no reason to write about them. Your first obligation is to your readers, not to your runaway emotions.