Today I went to one of my old haunts, the NW district, and worked on my book. I really enjoy sitting in a coffee shop and writing. Most people, I believe, have a book in them – they just don’t know how to go about getting it out.

Here’s what I do…

First, put together a simple outline. Just list the topics you want to talk about.

Next, take each outline item and list a few things about that topic. Keep refining and adding sub-items, listing more and more details about each item and sub-item.

That, surprisingly, was the hard part.

Now, for each line of your outline, write a short paragraph or two about it. Just get your thoughts down, don’t try to be eloquent. Do this for one or two outline points a day.

A few weeks or months later, your first draft is done.

Now the fun part (which is where I’m at). Take your first draft and start adding your personality to it. Take it a chapter at a time and polish it. I tend to read a paragraph, polish it, read it again, polish it a little more, read it again… Then I move onto the next paragraph. I do this until I can read the entire chapter without feeling the need to polish it anymore.

Repeat with each chapter.

You’re almost done. Tie in your illustrations and photos, clean up the layout, give it to a few friends for feedback, clean up and you’re good to go.

The key point is, almost everyone visualizes writing the book all at once so they never start it. Don’t do this. Just take it a little, teeny tiny piece at a time. Then it’s a piece of cake.

Gratitude Donations

You can help support my work via this button...

• Location: Portland, OR

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.