Want to write a book? You can. You start writing, and you keep going. At around 80,000 words, you've got yourself a book. Now what? You sell the book to a major publisher, hit the bestseller lists, and order your new cherry-red Ferrari.
Clear your life of other distractions. You probably have a day job that you can't quit just yet, but for the next 100 days put off everything else you can. Don't plan a vacation or a party or spring-cleaning. You don't want to lose your momentum once you get started. Make an outline. Decide on chapter titles and a logical sequence of information. It's more efficient to think this through ahead of time than to go back and re-write later. Decide how long your book will be, then divide the task into 80 smaller units. This gives you a little leeway, and also time for one day off per week. At 3-4 pages a day, you can produce a book of 240 to 320 pages. Don't plan to write a 500 page textbook in this limited amount of time. It simply will not work.
Start with an outline just like your English teacher taught you. The first part can be about who the characters are, what they do and how they are connected. The next part can be about what you where you think your story will go. Think is the key word here, because your imagination may take an unexpected path.Write. Anything and everything is game. You may want to focus only on your idea, but you may find more freedom to put the idea in a different context to see where it goes from there. After you have written your story you will revise and edit. You will find many directions and then you will find the right one. And then when you are done you will revisit, edit and revise again and possibly find another direction.
Everyone has a book inside them, or so the saying goes. But few people get that book out. Often it's because of lack of time. So, how can you get your book written inside a week or two?I was talking to a friend yesterday who complained they couldn't find time to write their book. They had an idea, but could never find the time. They wanted to know how did I manage to get books written so quickly - was there a magic formula I used. So I told him my story and thought I'd share it here.
Reward yourself when you're done. You need to put your manuscript aside for a few weeks, anyway. Even Stephen King follows this practice. So have a party or take a vacation. Refresh yourself before the real work, the re-writing, begins.
Once I've got a reasonable collection of material, which might take days, weeks, or months to accumulate, I'll then go through it and start to put it in order. I'll use the list of questions I've written to help guide me in this and then I'll use the sorted piles of information to help me come up with chapter headings. This might take me a day, but by the end of that day I'll have a complete, detailed outline of my book - plus all the associated background information which will help me write it.Then I can start writing. To do this I often go away from home. In the past I used to hire a holiday cottage somewhere idyllic. Nowadays I go to my own holiday home down near Bognor Regis. But it means I can write without the distractions of the office. If you have a book of, say 30,000 words to write, that's only 5,000 words a day for six days. That's one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon. Or, put it another way, you need to write around 750 words an hour - or one word every five seconds. Now that's not many is it?
Clear your life of other distractions. You probably have a day job that you can't quit just yet, but for the next 100 days put off everything else you can. Don't plan a vacation or a party or spring-cleaning. You don't want to lose your momentum once you get started. Make an outline. Decide on chapter titles and a logical sequence of information. It's more efficient to think this through ahead of time than to go back and re-write later. Decide how long your book will be, then divide the task into 80 smaller units. This gives you a little leeway, and also time for one day off per week. At 3-4 pages a day, you can produce a book of 240 to 320 pages. Don't plan to write a 500 page textbook in this limited amount of time. It simply will not work.
Start with an outline just like your English teacher taught you. The first part can be about who the characters are, what they do and how they are connected. The next part can be about what you where you think your story will go. Think is the key word here, because your imagination may take an unexpected path.Write. Anything and everything is game. You may want to focus only on your idea, but you may find more freedom to put the idea in a different context to see where it goes from there. After you have written your story you will revise and edit. You will find many directions and then you will find the right one. And then when you are done you will revisit, edit and revise again and possibly find another direction.
Everyone has a book inside them, or so the saying goes. But few people get that book out. Often it's because of lack of time. So, how can you get your book written inside a week or two?I was talking to a friend yesterday who complained they couldn't find time to write their book. They had an idea, but could never find the time. They wanted to know how did I manage to get books written so quickly - was there a magic formula I used. So I told him my story and thought I'd share it here.
Reward yourself when you're done. You need to put your manuscript aside for a few weeks, anyway. Even Stephen King follows this practice. So have a party or take a vacation. Refresh yourself before the real work, the re-writing, begins.
Once I've got a reasonable collection of material, which might take days, weeks, or months to accumulate, I'll then go through it and start to put it in order. I'll use the list of questions I've written to help guide me in this and then I'll use the sorted piles of information to help me come up with chapter headings. This might take me a day, but by the end of that day I'll have a complete, detailed outline of my book - plus all the associated background information which will help me write it.Then I can start writing. To do this I often go away from home. In the past I used to hire a holiday cottage somewhere idyllic. Nowadays I go to my own holiday home down near Bognor Regis. But it means I can write without the distractions of the office. If you have a book of, say 30,000 words to write, that's only 5,000 words a day for six days. That's one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon. Or, put it another way, you need to write around 750 words an hour - or one word every five seconds. Now that's not many is it?
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