Module 2: Organizing and Writing

Inspiration
Perfectionism… will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

5 action steps to help you write a shitty first draft
Download a PDF of Anne Lamott’s essay on “shitty first drafts”
Recording and edited transcript of the terrific Q&A with author Pam Slim
Q & A on storytelling for business
8 wickedly effective writing tools and tactics
New! Useful articles about writing a book

Your goal for this module is simple: crank out a first draft of your book.

I include organizing in the title above because that’s a necessary part of writing your draft.

But your goal is to get down X-number of words (you will decide how many). Your goal is to write a very imperfect first draft.

Here are 5 action steps:

1. Make a Jot Outline

Writing coach and journalist Jack Hart recommends creating what he calls a jot outline. Take 45 seconds and go through your list of ideas, your mind map and/or the scattered notes you’ve created through the Module 1 action steps. Jot down in list form the main ideas or points that you want to cover in your book. Scribble them on paper or type into a blank document.

The act of writing them down will help you begin to see a logical organization and enable you to highlight which are top-level ideas and which are secondary. Don’t give your organizing a whole lot more thought than this. I can almost guarantee that you will end up changing your outline or Table of Contents. This gives you a workable starting point.

For more on jot outlines and organizing, see chapter 2 on Process in Jack Hart’s excellent book, A Writer’s Coach. It is available for Kindle if you want it instantly.

If you are attempting a narrative format, check out this excellent article on How to Write a Novella. Basic ground rules: keep it simple. You are allowed one plot (avoid sub plots). One POV (point of view). One question. In other words, your short book answers one central question.

2. Choose an arbitrary page length for your book

Let’s continue on with making this doable. Decide, arbitrarily, on a page length for your book. For example, choose 60 pages or about 15,000 words. You can always make it longer.

Now look at your jot outline. Do you have 7 main topics? Add an Intro, a Resource section and an About the Author page. Now you have 10 sections. On your jot outline, assign a word count to each. That’s 1,500 words for each, for a total of 15,000 words. Of course, some sections will be longer and some shorter. The reason to do this is to impose a structure, even if it’s arbitrary, on your writing project.

3. Set a daily word count

Get even more brain dead simple. Assign yourself a daily word count. If you are aiming for 15,000 words (about 60 pages), you might set yourself a goal of writing 500 to 750 words of your rough draft every day. That’s about the length of a blog post. So it sounds doable, right?

When you feel stuck, read what Pam Slim says about writing one paragraph.

Use this Word template and adapt it for your manuscript. It has styles built in for section and chapter headings, body text, quotes and more. Open the doc, do a Save As (save it as a Word Template) and give it a new name. Update: if you use Windows, download this PDF to learn how to import Word styles from the APE template into your own document.

Tip: dump everything you’re writing into one Word doc
Use one Word document for your draft. You can model your draft manuscript on the APE Word template above. Or create your own styles for title, subtitle, section, chapter, normalfirst, normal, quotes, etc. Build your table of contents based on your styles. Then, when you open the doc, start from the TOC and click to the section you want to work on.

Note: using the APE template is a little tricky. I am getting more information on how to make best use of it.

Back up your master Word document!

Be sure to back up this master draft of your book. You could put it on a flash drive and carry that with you. Far preferable, is storing your doc in the cloud. The best solution is Dropbox.com [it’s free]. You can open your document from any device or computer. And you’ll always be working off of the latest version.

Do not worry about writing the sections in order

Start with the one you feel most excited about. You might jump into your Introduction to tell us why you are writing this book and how the topic will solve a problem for the reader. See the interview with Michael Margolis, below, for tips on how to be authentic.

Do not use the Intro to recite your official bio or resume. A version of that will be included on your About the Author page. What your reader really cares about is why YOU are passionate about the topic of your book. The reader wants you to reveal yourself.

4. Block out daily writing time on your calendar

This was an action step from Module 1. If you haven’t done it yet, now is the time. Block out a 90-minute to 2-hour slot on your daily schedule. You can try blocking off one hour but it probably won’t be enough to really get into whatever section you are working on.

You could, however, block off about 30 minutes in the morning – to get something down and out of your brain. Many writers swear by this. Suspense author and writing coach James Scott Bell calls these words his nifty 350. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, created Morning Pages – 3 pages of long hand stream-of-consciousness writing done first thing each morning.

The point is to de-clutter your brain. And to make friends with your internal censor (your Lizard Brain) so that it’s easier to do real creative work – including writing – later in the day.

Then block off 60 to 90-minutes in the afternoon or evening to draft your daily word count, no matter how rough.

It’s tempting to block off one day for a marathon writing session but that can be hard to pull off. If it works for you, go for it.

Reality check: try not to miss more than two days in a row without writing something, even if it’s a paragraph. The absolute truth about writing is that it gets easier the more consistently you write.

5. Write a shitty first draft (or a chunk of it)

Your definition of “shitty” writing may differ from someone else’s. It can mean misspellings, sentence fragments and holes that you need to fill in later. It can mean half-baked thoughts and lack of clarity. It can mean lack of a clear organization.

Go with it. Whatever you get down is raw material that you can move around, extract from – or delete. Repeat after me: these are not the final words of your book. They are the starting point.

Tip: when you’re typing, use // as a signal that there is a hole you need to fill. You can search for this later and it makes it easier for you to keep going when you’re writing.

To reiterate, the goal of Module 2 is to get a chunk of your book drafted. You are writing, not editing. It will be imperfect. It might be awful. It doesn’t matter. Stifle your Lizard Brain and your inner perfectionist.

I recommend you shoot for 10 pages that you can submit to me by Dec. 13, 2012 for review and feedback.

Writing is a messy business

The five steps above are an attempt to impose order on what is essentially chaos – writing a first draft of a book. Stay positive. If you set a doable goal (crummy first draft), you know you can accomplish it. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar died recently. Here’s one of his many sayings that could apply to writing a book as much as anything else:

If you want to reach a goal, you must “see the reaching” in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.
– Zig Ziglar, author of See You at the Top

Q & A with Michael Margolis about storytelling as a business strategy

Michael Margolis, of GetStoried.com, calls himself a a message architect and a strategic storyteller. He is a leading voice in the world of storytelling as a business strategy for branding and innovation.

“Emotional content is what makes a story powerful. It turns information (which people can find anywhere on the Web) into a meaningful experience.”
– Michael Margolis, GetStoried.com

Listen to the recorded interview with Michael. Right-click the link to download the MP3 file to your desktop.

Read the PDF transcript of my interview with Michael. Right-click the link to download the file so you can print it out.

Wickedly effective writing tools

Freedom: use a program called Freedom to block the Internet during your writing sessions. Works on both Mac and PC.

Write or Die: This sounds silly but some writers swear by it. Try it for freewriting. It’s a tool that encourages continuous writing by punishing you (makes loud noises and your words disappear) when you stop writing. Puts the “prod” in productivity. Available for your computer (Mac or PC) and also for iPad.

Pomodoro: This is a popular time management technique that makes a lot of sense. It breaks your tasks down into 25-minute intervals of “pure work,” followed by a five-minute break. Each of these 30-minute intervals is called a Pomodoro (tomato in Italian). The Italian inventor used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato to create the system.

The idea is to structure tasks – which could include writing a blog post or a one-page memo – into highly-focused sessions where you work steadily without interruption – and then take a short break. Use the Pomodoro technique for freewriting.

Meditate: a lot of writers swear by this as a way to calm your brain and make writing easier. I recommend a marvelous new book on meditation and mindfulness for business people, Search Inside Yourself by Google’s Chade-Meng Tan. It is an entertaining read, easy to follow and backed by solid research. Don’t be put off by the book’s claims for achieving world happiness. The exercises are easy to follow and incorporate meditation and breathing.

Walk around the block: take an exercise break and get outside. Studies show this makes you much more productive. I tend to get sucked into whatever I’m doing. When I force myself to take a break and walk outside, I always come up with a new idea or perspective.

Bounce on a stability ball: speaking and communications coach Cheryl Dolan recommends this to all her students. It really works. After bouncing for at least 10 minutes your brain feels refreshed, calmed and clearer. It works before giving a speech but also for attacking a writing project. Cheryl recommends a fairly large ball, 65 cm or bigger.

Watch a TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor‘s talk has been viewed almost 10 million times. A brain researcher, she studied her own brain after having a stroke. Note how powerful her prop (a real brain) is. Do the same thing in your writing. Be specific, visual and unexpected. Choose a TED talk that is persuasive, inspiring, informative, etc.

Channel Malcolm Gladwell: go to a coffee shop to write. Malcolm Gladwell on his writing process:

“Each book I’ve written has been more fun to write. I suppose that’s because I’m more confident that things will work out. Also, when I was writing Blink, I realized that I didn’t have to write at my desk and I discovered coffee shops – and somehow (for reasons I don’t entirely understand) that’s made all the difference in the world.”
– Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Fast Company