I’ve written 8 books, and none took me over a week. So I was puzzled when people told me they couldn’t get started. So I coached a couple of them, and we cranked out their book in only a few sessions. Apparently, the trick is how one breaks it down. Done this way, it’s easy! And I’m sharing it with you here. (You’ll use this for years!)
When Cervantes wrote the famous book Don Quixote. in an early chapter he had our hero learning about some dreadful thing, and this excited the main character Don Quixote so much that, as Cervantes said, “he rode off madly in all directions.”
And for us, it’s obvious that if you want to go to Cleveland, you don’t want to just drive madly in random directions.
It’s better to have a map, so you know which direction to go. But just knowing that a map is useful is not enough to change you from a person who struggles with writing books or articles into a person who easily writes books or articles. And so in this article I will give you the map that will take you from where you are to becoming the proficient writer you wish to be
Things We’ve Seen in Life
Although many people would say that they cannot write, in actual fact you will have noticed that these same people have no problem talking about things. And they are certainly willing to share their opinions about things. And if you went up to one of them and stated something untrue about them, then you will hear them reply that what you said is not at all correct but rather … And they’ll tell you what they believe and then will spell it out for you. It is effortless for any human to do this.
And I’d like to point out that when you see them doing this, you are seeing the creation process of writing manifesting right in front of you. Of course I have been that person now and again, and so have you. Meaning that you have created words in sequences which made sense and really that is all that writing is.
Arthur Becomes an Artiste
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer and create stories and novels and write The Great American Novel.
This was in my college days, and I think that I pictured myself wearing a beret, sitting at a tiny table at a street café in Paris, sipping espresso, while my publishers sent me fat royalty checks from book sales back in the states. Or it may just have been because it seemed more attractive to write than to actually get a job, because the jobs I’ve had earlier in life had not actually been that enjoyable. (Of course the only jobs that I had at that point were mowing lawns, doing janitorial cleanup of my stepfather’s office, working at the gas station, washing cars, and unloading the truck at the A&P grocery store.)
In any event I thought it would be cool to be a writer and so I sat down, with no map at all, begin to write some stories. My first story was about a cat because my friend Jerry had told me several anecdotes about a wacko college roommate and about a cat they had. And I took these anecdotes and strung them together and wrote it up.
As stories go, it sucked, but in my creative writing class I got some feedback. This made me realize that if I was willing to move stuff around, I would actually have something approximating a story.
The Characters Started Talking!
After several sessions of wrangling and re-writing this story, one morning I was typing … and all of a sudden it was as if I was no longer the person writing the story. It was if the characters were just speaking and I was just typing as fast as I could to write it down.
That was a strange experience. I had become caught up, much in the way that you may have become passionate some time when speaking on a subject when you get carried away by the thoughts that are coming so fast it’s hard to keep up.
I stumbled on in this manner for some years. Sometimes I found it effortless to write and other times I struggled and struggled and struggled. I took to reading a magazine called “Writer’s Life,” and they advertise books about how to write and one day I saw a book by Dorothy Brande. I think it was called Becoming a Writer.
In that book she addressed the question of “writer’s block” and she had a handy-dandy exercise. The idea was to get up in the morning and before you do anything else, sit down and write for 10 or 20 minutes. Write anything at all. You want to do this while you’re sleepy, hardly able to think.
Now of course the stuff you write is mostly gibberish. But the point of of the exercise is just to write something, anything, for 10 or 20 minutes. And you discover that you can do that.
Why Is It So Hard to Write Sometimes?
So if it’s easy to write while doing that exercise, then why is it so hard to write at certain other times?
The answer has to do with perfectionism. When you’re just blathering out anything at all with no purpose, there is nothing that will stop you. And in this exercise you are still largely unconscious. And your unconscious mind is the main generator of the words that come flying out of your mouth, or out of your fingers when typing.
And when you are struggling to write you are conscious, and self-conscious, and this shows us that it is the conscious mind that he is *interfering* with your production of written words.
Now after doing this exercise for a couple of weeks, you will discover that that you have no more “writer’s block.” You have moved up from from writing nothing to writing some stuff, some of which is crappy. And this observation led me to my own First Rule of Thumb about Writing. Here it is —
- Write stuff down
- Keep on writing stuff down
- When done, go through it, find the crappy parts, and fix them
Oddly enough, this primitive system allowed me to write quite a few stories and a novel.
The Career that Never Was
My writing career never met with much success. One day I got so frustrated by getting rejection slips from the magazines to whom I’d sent short stories, that I sat down and wrote a short story, entitled “Tale of Quacking Duck.”
It was typed up in exactly the proper format for a short story and about five pages long, and the only thing weird about it was that it only used the word “quack” in the story. For example …
Quack quack quack, quack quack. Quack quack quack quack.
“Quack!” quack quack. “Quack quack quack, quack quack quack quack quack quack quack. Quack quack quack!”
“Quack quack, quack,” quack quack quack quack, quack, “Quack quack quack!”
I sent it off to the “New Yorker” magazine. In a few weeks it came back with the rejection slip. But for the very first time ever the reader at the magazine had written something on my rejection slip. It said …
“Nice try”
As you can imagine I never became famous as a writer. As you can imagine, with only a couple of exceptions, I never got things published. And as you can imagine, I never made money as a writer at that time.
Learning How to Program Computers
So as we fast-forward a number of years I had created a business in San Francisco and had also become interested in computers. And I began to try my hand at writing a program for my computer. A buddy gave me a book called Structured Programming in Basic. And this book showed how you started from a rough idea for what the program might do, and then you refined that rough idea into a slightly more detailed idea, and then you got a sequence of steps, and then you began to consider what each section of the program did. And now you’ve got these sections, and each one has a sequence of things that the program is supposed to do.
And only then do you start to actually type into the computer the computer language to do each of these steps in sequence.
And when you have a section done you can start at the beginning and have it go through to the end and see if the answer is correct. And if the answer is wrong, then what do you do?
Oddly enough, you do the same as when you’re producing a story. You find the crappy part and fix it.
When you have all of the sections functional the entire program should be functional. And you test and test and test. And now you have written a program.
So to summarize the process. You start with a general idea, and then successively refine it. And in fact in the world of computers this process is called “successive refinement.” And the general approach is called “top-down” programming.
Writing a Billing Program on the Computer
For example I wrote a program to send bills for monthly service to clients.
The first version of the program just said “send bills to clients.”
The first successive refinement broke that down, so you had these parts –
- Enter a client and their billing information and the monthly charge
- Store this information in a file
- Retrieve the file.
- Extract the client information
- Print out the client information (name, address, monthly charge) on a sheet of paper
And this is how I learned that it’s easiest to do a complex task if you have planned it out carefully in advance. (As opposed to riding off madly in all directions!)
When I was creating a program, I used to wander around for a few days trying to work this all out carefully, before I launched into writing computer language. And by thinking carefully ahead of time it eliminated going down many wrong pathways.
Although I never fully returned to writing novels and short stories as before, I did write lots of manual pages and advertising and short articles and I began to use this method of successive refinement, going from a general idea in successive iterations, and each new version had more information.
My Second Rule of Thumb for Writing
- Mull stuff over and jot down notes
- Do this until I get some clarity. Sometimes this occurs as an image in the mind. Other times it’s seeing sequence or a path
- Now that I have steps clear before me, write step one, write step two, write step three, until I reach the end
- Finally, go through and fix the crappy parts
This idea of figuring out what I was going to do before I wrote off madly in all directions turned out to be very helpful.
And this includes not only what a program is supposed to accomplish, but for an article this preliminary thinking should include what you wish to accomplish for your reader. In other words what is your mission for what the article is to accomplish, and what should your reader *get* from reading the article?
Here’s What You Will Get from This Article
As an example, here is my mission for what this very article is supposed to accomplish for you (my reader) –
- After reading this article you will be able to write an article, a book, a speech, or a video, because you will know how to create a map of the project
- You will know how to gather ideas in the beginning
- You will know how to organize the information, and put it into a sequence
- You will be able to blather a bunch of words for the various parts, all while keeping your judgmental conscious mind out of the way
- Finally, you will know how to revise, simply fixing any crappy parts. (This part is easy for everybody, because the crappy parts just leap out and annoy you.)
The Heap-List-Interview Method
So now we fast-forward several decades and I have been writing articles, advertising, a couple of poor novels, 50 to 60 short stories, 500+ micro stories in my personal weblog, and eight nonfiction books about how to do stuff (four on how to play music on unusual guitars, one on how to find a sweetheart, one on self-help, and two about marketing).
A couple of times, clients had asked me either to edit their book or to publish it for them, which I had learned from having published several of my own. So this was very straightforward.
But then one day, a client said he wanted to create a book but he just couldn’t write it. Now of the eight books I’d written at that time, none took more than a week to create. Now sometimes improving crappy parts and making it look pretty afterward would take more time, but the actual book creation was always just a few days.
So I offered to coach the client through the process.
And we did. And in only a few sessions we had the book created. He had written it. All the ideas were his. I didn’t create or write any of it. All that I did was to take him through the process that I used for myself when writing books.
And here is that process …
How to Create a Heap
Personally, I like to work with letter-sized yellow lined paper. So the first thing we did on the phone together was that I took the client into the process by saying, “Tell me some of the things that ought to be in the book.”
And I jotted down the various things that he mentioned. And I sent him the list and told him to add anything else that ought to be in the book.
Realize that at this stage we are not concerned with the sequence of anything. We are just making a heap of ideas. We call it a heap because it is not organized in any way. It’s just a great big heap of ideas jumbled and tumbled and stacked up any old way.
I suspect that this is the place most people come to grief. My guess is that they never actually get this huge unorganized heap of ideas written down because as soon as you write down it starts looking chaotic and hopeless. (As if one’s thoughts should somehow magically come out perfectly lined up and studded with brilliance!)
So when they look at this untidy heap, the conscious mind begins to interfere, using perfectionism to try to fix things, and it gets caught up in what the sequence should be, and trying to “correct” this and that. In other words, riding off madly in all directions.
Don’t do that! It’s fine if everything is untidy. That’s how stuff emerges. The only important thing is to capture it.
Now, how long do you spend on heaping up ideas?
Just continue until you can’t think of any more ideas. (However, a good idea is to leave it there until the next day and come back, and you’ll probably think of a couple more ideas. And after a total of about three days you will truly have run dry and your heap is done.
How to Create a List
Now, still using my yellow sheets of paper as an example, I had the client go through this heap. He had his copy, and I had mine. And I told him to choose the item that he thought should come first and mark it with the number “1” in a circle.
And then to select the item he thought should come next and label it with the number “2.” And so on down the list
And then … you recopy all the items onto a new paper list with number one first, number two second, number three third, etc.
Now you look it over. The question is … “If you told the story, or covered the subject, in this order would that work?”
Oddly, though you may have to rewrite this list a time or two to to get it right, this step is pretty easy. So from a heap you now have a sequential list.
How to Interview, or Self-Interview
Now from the client’s list I made for myself a set of interview questions. In other words if the first item was” describe how I walk my dog,” my interview question would be, “Could you describe how you walk your dog?”
And then with my client on the telephone, and a recording device attached, I simply interviewed the client. I would ask him question number one, and then wait for him to blather blather blather, Whatever he said was fine. He could answer any old way, and his answer to the question is now being recorded.
Then I would ask interview question number two, and record his answer. And then question number three, and record his answer. And so on, until we were done.
When we were done I sent the recording off to my transcriptionist, who turned it into written words in a Word document.
Now realize that at this moment the client has just written a book.
It’s got poor language, it doesn’t look very pretty. But it is now a book. Assuming that the writer actually knows what he’s talking about, it’s got useful content, and helpful information.
All we have to do now is to go through and fix any crappy parts, and then in a Word document we make it pretty.
The difficulty that people have with creating a book has been solved, because now we have a first draft. Everything after the first draft is rather easy.
Writing versus Speaking
For a moment, let’s rewind the years back to a time in San Francisco when my then-wife and I ran an answering service with an office on Geary Boulevard. We had to hire and train operators, a lot of them, and after training a few hundred individuals, it becomes tiresome to have to say the very same things to new people over and over and over.
And so we got the bright idea – radical at the time – to put this training on a video and could just send a new hire to watch a video for big chunks of the training. And so we did that.
Now at that time we had an operator’s manual. Now this manual had been created bit by bit, and I used a very simple way to create it. Since I couldn’t know ahead of time what needed to be in it — because we were inventing and refining the jobs as we went in those early days — I used a looseleaf three ring binder, and used separate pages for each item. And the goal was to only put one useful thing on each page.
For example in the building where we were it would not be obvious to a new person where to put the trash when the wastebaskets got full. So we would create a page called “How to Take Out the Trash,” and it would tell them how to go down the hall to find the hidden door that led to the building’s trash collection.
So by the time we got to the videos we had a whole manual of individual pages which could be reshuffled to break the pages into sections and sequences. This is “bottom-up” organization as opposed to the kind of “top-down” organization we discussed earlier.
So we had some bottom-up manual pages which were created by writing. And now from what we knew, and by rearranging manual pages we wanted to cover, we now had some top-down video trainings which were created by someone speaking on camera.
What We Learned
What did we learn about speaking versus writing?
- A person when speaking tends to organize the information rather well, unconsciously, without giving it much thought… But the actual sentences a person uses when speaking are often not very good sentences.
- A person writing things down tends to use good sentences, but the organization wanders all over the place, going from rambling to bad to nightmare, and this can turn into a very long series of rewrites and reorganizations.
The Heap and List method organizes your material before you go leaping into writing it. And because your material has been pre-organized in this way, usually your reorganization and re-writing will be less.
Now when I interviewed the client with a series of questions, and had him just answer questions, then he tended to unconsciously organize his answers brilliantly, without thought. But of course the way we talk is often not the very best or the very clearest English. It is usually understood, but often will appear vague or chaotic when it is written words on the page of a book.
However, correcting the sentences is very easily done once you have the first draft. You just read it and any error leaps out shrieking at you, and you immediately know a better way to say it. This comes naturally to any English speaking person.
Talk It Out? Or Write It Out?
Now the question is: Should you speak and record your answers to the questions that you’ve made up for yourself from the heap-list process? … Or should you just write down your answers to the questions you have made up for yourself during the heap-list process?
At this point I have practiced so much that I can write. But if you find yourself trying to write and kind of going all over the place, then stop and instead of writing, record yourself, and then transcribe what you recorded. The wandering will vanish, leaving you only with the minor task of correcting some clumsy or incomplete sentences.
Got Stuck Answering One Particular Question?
If you find yourself floundering when you get to one of the questions you made up and your answers, and instead of an answer you find yourself floundering and wandering all over the place, it just means that your question (and the item) is too broad.
The solution? On that question itself, first make a heap, then make a list, then make a question for each item you’ve put on your new list.
The confusion and floundering will go away.
After Editing, Make it Pretty
If you are writing an actual book, then making it pretty involves creating a title page, some information about the copyright, perhaps a preface, or a dedication, a table of contents, perhaps an introduction, or a forward, and then chapters and within your chapters perhaps some sections, and within those sections some subheads, and then after all the chapters are done, perhaps you have appendices, and at the end you will probably have a contact page.
Now the easiest way to do all this is just to use something like Microsoft Word, and you can find a template for a book as one of the templates already built in Microsoft Word. Choose readability and clarity over any fancy styling, and I recommend you use only templates that work in black and white because that gives you more freedom going forward. And especially since printing costs rise quickly with color, compared to black and white.
If you’d like to see an example, go to http://Amazon.com, and enter my name, “Arthur Cronos,” and you’ll see a couple of the books I’ve written. Then select the book entitled Get Endless New Clients, and when Amazon displays the book, on the left choose “peek inside,” and you can see my (somewhat customized) template that I have used to make the book “pretty.”
And what to do now that you have written your book, fixed any crappy parts, and made it look pretty?
The next step is “publication,” or distribution to get it before the people for whom you have created it, so that it can then function to help those people as you intend.
But that is another story, for another time.
And That’s It!
You now have an understanding of how your own conscious mind, or judgmental mind, can interfere with the process of creating a book or an article.
You can now perform the simple steps of creating a heap, and then from the heap creating a list, and then from the list creating a sequence of questions, the answers to which spell out the content of your book or article.
You can capture your answers in either writing or via recording.
You can then go through your first draft, find a crappy parts, and fix them.
If it’s just an article, then you go through and stick in some subheads – and the subheads should tell the story to anyone who is merely skimming – and when you get to the end, sum up and stop.
If it’s a book, then get a template for Word, pour your content into the area of the book where chapters go, and then go through labeling the title of each chapter, sticking in subheads within each chapter, and then when the chapters are all done …
You tweak up a title page, copyright information, a table of contents (built into word), any appendices, and the contact page at the end.
And you’re done!
You have just written your book. Congratulations!
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