In previous articles on this platform, I wrote about what to do before starting writing a book. Now, the next step is to actually start and keep writing. There’s obviously a ton of strategies on how to write books, so I will just present a few of them.
Mind Mapping
Many people sit down, and they think they will write this 300 page book, and obviously that can feel a quite overwhelming if it’s your first book. That's when having a mind map can come in handy. This concept is so simple, that it’s often ignored. When you start with a mind map, you literally take every thought that you have about your book, and just draw it out on a mind map on a paper, basically everything you can think of.
Then when you get that, you can organize the mind map you did into an outline. You can do this on a macro level for your book, and you can do it on a micro level for the chapters, it’s kind of universal there. Once you do that, it makes things so much easier because you actually have an outline. If you don’t do this, you'll just open up a word or pages document on a blank screen and bang your head against the keyboard out of frustration. But when you have an outline, it really gives you some clarity and some great direction to start.
Big blocks of writing
You can do big blocks of writing in one sitting. It’s really possible to go from an idea in your head to having an Amazon bestseller on Kindle in 3 months.
That’s a pretty aggressive writing strategy, writing 4-6 hours, a few times per week.
Daily writing
You’ve probably heard many people advise that you should write 500 or 1000 words daily in 1 hour, especially if you want to improve your writing and become better over time. The daily writing habit is great for consistently getting to work on your book.
You also get to keep a very fresh mind on what you wrote the previous day and can continue where you left off.
Knock it all out at once
If you find yourself on a very busy schedule, you can take a week, where you really focus on the book project, and write without interruptions. You can get done with the book very quickly this way, and then towards then end, you will probably have to do a lot of editing.
No matter what you do, just focus on getting it done first, and then go back in and edit the book later. When people make a big mistake, they try to make the perfect book, get caught up making the perfect chapters, and end up with a half finished book. It may be “perfect”, but it’s never finished because they are so worried about perfecting it as they go. Make yourself unavailable, turn off your phone, Facebook notifications and all the other distractions, and then just focus and get it done in a short amount of time. Then you can go back and edit and perfect the book later, after you have all the chapters written.
