Latest / The Daily Writer / Audio Journal: How I Wrote a 45,000-Word Book This Month

Transcript

Audio Journal: How I Wrote a 45,000-Word Book This Month · The Daily Writer

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This morning I sent off the first complete draft of my second client book of this year.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And in just about a month, I wrote 45,000 words on this draft.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now that probably sounds like a lot, and it is a lot.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean 45,000 words is a definitely a full-length book.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I did it in just about four weeks from start to finish.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to break down how I actually did this because I think this will be helpful to you as you think about writing your own books, or maybe you're in the middle of a book and you're stuck.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And really it all comes down to this.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And let me share with you an analogy, and then I want to break down how I would actually go about writing the chapters in this book so you can see how I was able to do this pretty fast.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you can do the exact same thing.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm no Superman, I'm not superhuman, or anything like that.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just following a very precise structure and way of working that's allowed me to finish this draft pretty fast.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, the analogy.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people, whenever they think about writing a book, they look at it as it's kind of like looking at this big pile of wood and nails and screws and material.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: You look at this big pile of stuff and you stress out because you're thinking, I've got to build a finished house out of this.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Where do I even get started?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that a lot of people don't get started is because they have no structure.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: They have no idea what they want to build, they just know they want to build something, but they don't know how to go from this pile of ideas or pile of things that they want to say.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get from there to an actual finished product?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I think that is where a lot of times you have to start because sometimes you don't know what you want to say in a book.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it is really helpful if you can just start writing and exploring ideas and coming up with concepts, and sometimes in a book you have to just start writing and kind of find your way into the idea.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other side of that is that many times, and this has been my experience with these first couple client books, is that many times you have a definite structure in place and it's more like you're working from a blueprint.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if you ever work with an architect or with a designer building something, you know that they're not gonna do anything until you have blueprints in place.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna lay concrete, they're they're not gonna run electricity, they're not gonna build scaffolding or anything like that until they have very specific ideas about what goes where and when things are gonna happen.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And a precise step-by-step sequence that those things are gonna happen in.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the way that I have approached this client book.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So when I first got this gig, uh, which I was very thrilled to get, by the way, uh.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to present this as like something that's drudgery because I was absolutely thrilled to work on this book, and it's been a blast.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when I got this gig, I sat down and developed a very detailed outline of the book that flowed really well, and the client loved it, and all that stuff.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I was working from a very detailed and specific outline for the topic that they hired me to write about.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I had that detailed outline when I sat down to actually begin the writing just about a month ago.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So here's how the process actually would work.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: A couple days a week, and this has been over the past month, a couple days a week, uh maybe two and a half days a week, spread out over typically two or three days.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I would take a block of typically six to eight hours.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uming, sometimes well late into the late night.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, usually started in the you know, the afternoon sometime and uh often to the late night, oftentimes.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I would write typically uh a couple of chapters per block.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it would take me anywhere from three to four hours typically with a few breaks in there.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: It would take me three to four hours to write a chapter of about 3,500 words.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And when I talk about writing a chapter, I mean writing a clean chapter.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a final draft, this is a first draft, but I try to make my first drafts as clean as possible.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: I try to take out all the typos, you know, I make sure everything flows, I make sure the transitions are in there.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a true first draft.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a rough draft, this is an actual true first draft.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And here's how I would actually sit down and write those chapters is I would be working from an outline, of course, and in each chapter, which was about 3,500 words, my my goal for my goal for each chapter was 3,500 words.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you put all those together, that makes a book that's gonna be somewhere between 40 and 45,000 words.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Give or take, I assume some chapters are gonna be 3,000 by the time you get to the end, some chapters are gonna be closer to 4,000 and so forth.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I aim for about 3,500 words per chapter.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what that means is that you're gonna have anywhere from three to five sections in each chapter.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have some kind of opening story or opening section where you're laying out a story or an illustration or you're asking a question or something like that that's gonna then lead into the topic.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna have an introduction section of, you know, three to five hundred words, something like that.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're gonna have three to five main sections.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Each of those could be anywhere from 750 words to maybe even 1,500 words, just depending on the chapter and how you're organizing your information.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're gonna have a closing section where you're bringing everything together.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And for a nonfiction book, I really like to have some takeaways at the end.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like action steps or um, you know, specific reflection points or or something like that to kind of wrap up the material and inspire the reader to take action.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So when I sit down to work on these chapters, I would have all that laid out and I would have, let's say, an idea for the intro and some ideas for the closing.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: But then this, the whole middle section, the body of the chapter, I would then think through, okay, what are the main sections of the chapter going to be?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it would be three to five kind of main chunks of ideas.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then for each of those sections, I would then sit down and come up with the main points that I wanted to say for each of those sections.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say there's a section in the chapter that's um a thousand words or so, give or take.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And let's say that there are four things that I wanted to talk about in that subsection of the chapter.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's four points I wanted to make, four reasons to do something, uh, four roadblocks or obstacles, uh, four creative ideas, whatever it is.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if I have four things that I want to talk about in that section of a thousand words, that means each of those subpoints, sub-subpoints, I guess, each of those is going to be around 250 words.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I would go through the whole chapter that way, knowing the word count for each of the sections that I wanted to talk about in that chapter, and then also knowing the word count for each of those sub-subsections.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of you are listening to this, and you're probably thinking, wow, this is super anal retentive.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's no way I could write a book like this because this is like way too rigid and way too structured.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: But this is this for me is the way that it works to write a nonfiction book.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: At least it does for client books.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: For my own books, it can be a little different, I guess.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for client books that are structured like a standard nonfiction book, this is the way that I tend to work.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason this is helpful is because when you start to actually write the chapter, you already know how many words each of those subsections needs to be, and you have a rough idea of how many words each of those subsubsections needs to be.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say you're working on chapter seven of a book.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And chapter seven, you have an idea for the intro, which is going to be, let's say, 400 words, the conclusion might be a couple hundred words, the takeaways might be like a hundred words if you have a few points there.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then you've got uh like 3,000 words of material to fill in those, in the main body of the chapter.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And let's say one of those sections is 750 words, one of those sections is maybe 1,250 words, one is maybe 750 words.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a few of those, and then as you're writing that, you have the points for each of those subsections, and you know if you have a section that's a thousand words and you've got four points, each of those points is going to be around 250 words.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how I would actually write through these chapters, and it would take me sometimes three, maybe four hours to sit down and write a super clean first draft of a chapter that's about 3,500 words.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the beauty of this is that once you have that detailed outline for the chapter, you don't have to guess at what you're saying.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: You just are you're just kind of plowing through it.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're riffing on your topics.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you need to change things around, and that's totally normal whenever you're creating a book.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very common, in fact, because once you start the actual writing, you discover things, uh, you think of things, you rearrange things and so forth, and that's all completely normal.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, this is kind of a long audio journal episode, I guess, but I felt like it was important to get this out there because it's really important when you're writing, especially a nonfiction chapter or a blog post, to have a structure in place if you want to do it quickly.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that you should always work this way or that this way works for everybody, but it really works for me very well.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And as I have approached this book this way, that's what allowed me to essentially write a whole draft of a book in l in about a month.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um now, this was a lot of work, so I don't want you to have any illusions about this.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: This involves just a lot of concentration and focus, and really it just comes down to setting your behind in the chair and doing the work.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where so many of us get tripped up is we just get tired.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: We get fried, we get mentally burned out when you're writing this much this fast.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, if you've been hired by a client to write something, this is what it calls for.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is it's just a matter of sitting down and doing the work.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be a creative genius to do this.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um you don't have to be like the world's best writer.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to be willing to sit down and organize your content and get a really solid, clean first draft.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, if you have questions about this, let me know.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to chat more about this.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I kind of geek out over this stuff.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love structuring content, and I think this is this is a skill that anybody can develop.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be a super analytical person to do this.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's just a matter of sitting down and thinking through it, getting a really solid outline, getting a detailed outline, and then you're going in and you're just writing through the outline.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, novels are a lot different, I think.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Novels are a whole different deal, stories are a whole different deal.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Although some people do approach stories in a very, very structured way like this as well.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's not my approach to fiction, but uh for some people it is.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, this is a longer episode, but I did want to throw it out there in case this is helpful for anybody.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know if you have questions.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to chat.