It’s now time for pen to paper! Well, I guess it is fingers to keyboard anyway. I have journaled most of my life so I certainly have written the old fashioned way (pen to paper). But I have learned to type much faster than I can write so for me typing was the best option. Plus, I would need to have the text in an electronic format anyway to share with editors and send to a printer when I publish my book. So it makes complete sense to write on my computer.
After four weeks of narrowing down my specific angle of writing with my book coach, I was ready to begin writing. My fingers were ready to begin typing: Page one, word one…
Starting with page one, word one would be too simple for sure. There is much more of a strategy to writing a book than just sitting down to write (of course). So instead of just starting at the “beginning”, I went back into the big silos of topics that I had created during my brainstorming sessions, and I picked one big silo. And then, within the silo, I had many mini-topics and story topics written down from my brainstorming.
My writing strategy over the next seven weeks (50 days) would be to pick one mini-topic each day and spend at least one hour writing. Sure, some days I had plans and couldn’t spend one hour writing so I would just spread that missed hour over the next several days of writing.
One of the very first things my book coach asked our writing group to do was to spend two minutes just writing. Writing about anything. The goal of the exercise was not for the writing to be perfect. Misspellings were ok and improper grammar was ok also. The goal was to just write and to see how many words we could produce using whatever method we would use to write our book. And then after two minutes, we would count the number of words produced and multiply that number by 30 to estimate how many words we could theoretically produce in one hour.
At the end of this two minute exercise, I produced 150 words, which was about 4,500 words per hour. Our coach had told us that most non-fiction books ranged from 45,000 to 55,000 words. This meant that if I produced 4,500 words in one hour, I could theoretically write a full draft of a book in 10 hours (or in 10 days if I wrote for one hour each day).
Once we broke out the number of words like this, the daunting task of writing a complete book didn’t seem so daunting. It seemed very doable. I realized I probably wouldn’t produce 4,500 words in an hour each day, but even if I produced a third of that (1,500 words per hour), I could finish a full book draft in 30 days. This goal seemed very reasonable to me. And I could certainly achieve my goal of writing a full draft of my book in 50 days.
It was important to always remember that the goal with the initial draft is to get the thoughts in my head out on paper. The words written didn’t have to be perfect (like our initial exercise of producing a number of words in a specific time). Of course, writing that is not perfect can be difficult for many people, but it is important to try to just write. It is not necessary to edit anything at this stage of writing.
I will write about it later, but there are so many people to help out with editing my text at the end of the book writing process. But the hardest thing about writing a book is to produce the initial draft! So I set off to just write and I didn’t bother editing anything I wrote. And from July 9 to August 31, 2018, I wrote my first book draft of over 55,000 words!
NEXT UP: STEP 5: THE HEALING PROCESS: OVERCOMING FEELINGS THROUGH WRITING
Here are the links to previous articles in the series in case you missed them
