This post grew out of a response I had left on James’ post Writing The Book – The Ultimate Pinnacle Of Blogging? and he found my response to be very helpful. He suggested I write a post about writing a book, and since I haven’t done this topic in a long time, I figured this was a sign to do another one!

Here’s a few past posts on writing and creating, turns out they’re a very small subset of the types of posts I have been doing.

• Finding the time to write…
• Note Writing and Making To-Do Lists… Here’s a cool trick!
• What Tools Did I Use To Create the Workbook for Healing Your Life on a Deep Heart Level?
• What Was My Writing Plan When I Wrote “How to Heal Your Life” Book?
• Creating Art Out Of Nothing… a.k.a. Making The Best Out Of A Bad Situation
• Do you prefer a White Canvas or Colored for Starting a Painting?
• Healing Art… Does it Exist?

Before writing

Before I started writing I was reading about how to write and how to write books. The advice usually followed the same format I learned in High School creative writing, which was to first create an outline, know where it was going to start, what was going to go into the middle and then to flesh it out to finally reach at the conclusion already prepared in the outline.

Every teacher seemed to extoll that method, and even advice for writing books all provided variations on this method, usually individualized by special software they use.

I was never that kind of writer, so I labeled myself a failure, and possibly having no writing talent since my mind didn’t function in a linear fashion.

It was only when the overseas publisher of my illustrated children’s book suggested that I write down “some of my philosophical thoughts, based on how I was speaking” that I started writing in a completely new method.

Starting writing

I was completely winging it in the beginning, not having any idea of where it was going to go, but since my publisher had expressed faith in what I was saying, I started by writing those thoughts down in very tiny notebooks because I still didn’t have enough faith in myself to even use a larger notebook.

A larger notebook meant that I felt I had enough material to fill it, plus it would be much more visible and obvious when I wrote on the express bus to and from work. It was only when I filled up 3 of the very smallest notebooks (3″ x 4″!) that I moved up to the next larger size of 4″ x 6″!

I was just jotting down random thoughts that were coming to mind, with no specific idea of how I was going to use them yet. When a man on the bus questioned me about what I was writing everyday, I told him I was writing a book. He laughed and laughed at me, pointing his finger at my tiny notebook, saying over and over to all around “She thinks she’s writing a book! In those tiny notebooks! She’s delusional!”

Thankfully I already had my PUBLISHER encouraging me to write a book, or I’d have become discouraged and felt publicly humiliated. Instead I simply smiled at him, knowing he had no idea that all the material I was writing could then be typed up. Maybe he thought we still lived in the middle ages when books were written longhand?!

Transcribing from notebooks

Once I filled up a few notebooks, I felt it was time to start typing them up in Word.

Ah the magic of copy/paste! I was loving how I was seeing that one sentence seemed to fit together with another one, then paragraphs started to form. What joy!

I felt inspired to add more to the thoughts that were there and gradually I was separating material out into chapters.

Let the Creative Process grow and flow

I discovered my best writing process was to have an idea and let it lead me where it wanted to go, instead of trying to force it into the pre-made box I had made by creating an outline.

This method meshed well with my painting process, where I had discovered early on that at some point a piece of artwork will start to take on a life of it’s own and the creative adventure obligated me to follow it where it wanted to go instead of deleting all life from it by forcing it back into a pre-determined idea!

By giving myself permission to create in that way, I found the entire process to be deeply therapeutic, and meant also that I needed to delve deeper into my subconscious to pull out the inner connections I had made and was still making!

Next comes editing

I don’t recommend doing much editing early in the writing process. It is more important to get as many thoughts written down as possible.

As I went through the writing process, I found that a flow developed, and sentences grew into paragraphs, and paragraphs grew into chapters. Naming a chapter isn’t set in stone; I renamed some chapters a few times.

Many people get bogged down in editing, and will eliminate a bunch of paragraphs and chapters because they aren’t perfect or don’t seem to go with what they have set out to write. This can turn into wheel spinning, where there is such an emphasis on perfection, writing the perfect sentence or paragraph, that great information keeps getting erased, even lost. The early writing process isn’t the time for perfectionism!

Give the writing flow a chance. You don’t know what is locked inside of your mind and heart until you release it. You may surprise yourself and even find that you have so much information that you need to save some chapters for a different book!

Editing for grammatical and spelling mistakes is good to do, but try to hold off brutally eliminating entire chapters at this point, because that very material may well fit somewhere else, or in a different project entirely!

Once the actual book has been written and massaged into place, that is when editing gets done. I found it best to let the project sit and get “cold”, before trying to edit, that way I could read it more objectively to see how it would sound for a person reading it for the 1st time.

Many times in writing flow, some information gets stuck in our heads and didn’t make it into the manuscript, so seemingly choppy paragraphs get improved at this point by filling in the missing pieces. Before you delete a paragraph, take a look at it to see if its actually missing a sentence or two in the middle!

How many editing rounds is a good idea?

When I worked for a magazine publisher, there were 3 to 4 different people reading an article for editing purposes, and each one would catch something others had missed.

Following this model, I did 4-5 rounds of cold editing for each manuscript, which meant that getting a project ready to publish takes more time that we may originally think it will.

I did my own editing, because a) I didn’t have any supportive folks around me willing to give feedback, and b) I couldn’t afford to pay an editor.

Truth be told, I don’t write or edit to create absolutely grammatically perfect sentences, but to create a readable and understandable flow that has the feeling of us sitting down together and chatting. A reviewer for my 1st book said she felt like we were sitting down together drinking lots of cups of tea while I chatted with her. That felt like high praise to me, for I purposefully steer away from an academic style of writing. I want my writing to sound like the reader’s voice in their head, like they are discovering information in their brain that was there all the time but needed to be unlocked.

Publishing

After I finished writing my manuscript I sent out queries to publishers. They informed me they only accept projects sent to them by agents. I then tried to get an agent to represent me, but I was told they only represent an author for the second book, if the 1st book had enough sales to make it worth their while.

The question that came after that naturally was: HOW? How can I do that if I can’t get a publisher or agent to support me?

That’s when I found out more about self-publishing. Vanity publishing was the answer for so many years for folks stuck in the same situation as mine, but that had a bad name for itself, nd I really didn’t wish to go that route.

Print-on-demand and E-books were still fairly new at that time, so there wasn’t much information available on how to go about doing it, except to hire a Graphic artist. My publishing and marketing budget were $0.00, so paying someone wasn’t going to work for me.

After exhaustive research, I found information how to format a manuscript for an E-book, and found out about KDP.com, a subsidiary of Amazon, which was still positioning itself as the big publishing giant it is now.

Thankfully Amazon has found their E-book, paperback print-on-demand and audio-book subsidiaries to be very lucrative, so they have many online tutorials and templates to offer people now, as well as paid-for services to write, edit, format, create a cover and more.

I started first by creating the E-book and uploaded it. After it went live on Amazon, I found out about the paperback print-on-demand and then the audio-book versions, and set out to create and make those versions available to folks on Amazon.

It was a lot of work, but I feel happy with the results!

Marketing

After I published my first E-book, I learned that I needed to market it. Whether a person is published by a brick-and-mortar publisher, or they decide to self-publish, 99% of us need to do our own marketing. Gone are the days of companies doing the marketing campaigns! It isn’t cost efficient for them anymore, plus they can drastically cut costs by having authors do their own marketing!

Unless a person is famous or is part of a national or international story, an easy ready market no longer exists! It is now up to us to create our own markets.

Starting a blog

When I did my research for how to market a book, the advice I found was to create a website and to start a blog. By blogging one was supposed to build up a raving fan-base who would then buy the book.

So I followed that advice and found that building a fan base is a lot harder than it sounds. So I kept blogging. Then I wrote my second book… and I kept blogging.

I sell enough (personal development) books to keep me in coffee each month, still working on selling enough to pay for groceries!

I found that selling books is really hard! If that’s my only goal in life, I need to move on!

However I found that I like writing blog posts and interacting with my readers and visiting other bloggers and interacting on their sites.

More thoughts on book writing

Writing a book is very intensive (at least for my genre) and I pour so much of myself into it. I’m working on a third book, but this one is a different genre, a bio-novel from some of the strange years in my life.

If you want to write a book, start doing it! There are so many different ways of going about it, and I didn’t fit into any of the prescribed “real” methods, and instead created my own way.

When I’m in writing mode, ideas can come to me when I’m away from my computer, but thanks to the notes app in my phone, I can type the ideas and then email them to myself to be added to the manuscript when I get home.

Prior to having a smart phone, I was using little notebooks I kept in my purse to jot down my ideas.

There aren’t many barriers, and the first big barrier is questioning if we could even do it!

Once the first book has been written and published, the second one is much easier, because we know we can do it, and we’ve figured out a method that works for us.

How to choose what to write about

If you wish to write a book, start by looking at what you write about most, what are the commonalities between your posts, and figure out what speaks to you the most. For now, don’t try to figure out what would sell or what people want to read.

It is impossible to write one book that encompasses everything (that would be too general), or to write a book that would be the ultimate reference on that subject!

Knowing this is very freeing, for then we can just write about what we know, and write in our own style and share those parts of our lives that fit into the subject at hand!

Start from what you want to share about your journey! If writing has been therapy for you, it stands to reason that there are other people a few steps behind you who are trying to figure out the things you did!

Then trust the process! Trust that your gut and your hands know what need to be done, and write! Don’t spend time pre-editing, or doing heavy editing in the beginning, and remember that great paragraph that you may think of deleting? It may well belong in another chapter!

You don’t have to narrow things down right away! I have a lot of material that I wrote that didn’t fit into the other books, but I know I can fold it into future books I write.

You’re allowed to keep a few manuscripts going at the same time, LOL!

Follow your inner muse!

When you hit a roadblock, don’t worry, move onto a different project. When the time is right to return to the first one, you will feel it, and probably be surprised that you needed to experience or learn ‘xyz’ before being able to write more about it! That has been my experience anyway!

Start writing, see where it brings you!

 ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Blessings!
Thank you for sharing this post and for following me!
Tamara

I hope you’ll poke around my Archived Posts to find a wonderful trove of supportive and encouraging posts! Don’t forget to Like, Comment, and Follow my blog! If you want to become a Guest writer, please contact me and we’ll work out the details!
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Guided Journals help you work on a particular issue by answering questions to help see patterns and to find solutions:

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