How To Write A Book: Day 2
Break It Down
It’s a very strange feeling to walk off stage at an event with the roar of the crowd still ringing in your ears, click the door to your hotel room closed behind you, and sit down at the keyboard to write.
Yet that’s just what you’ve got to do when you’re a professional presenter.
Perhaps more than in any other profession, writing your own book is crucial to your success when you’re a professional speaker. Yes, it takes focus and follow through to get it done, especially when on the road between engagements. (I travelled 12 hours between gigs today!) But the benefits far outweigh the temporary demands of the endeavor.
In a few weeks the book I’m working on will be done and these lonely nights typing away in hotel rooms will be but a distant memory. I’m sure you can look back on your own accomplishments and say the same thing: in the end you’ve either got something to show for your time spent on this planet or you’ve got a bunch of excuses as to why those big plans never materialized.
The difference often comes down to just doing one thing each day that will bring you closer to your goals. Today I did a very small but important task to make my next book a reality.
So on with the play-by-play analysis of “how to write a book”.
This was my second day of writing a book for speakers on how to get jobs as cruise ship lecturers and use them to create a six figure speaking business.
Yesterday I started this process by defining my ideal reader, establishing the purpose for writing this book, researching the competition, and outlining the chapters.
You can read the complete story here: Day 1
Tonight I broke things down further by creating subchapter headings and, in some cases, bullet points within those subchapters. In time management parlance this is called “chunking”, which is basically a technique for taking a big project and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts (called “chunks”).
In other words, writing a book can seem overwhelming, but creating a chapter outline is something that can be accomplished in an hour. Writing the chapters themselves can also seem like a lot of work, but coming up with subchapter headings is a pretty simple process. By the time you’ve created all the bullet points for those subchapters you’ve chunked the work down so much that filling in the content for each point only requires writing a few paragraphs at a time. It’s a pretty useful technique.
So this is what I did for day 2 of writing this book. It didn’t take very long and I was even sufficiently motivated to write out all of the questions for the FAQ section. This book is really starting to take shape in my mind now, which is of course the first step to it taking shape in reality.
You can only create within the limits of your imagination after all. Adding more levels of detail to the structure is like filling up a drawing with color. You can picture the outcome more clearly and vividly at the end of the process and your imagination will then bring that image to life.
Tomorrow I will have a solid block of time to commit to this process without having to fly anywhere. I’m planning on using a special tool to help speed things along. In fact I’d say I’ll get about five times the amount of words on the page by using this technique than a typical writer would produce in the same amount of time. Can’t wait to share it with you 
Time invested today: about an hour.
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