Book Writing | I'm Just Sharing

Book Writing Series Step One – The Concept

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 21, 2008

This is the first part of my series on writing and publishing a book. I want to make a few things clear, if I may. One, not all of these concepts are specific to writing “print” books. Many of these concepts can be used in writing ebooks, magazine articles, short stories, or pretty much anything else one wishes to write. Two, all of these steps aren’t concrete; these are my opinions on the steps one should take, or things one should think about.

This may seem like the most basic step to most people, but it’s actually the one that keeps a lot of people from starting. Every person has to first decide what they want to write about, but it has to be more detailed than what they think.

For instance, you may say you want to write a detective story. Okay, what kind of detective story do you want to write? Do you want your main character to be a male or a female? Is it an agency or an individual? What kind of detective agency; serious crimes, following around people cheating on each other, finding lost children? Is there a particular area of the world your detectives are living in, and do you know enough about that area to write plausibly? What race is your main character; weight, height, background? Are they funny, serious, brooding, good looking, ugly, troubled, perfect, educated, rich, poor, sexual? Are they well known, well liked, well traveled, or are they the opposite? Are they more like James Bond or Easy Rollins or Kinsey Milhone? Or are they actually something else entirely, but end up doing detective like stuff, such as Dirk Pitt or Stone Barrington?

Or maybe you want to write a book about travel. Are you going to try to cover the entire world, or just a specific segment? Are you going to talk about places you’ve been, or places you’ve researched? Will there be images? Will there be history? Are you going to talk about the foods, the demographics, the politics?

Perspective is always key when you decide you want to write something. Almost no one gets away with writing about something they really don’t know anything about. Many years ago a friend and I decided to write a short story about a guy who ran a mining company on the planet Mercury, and how, on his return flight back to Earth, settings on his ship had been altered and, instead of flying back towards Earth, he was heading towards the sun, and had to try to figure out a way to get things changed before he was killed. Sounded like a plausible thing for us, as I wrote the storyline part and my friend dug into a little bit of the science. We submitted the story and got rejected soundly, saying our science wasn’t close to being legitimate enough to make the story plausible. Though the storyline was a pretty good one, we were way out of our realm in trying to write a science fiction story to pull it off.

I told you about my book, which I’m not going to mention here, but expect it in the next post; hey, I get to plug also, right? Anyway, it’s a book on leadership and management. I had been thinking about writing that book for years before I started. I had always been the leader of my group as a kid, and when I got my first real job, I worked as a regular employee for 8 months before I was promoted to management, and I’d been in a leadership position ever since until I went into consulting, and even now, I always go into a consulting assignment in a leadership or independent role. While I was a director, twice the place I was working brought in survey companies to question the employees on management, and both times I came out as either the top ranked leader or tied for the top ranked leader. I always had other managers and directors and supervisors coming to me to ask how I would handle situations involving their employees. I felt that this was a subject that I was imminently qualified to write about. And even with that, I still did a little bit of research, because I wanted to have some statistics behind me while I was giving my tips.

Every book written doesn’t necessarily need to have research done, but if facts are put into a book they need to be somewhat accurate. For instance, if you mention the name of a song and the group that sang the song, it had better be correct, unless you’re writing an alternate universe story. If you’re a male and writing the story from a female perspective, you’d better be sure you’ve captured how women think and act correctly, and not just your impression of how women are.

Anyway, this all leads to what all the preparation and concept of what you’re going to write is all about. No one sits down one day and starts writing a book. Most probably, you’ve been thinking about something for a long time. Hopefully it’s become a passion for you, but it’s possible that you’re a hired gun; the process is the same.

What I recommend is to create an outline or a fact sheet, or both. An outline helps you determine in which order you want things to happen in your book. It also allows you to group common themes together if it’s a nonfiction book, or keep the flow of your book together if it’s fiction. A fact sheet allows you to put down facts that you garner from research, or write more detailed biographies of characters you introduce in your story. I know one guy who actually writes mini diaries of all the characters in his books, even if they only appear in one chapter, if he gives them a name. That way, he feels he has a better chance of capturing their personality properly as his story goes along, in case that character gets introduced again. But that’s for another time.

This gets us started on our series. I hope you’ve picked up at least one or two tips, if you needed them. Be looking out for part two of this series.

Writing | 7 Comments

How To Be A Prolific Writer

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 7, 2008

One of the weirdest things about blogging is that not everyone wants to leave comments on the blog. Sure, I’d love that as much as anything, but what sometimes happens is people will send you an email to tell you things or to ask you questions. I take that as a compliment, especially since no one has sent me anything bad yet.

Anyway, there’s one question I get more often than any other. The odd thing is that I get this same question outside of this blog. I get it on my other blog. I get it from my newsletters. I get it from people in organizations I belong to. I sometimes get it from people who have been forwarded things that I’ve sent to others. And I always get it from my friends, because I tend to chronicle my life and then share my stories with all my friends. I’m betting some of you would have loved to have been on my personal mailing list when I talked about the day the plane I was on that was trying to take off hit a deer. Or, if that’s not good enough, how I, as a five year old child, walked away from a crowd in downtown Japan and went on my own adventure, while teachers scrambled to find me.

Anyway, that question is: “How can you be such a prolific writer?” Well, it’s just what I do. As some of you may know, I’ve actually written a book on leadership called Embrace The Lead, and an ebook called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, two books that have nothing in common with each other except the fact that I wrote them. I’ve also got 5 other books in the works, but who knows when I’ll finish any of those. I’ve written tons of articles in multiple places on a variety of subjects, and I’ve been published in a few national magazines and newsletters. Frankly, I wish I could get more people to pay me for writing, because there’s nothing I’d rather spend time doing, other than playing poker (yes, my wife knows this, so go ahead and tell her).

Okay, enough of the self promotion. How does one go about being a prolific writer? How does one come across so many ideas to write about?

I like to think of myself as someone whose real business is the accumulation of knowledge. Other than geography and entomology, I have this insatiable thirst for knowledge. I just want to know things. I also like to think I have kind of a discerning eye for being able to step outside of a situation and view it as a story. On this blog I posted something short, with videos, on how I felt after Barack Obama was elected president. I’m not sure how many of you saw this accounting on my other blog of what went on with my wife and I the night he was elected, but I’m happy to share it here.

Anyway, after I’ve accumulated some knowledge, or after I’ve had time to digest an event as a story in my mind, I love sharing my thoughts and happenings with others. Maybe my goal should be in storytelling, because I just love to tell my tales and share information as much as I can.

So, getting back to the point, which is how you can become a prolific writer yourself. Here are five ways you can become a prolific writer:

* Write like you talk – I see many blogs where people seem to be trying to figure out how to write rather than just writing. Most of the time when I sit down to write, I write directly into blog, real time, and I don’t stop until I’ve written the entire thing. Most of my posts take between 5 and 10 minutes to write; that’s about all. Now, it takes a little longer to finish if I’m adding links, which is always a smart thing to do if you can, but otherwise, my posts are usually done fairly quickly. Even most of my very long posts have been written that way. This post is being done differently, as I’m writing it in Word (word to the wise; if you compose something in Word, then transfer it to an HTML based program, you need to remember to change all the quotation marks so your coding will be recognized; maybe Microsoft will fix that one day) and then I’m going to transfer it over. I’m taking a little more time with this one because it’s a listed post.

Anyway, when you write, whether it’s short or long, ask yourself if you’ve written in your voice. With short posts, ask yourself if that’s how you would present yourself if someone was sitting with you and talking to you. If you’re writing a long post, do the same thing.

* Think of every situation as a story – Who doesn’t love hearing or telling a good story? The truth in life is that almost every moment of interaction with someone else can be told later on as a pretty good story. Right now, I have a story in my head about the adventures my wife and I have had over the past two weeks with a chipmunk that’s somehow found its way into the house, and how even the exterminator has seemed to have lost this battle. I don’t have a place to put it, however, but it’s a story I can tell friends. However, when it comes to your blog, telling your story about an implementation you did with new hardware on your computer or new programs you’re trying to run are all stories that you could probably tell on your blog.

* Don’t niche yourself into a corner – There’s a lot of talk on the blogosphere about selecting a niche and sticking to it. However, there are also thousands of blogs that have been abandoned because those people couldn’t continue thinking about what they wanted to write about. People who write financial blogs seem to run out of things to say because they think their niche is finite, but it’s not. Right now, I’d be writing about the price of gas, the bad news about the car and housing industry, credit cards and their changing of interest rates and top dollar limits, why keeping health insurance is important in a bad economy. There are thousands of ideas related to finance that aren’t directly related to the stock market that they could be writing about.

One of the issues I’ve had with many blogs I’ve been reading lately is that it seems many of us tend to keep writing about the same issues over and over, and at the same time. Days ago I wrote about commenting on blogs, only to discover later on that four other blogs had written on the same topic on the same day. When we talk about blogging, we tend to stick to specific niches that help drive blogs into prominence, hopefully. That’s why I break out into other areas from time to time on my blog, throwing up a video or two, giving a personal opinion about something, or sometimes going in directions that don’t have much to do about blogging at all, but are important to me at that moment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I believe Sire’s guest post on why he loves blogging was a very important post because he’s someone who refuses to be locked into a corner as to what he can write about on his blogs, even if they have a specific focus.

* Don’t worry about perfection, but check your grammar here and there – There is no such thing as the perfect post. I’ve written some that I think are pretty good that get few writers, and some things I thought I was just putting up to have something to write about that have touched a lot of people. People sometimes worry what someone else is going to think about what they’ve written, and that can help to paralyze them and stilt their writing. I’ve never had that issue; I write whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, trying to offer something pertinent or personal, and that’s that. I don’t use profanity because I don’t use, and never have used, profanity in my real life (I’ve also never had a drink in my life, smoked cigarettes, taken illegal drugs, or, for balance, gone to church since I was 11 years old).

At the same time, I have to admit that there are times when it’s hard reading a blog post or an article where the grammar is choppy and sentences don’t flow in some fashion. I make allowances for people for whom English isn’t their first language, because I’ve seen how some of the posts I’ve tried to do in other languages (thanks, or kind of thanks, to Babelfish). And by grammar, I don’t mean using a word like “y’all”, which is a part of my language, and I don’t care how many people tell me it’s not a real word. I’m talking about major misspellings of easy words (it’s easy to tell a typo from a misspelling), picking the wrong words (”there, they’re and their”, as examples), or missing words throughout someone’s copy.

* Write about what you love and like – I love blogging, and it goes well with this blog. I love finding all sorts of things on the internet, which I can write about on this blog. I love writing about the things I do on my business blog. I have some kind of passion towards everything I write about, whether it’s positive or negative. When one has a passion, one can do a lot of things and talk about a lot of things. Everyone has a passion, and many people are hesitant to release it to the public. Trust me, there’s so many more things I could talk about on this blog that would make people’s heads spin, but that’s not what this blog is about. I have a place for that sort of thing, but I’m not sharing it here, so don’t ask. As I was listening to Lynn Terry on a conference call earlier today, she was saying how she has multiple outlets of expression under pen names that she doesn’t tell everyone about because sometimes she just needs to step out of being Lynn Terry for a few minutes. I’m the same; every once in awhile I just have to be someone other than Mitch Mitchell, or T. T. Mitchell, my business name, or whatever my wife feels like calling me at a particular moment. Still, being passionate about something, and adding a passion for writing into the mix, is probably the most important thing about blogging, and something I cover in my blogging series.

If you can put all of those things together, you can be a prolific writer. Some of them might seem like it’s a lot of work, but trust me on this one; if you’re doing something you love, it’s never work.