Take Baby Steps in Your Writing to Yield a
Book
BY SHERY MA BELLE ARRIETA-RUSS
The thought of writing a book is
usually daunting for many writers. After all, how and where do you begin
writing a book that's anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 words?
Big numbers can be pretty intimidating.
But there's a way to get around this. And it's by taking baby steps —
writing one chapter or even 300-500 words at a time.
This is how I wrote my book,
Weekly Writes: 52 Weeks of Writing Bliss. Every week for one
whole year, I wrote one chapter or module. Each module was only 250 to
500 words. It helped too that as I wrote each module, writers were
"testing" it. They did the activities in the module I sent out to them
every week.
When I started, I began with an outline
for Weekly Writes. This was just so I could see what I was supposed to
do every week. An outline doesn't have to be set in stone. Think of an
outline as a frame, a guide. It can be modified as you go along. So by
the time I'd written chapter/module 52, I realized I had a book ready to
show to a publisher or one that I could self-publish and sell the next
day.
I didn't intend for Weekly Writes to be
a book. I created it as an e-mail course. But when week 52 came around,
I knew Weekly Writes could be a book too. I sent a proposal to a
publisher and a week later received a note that she wished to review the
manuscript. A couple of weeks later, I was offered a contract and given
a deadline for submitting the final draft.
It took about 6 weeks to edit and
rewrite some chapters. And to make the book even more useful to readers,
I invited writers who had taken the e-mail course version to contribute
creative pieces they've written as a direct result of doing the writing
activities in the course modules.
The result? A writer-tested
book.
On top of that, I had fun writing it
because when I wrote a chapter, I simply wrote. I stuck to writing
250-500 words once a week. One baby step at a time. It was certainly
easier to write when I worked with smaller goals (word quota every
week).
Perhaps you can try it too. You may
have a book 52 weeks from now, even sooner!
Shery is publisher of
WeeklyWrites.com and the creator of WriteSparks!, software
that generates over 10 million Story Sparkers for Writers.
Download WriteSparks! Lite for free.
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