The Writing Process: From Idea to Great Book

 

 

Tens of thousands of books are published every year, but very few have any kind of impact, let alone hit a bestseller’s list. While there are tons of promises out there for programs that will get you a bestseller, writing a great book doesn’t happen because someone has a gimmicky or secret methodology.

Good books come from great thinking, and great books come from honing that thinking into its best presentation possible.
While making a bestseller list can’t be guaranteed (without buying your way on to one, anyway), writing your best book—a great book—in fact can.

What you need is a process that will bring out your best thinking and tap into your expertise. Even then it’s difficult, but I can guarantee your book will be better for it—as will you as an author. And once you embrace the process, you can do it again and again until you write that book that really lands with your audience.

I taught writing for several years, then joined a small publisher as an editor. When our publishing company was put up for sale, I went independent, first helping our authors make the transition to the new publisher and then slipping from editing into ghostwriting (it’s not as far from “Would you proof this?” to “I have a title idea for a book—would you write it?” as you would think).

Since 1997, I’ve had a major role in guiding more than 80 books from idea to manuscript, the vast majority of which I ghostwrote. Two debuted on a main NYT best seller list (as well as others) and together those books have sold more than 5.4 million copies.

More importantly, every businessperson or nonprofit leader I’ve help write a book became better at what they do. Their businesses and nonprofits benefit quite a bit as well.

Through that I’ve found that writing a great book happens in 6 distinct but overlapping phases. And I’ve also discovered the more you embrace the process, the more you grow through it, both as a writer, a leader, and as a person. Here’s how I’d describe them:

Phase One: Discovery

Imagine watching a legal drama. There is always a time of “discovery” where all the evidence is gathered and reviewed before the trial begins. Often when it’s a case against a large company, the attorneys receive boxes and boxes of material with the key evidence hidden somewhere inside.

Prewriting and research can feel a lot like that. The more complex the topic, the more this stage can feel like looking for the needle you will use to stitch together your book in several haystacks. This could mean reading piles of books, hours of research, or sitting back and reflecting on things you already know or experiences you’ve had.

The practical side of discovery requires aside a designated time and place to gather your research and capture your thoughts. Where will you collect all of your books, diagrams, notes, and quotes so you can easily find them again? How will you begin organizing them? How will you start seeing the forest instead of the trees?

I have also found that discovery tends to work intricately with the next phase, which I call “essaying.”

Phase Two: Essaying

In French, essayer means “to try.” Though it’s lost much of its significance in this regard, I’ve long felt that essay writing is an attempt to harness ideas that are presently just beyond one’s grasp. This is done by organizing them into a linear presentation and delving into one’s thoughts about them. It’s part recording, part thinking deeper, and part synthesis. It also involves a good deal of time not writing but incubating your thoughts.
When people talk about starting a book, they often divide writers into two groups—there are the “plotters” and the “seat of the pants” writers. This is where the first two phases overlap. While many debate which method is better, I’ve found both are needed.

“Plotters” like to develop a detailed outline before beginning. “Pantsers” just need a germ of the idea and then launch into free-associating writing. Plotters start in their conscious minds; pantsers delve into the subconscious. Both are valid places to begin, and depending on personality, the genre (fiction, non-fiction, or memoir), and the nature of the material, you will lean more toward one or the other.

For me, plotting is part of discovery and seat-of-the-pants writing is essaying. When you get stuck on one, you need to switch to the other. The parts that will someday be your book begin by taking a sticky note off of your wall and then writing as much as you can to unpack the concept scribbled on it.

You can think of your organization as a thread that runs through each essay to string them into your book. None of these will be connected at first—the essays will be haphazard (it’s good to collect these where they can be easily rearranged)—and the thread will still be on the spool. When you have enough essays and an inkling of how they should be sewn together, you are ready to start writing your first draft.

Phase Three: The “figure it out” draft

At some point as you research and write about what you’re finding and thinking, something like a path through the material will begin to emerge. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll start feeling like certain ideas go together, and that certain concepts need to be first.

As that happens, it’s time to start putting your essays into order and then writing connections and transitions between them. This will be the basis of your first draft.

This is not the time to worry about style, grammar, voice, or any other writerly flourishes. The point of the first draft is to figure out what you are really wanting to say. You are in chase of a bigger idea—none these other things matter until you’ve captured that. This draft is that quest. Be ready to discover amazing new insights along the way.

Writing your first draft isn’t efficient. No matter how good your map is, you’ll still get lost and need to redraw it. The more complex your idea, the more this will be true; the simpler your idea, the less. Tackling big ideas is going to take a lot of taking concepts apart to see how they work, of looking at how others dealt with them in the past and making them applicable to your present-day readers. It’s a rather messy, perplexing, but ultimately fulfilling process. The more things fall into place, the more you’ll feel like you’re on to something, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some dark tunnels along the way.

As you do this, with fresh starts and rewrites, eventually you will have something that feels like a book. Your first draft will be done. And that’s when the magic can happen.

Phase Four: The “Big Rethink”

As odd as it may sound, it’s only when you finish your first draft that you’ll really know what you’re writing about. It will be the first time you have all the pieces laid out and can see the big picture. A lot of people stop here and call their book finished.

In my mind, that’s the biggest mistake in publishing.

Instead, now that you can see the entire landscape and have finally harnessed your big idea, it’s time to ask yourself if there’s a better way to write it.

It’s a scary thing to do because you will have so much emotional attachment to what you’ve already written. Many can’t overcome that. Reworking it at this point can seem sacrilegious. It’s the difference between being an amateur and a pro.

But you need to objectively ask yourself: What is missing? What isn’t needed or gets in the way? What’s the overall story like that pulls it together? What’re the holes in your logic? What have you overlooked?

In my experience, great books change dramatically at this point—decent books are those the author isn’t willing to rework. Your friends and loved ones will pat you on that back and say its good, but generally that will be about it.

If it helps, remember, a draft is merely a prototype. Does it work in its present form, or does it need to be recast? Now it’s time to begin experimenting with different presentations of the material—creating new and better prototypes. That’s where revision comes in.

Phase Five: Revision

To re-vise is to “see again,” hopefully in a new and better light. Certainly it means cleaning up and honing your language, but it should also be more daring than that. Sometimes it means completely rewriting sections from scratch.

Ernest Hemingway famously said he rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. He wasn’t just moving words around when he did that. He tried completely different takes on the ending of the book. At the end of his first draft (spoiler alert), he simply wrote, “That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.” Catherine died in childbirth, so he did versions where the baby died and where the baby lived. In a couple others, the books ended after the funeral. Another finished the morning after the deaths. He tried a religious ending. In another, he wrote as if his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald were writing it. The magazine ending of the story (it was first serialized) was very different from the published book.

The point is, Hemingway recast it several times until he felt he had it just right. If you’ve ever read the book, I think you will agree the ending is perfect Hemingway. He wrote it in a way that defined his style as we know it today, and none of the others would have lived up to that legacy.

Personally, I find at least two or three “prototypes” are usually necessary—one to get my ideas down on paper and the second to organize those ideas in the most coherent way possible. Sometimes I work with an outside reader in that process, but usually I don’t. More often it means adding some things I hadn’t even considered until a few weeks after the first draft was finished, reorganizing the chapters, or creating a new thread of thought to run throughout the book.

Phase Six: Finishing work (like in carpentry)

Once you have it “just right,” it’s time to worry about punctuation, grammar, the logic of your arguments in the minds of others, spelling, and the like. I think of it like having a finish carpenter who makes things beautiful once the structure is designed and solidly built.

Then you’ll need copyediting, which needs to be done by someone who hasn’t seen your manuscript yet—who will objectively judge if what is written on the page conveys what you meant to write.

And when that’s done, its finally ready for the publishing process (which will still need proofing!). It’s time to get your writing out for the world to read.

What’s your plan?

Despite how difficult it is and how much technology has changed our world, writing a book is still one of the best ways to catapult your business, speaking career, or nonprofit towards incredible growth.

Whatever your goals, it’s good to have a road map of where you are going before you begin. Knowing there are things you can be doing now will make that journey more pleasant when the time is right to set out.

Was this helpful? Have you ever thought about writing like this or heard it taught this way? What stage are you in right now? What are you doing now to prepare for writing your upcoming book?

Need any help? Want some guidance? Still have some questions?

Book your free discovery call now at killiancreative.com.