You’ve established your niche and decided what you want to write about, but now you’re stuck. Your mind has come to a complete blank and you’re looking at an empty page on your laptop or notebook. How do you get started? Let’s go back a bit to your school days when your English teacher would insist that you write an outline for your story and you struggled to visualize each step and jot down your ideas. Well, the principle is the same for writing a book so let’s see if we can make it happen.
First, try to come up with one sentence that summarizes what your book will be about. I know that may be difficult but just try to imagine that you’ve finished your book and attempting to get it published. The publisher asks you what the book is about, and you need to give the response in one sentence. What would that sentence be? Don’t worry about the grammar or whether the sentence is too short or too simple. Just make sure it says concisely what you intend to write about, so feel free to edit it and rewrite as many times as you need to until you have a clear focus for your story.
The next step is to expand that sentence into a paragraph by adding a few more ideas about what the book will cover. Don’t go overboard and try to fill a whole page, because you might then find yourself with too many ideas and your book will be spread all over the place. So once again, jot down the ideas, then begin the process of removing and refining until you have one paragraph that describes the essence of your story. When you have this done to your satisfaction, it’s now time to expand on your paragraph to create a one-page outline. To do this, you can simply expand on each idea expressed in the paragraph, putting a bit of detail on each so that when it’s time to write the book you will have a general idea of what aspects of each idea you will cover. This part of the process is very important as it will serve as the basis for the development of your book, and solidify in your mind exactly what you will be writing about. Remember that for whatever niche you book will be focusing on, there are probably an endless number of sub-niches and ideas you could incorporate, so this one page outline will allow you to get rid of anything that will make your story too broad and rambling.
If you’ve got this far, then you’re well underway, but there’s still work to be done because that masterpiece has still not been written. It’s no use telling your friends about the wonderful outline you have for a book, because nobody cares about that. What they want to see is the actual book, so you need to move on to the next step of your journey into the world of published authors. Your next task, therefore, is to write a table of contents which will serve as your guide as you write. Consider everything you want your book to cover, and include them as chapters in your table of contents, then take it a step further and create subheadings under each chapter. This will give a broader scope to your book, and will help you to consider ideas you might have overlooked previously. The best way to do this is to think of your book in terms of beginning, middle and end, and you will be able to cover everything from start to finish without getting overwhelmed and lost.
When you’ve done all of this, pause and give yourself permission to smile. You now have all your ideas on paper (or your laptop) and can confidently proceed to start chapter one. Enjoy the feeling of accomplishment, knowing you have taken an important step and now have a very clear idea what you will be writing about. In my next post we shall take the next step together.