The Fastest Way to Write Your Book

by Dave Haslett

  But as each section can be completed in just a few minutes, you should be able to squeeze in a few more each day. If you can find another two hours in total, you’ll be able to write your book in just one month. That’s twelve books a year.

  Remember, those two hours don’t have to be a single, solid block. You could write a section or two before you go to work, or on your way to work, or on your way home from work, or straight after work. If you get a morning or afternoon break, it might be long enough to write another section.

  If the other members of your family are watching TV and you don’t particularly want to see that show, slip away and write another section or two, then go back and join them when the show finishes.

  Write another section just before you go to bed.

  If you have to wait for someone and they’re late, don’t get annoyed and waste the time; write another section of your book. Just make sure you always have page of your outline with you, and a notepad and pen, or a voice recorder, or your phone so you can type some text or record your words.

  You can also think about the next section of your outline while you’re doing other things: travelling to and from work, walking the dog, putting up shelves, cooking, washing the dishes, washing the car, vacuuming the carpet, shaving, showering, mowing the lawn, and so on. All the chores that usually keep you away from your writing suddenly become marvellous periods of thinking and preparation time.

  Once you have the whole section straight in your head, write it down. Remember that as long as you’ve broken your outline down into lots of small steps, each section should only be a paragraph or two.

  We’ll explore this idea further in Chapter 8, where we’ll look at several more pain-free ways of fitting mini writing sessions into your busy life.

  You don’t have to write your entire book in mini-sessions, of course. If you have a long scene coming up and you’re looking forward to getting stuck into it and taking your time over it, it’s fine to do that. You might have broken the scene down into several sections in your outline, but if you have enough time you can treat the whole scene as one big section and write it in a single session.

  But once you get used to writing in mini-sessions, chances are you’ll write every scene this way, and the time will flash by because you’ll be enjoying yourself so much.

  The traditional way vs. the modern way

  Some novelists won’t consider working from an outline. In the writing trade, these writers are known as “pantsers” because they write by the seats of their pants, with little or no planning or plotting ahead of time.

  They might have a rough of idea of how the story will begin, and perhaps a few thoughts about some of the key events that happen later on. They might have vague idea of who some of the characters are, but probably not all of them. They might not know how the story ends. They just start writing and hope everything will work out.

  Perhaps something good will come out of it eventually. Or perhaps not. They might end up scrapping several chapters or binning the whole project. They might write their main character into a corner and not be able to come up with a plausible way of getting him out again. They’ll have to backtrack and rewrite everything that led up to that scene, then write him into a different corner that he can actually escape from.

  The characters might go off at such a tangent that it becomes a completely different story from the one they imagined. Or it might end up going nowhere. After months or years of work, they might get bored of the project, decide it’s not working out and not worth continuing with, and scrap the whole thing. What a waste!

  This method of writing suits some writers, but it doesn’t suit me. I don’t have the time – or the inclination – to write things that will be thrown away. Nor does it suit the majority of professional writers. Most bestsellers are planned in intricate detail. Novelists who plan their stories in advance are known in the trade as “plotters”.

  The fastest way to write your book is to be a plotter.

  Traditionally, an outline is a work in progress, right up until the moment the book is published. It changes and evolves all the way through. But with our method, we’re aiming to get the outline as near to perfect as we can from the outset, before we start writing. And then we’ll stick to it rigidly throughout the writing stage. We’ll only allow tiny changes – and only if they’re absolutely essential. A perfectly crafted outline will never change at all.

  Making major changes part-way through a novel can be a serious business. You could waste days, weeks or even months unpicking everything, rewriting scenes, and reconnecting the joins. But if you take the time to get the outline right before you start writing, you’ll avoid these problems and finish your book sooner.

  If you’re writing a non-fiction book this isn’t quite so important, as the chapters and topics are usually self-contained. If you change something in the first part of your book, you probably won’t have to rewrite anything in the second half to accommodate it.

  Similarly, you don’t necessarily need to have all your non-fiction sections in the right order from the outset. If your word processor can work with collapsible outlines – as Microsoft Word can – you can easily move large chunks of text around later. But it’s a lot easier – and faster – if you have them in the right order in the first place. And the best place to do that is in the outline.

  Creating your outline

  The fastest way to create your outline is to use a computer. Most word processors have a built-in outline feature, and they all work in roughly the same way.

  I do my outlining on my iPad using an app called Workflowy.

  The basic principle is as follows:

  Type in your chapter titles and use your word processor’s built-in styles to set them to Heading 1.

  Type in all the headings or scene titles within each chapter and set them to Heading 2.

  Type in all your bullet points or “camera shots” beneath the headings or scene titles and set them to Heading 3.

  If you’ve split a large section into smaller parts using subheadings, these should be set to Heading 4.

  Anything that comes below this – i.e. the text of your book – should be set to Body Text or Normal Text.

  If you switch to Outline View in your word processor, or use separate outlining software, you should now see a minus symbol (-) next to each heading and sub-heading. Clicking on one of these will collapse any text below it, so that only the heading is visible. The minus symbol changes to a plus symbol (+) which you can click to see the full text again.

  If you’re using Microsoft Word, click on the View menu and you’ll see a button on the ribbon bar labelled Outline.

  Menus or buttons at the top of the screen allow you to collapse or expand all headings of a particular level at once. For example, you could click the [1] button to show all the chapter titles (Heading 1) and hide everything else. This will give you a simple overview of your entire book.

  Clicking on [2] will show the chapter titles (Heading 1) and the headings or scene titles (Heading 2), but the bullet points and body text will be hidden.

  If you wanted to, you could drag things around on the screen to change their order. For example, you could drag the chapters into a different order, put the headings or scenes into a different order, or move headings or scenes from one chapter to another. When you move a chapter, the headings and text within it move too. When you move a heading, the sub-headings and text that belong to it move too.

  You can also promote or demote headings to a different level. For example, you might decide to turn one of your scenes into a chapter in its own right. Select its heading and click on the Promote button (sometimes labelled +) to change it from a Heading 2 to a Heading 1.

  If you used Mind Mapping software, you should be able to export your Mind Map as an outline. The software should set each of the main branches to Heading 1 (the chapters), and the smaller branches leading off them will be set to Heading 2, Heading 3 and so on (the headings, sub-headin
gs, scenes and key events).

  You can then load the outline into your word processor and continue working on it in Outline View. When you’re happy with it, switch back to Normal View or Print Layout view.

  You can write the text of your book beneath each camera shot or bullet point in your outline. Remember that the text’s style should be set to normal text, body text or regular text. This makes it easy to move things around later if you need to – switch back to Outline View and drag things to their new position.

  The best way to learn how to use the outline function is to play with it. Create a simple test document that you can experiment with. Try creating chapters, headings, and sub-headings, expanding and collapsing them, promoting and demoting them to different levels, turning them into body text and back into headings again, and dragging things around. Then try switching between different views to see how it looks.

  Creating an outline using freewriting

  In Chapter 5, we looked at using freewriting to create an overview of your book as if you were writing it under exam conditions. You could also use freewriting to create your outline.

  The overview you created earlier should cover your entire book, with a proper beginning, middle and end. It should have a summary of all the topics to be covered, or details of the main storyline, key events and sub-plots. Go back and finish this now if you haven’t already done so.

  The next step is to split your overview into chapters. A good starting point is to aim for twenty chapters for fiction and ten chapters for non-fiction. You can adjust this later as the situation becomes clearer.

  I usually print out a copy of my overview and draw lines across it to indicate where the chapter breaks will occur.

  Your overview might not be in the correct order at this stage. Some of the topics might be listed several times under different headings, and some of the ideas that are currently spread across several chapters might need bringing together under a single heading. It’s worth taking the time to sort this out before moving on.

  I then make a separate list of all chapters, and all the scenes, events or topics that each one will cover.

  Choose one of the topics or scenes and break it down into smaller and smaller sections or steps. Remember that when you expand each step into its full text later, it should take up one or two paragraphs that you can write with five minutes of thinking time and about fifteen to twenty minutes of writing time.

  Repeat this process until you’ve covered every topic or scene and you have a complete outline.

  How long should your outline be?

  It’s entirely up to you. Mine are usually around one-tenth of the length of the finished book. If I’m planning a 300-page novel, my outline will be about thirty pages. For a 240-page non-fiction book, I’ll create a twenty-four-page outline.

  As we’ve already seen, each sentence or bullet point in the outline should represent one or two paragraphs in the finished book. But this can vary. Sometimes the sentence you write in the outline will be all you need and you can copy it straight over to the final text. Occasionally, the sentence in the outline might need a whole page or more to cover it fully. But this usually only happens if you didn’t break the topic or scene down into enough detail.

  How long does outlining take?

  For a full-length book, I would suggest spending about three days on your outline, working for around two and a half hours per day. So about seven and a half hours in total.

  A second opinion

  Before you move on to the writing stage, it’s worth asking someone else to read through your outline. Ask him to check it for completeness, glaring plot holes, improbabilities, and so on. Ideally, you should choose someone who’s an expert in the subject or familiar with the genre, and whose judgement you trust.

  Fixing any problems at this stage should be reasonably easy and straightforward, even if they’re serious ones. If the worst happens and you decide to scrap the book, you’ll only lose a few days’ work. But if you don’t realise there’s a problem until after your book is finished, you might have to spend weeks or months rewriting it and editing it to sort it out. If someone had checked your outline before you started writing the book, you could have avoided that.

  Adding in the extras (non-fiction)

  One last thing to decide on, before you start writing your non-fiction book, is where all the extra bits will go. This includes the anecdotes, side notes, tips, quotes, references, charts, glossaries, and other essential information that doesn’t quite fit under any of the headings.

  They could go in boxes, side panels, footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography or resources section at the end of the book, and so on. Leave yourself notes in your outline – in roughly the right places – to indicate where you’ll put them. Then you won’t forget about them later.

  The next step

  How can you find enough time to write your book? We looked at a few ideas in this chapter, but there are lots more in the next one.

  8. Finding the time to write

  Most of us have hectic lives that are practically bursting at the seams. There aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done as it is, so how the heck are we going to find the time to write a book?

  Don’t worry; you have more than enough time to write your book – as this chapter will prove. The ideas that follow are a mixture of finding time and making time. You should be able to find at least one option that works for you and doesn’t require any drastic changes to your lifestyle.

  We’ve already seen that it’s perfectly possible to write your book in three months in your lunch break. If you don’t take lunch breaks, perhaps it’s time you started; they’re a fairly painless way of gaining extra writing time.

  You can take lunch breaks even if you don’t have a job. For example, if you’re at home looking after a baby or an elderly parent, see if someone else could take over for an hour each day. Everyone is entitled to a break – including you.

  If you’re wondering when you’ll have time to eat your lunch, remember that you’ll spend the first five minutes of each mini writing session thinking about what you’re going to write. You can eat while you think. If you write three sections of your book during your hour-long break, you’ll have fifteen minutes of thinking and eating time.

  If you normally eat at your desk, get away from it and go somewhere where you won’t be disturbed. Ideally, it should be somewhere you can walk to in five minutes. You can use the walking time as one of your thinking sessions so you’re ready to start writing as soon as you get there.

  If there’s nowhere in the building where you can write, perhaps you could sit in your car or in a colleague’s car. Go home if you live nearby. Or go to a friend’s or colleague’s house. Or go to a library, café or coffee shop. If the weather is good, sit in a park. Use headphones to block out the noise if you need to.

  Scheduling your writing time

  You should be able to find another hour or two each day without making any significant changes to your lifestyle or giving up anything you enjoy.

  If you budget your time carefully, you can allocate it to the things you have to do and the things you enjoy doing, and eliminate everything else – the things you don’t have to do and the things you don’t enjoy. Not only will this give you extra writing time, you’ll feel much happier too.

  For the next few weeks – or however long it takes you to write your book – writing should be your main priority. Everything else will either support your writing or get in the way of it. We can all find plenty of excuses for not writing because we’re too busy doing other things. So let’s reverse that attitude: you’re too busy writing your book to do those other things.

  As this is only for a few weeks, you can afford to let a few things slip and catch up with them later. (Unless you plan to start work on your next book as soon as you’ve finished this one.)

  Budgeting your time

  How do you spend your time at the moment? Try keeping a diary for a week, noting
down everything you do and how long you do it for. You should include things like:

  working*

  sleeping

  eating*

  bathroom time*

  household chores*

  family duties*

  shopping*

  socialising and entertaining

  relaxing*

  watching television

  reading*

  exercising*

  watching sports

  playing games

  travelling*

  reading emails, web pages, social media sites and blogs*

  writing

  editing

  researching

  marketing

  wasting time, waiting, queuing*

  Entries marked * can also be used for thinking, research, and so on.

  At the end of the week, add up all the time you spent on each activity and give each entry three scores:

  How essential was it?

  How much did you enjoy it?

  How productive was it in terms of writing your book?

  How much of the time did you spend being productive and enjoying yourself? How much time did you spend doing things you didn’t particularly enjoy, purely out of habit, when you could have been writing or having fun? How much time did you waste?

  Now that you know how you spend your days, make a schedule that shows the times when you’re definitely busy – doing things you have to do and things you really enjoy. Anything that’s left over, even if it’s just a few minutes here and there, can be allocated to writing – or, at the very least, thinking about what you’ll write in your next writing session.