Quite a few years ago I took a weekly course titled how to write a book. We met on Tuesday evenings for 8 sessions. I planned to take the course and then magically know how to write a book. I was correct in thinking that taking a course would be helpful. It was. Each week we covered an aspect of manifesting a publishable manuscript:
• Inspirations, aspirations, and ideas
• The plan: outline or wing it? Answer: it depends
• Setting goals and schedules: (so left-brained!) but annoyingly necessary
• Talent vs. hard work? Both helpful and blessed are talented writers who work hard
• Procrastination, negative thinking, distractions
• Dealing with feedback
• The rewrite.
• Marketing
And every week we talked about craft and brought our pages for feedback. It was a valuable course. I learned a lot, and it has stuck with me. I’ve written thousands of pages. And yet, I’ve not yet finished that book, so knowing how isn’t the whole story. If you thought by reading this 200-word blog post you’d learn how to write a book, you have the optimism that’ll carry you through challenging days.
The rest of the story: I’ll boil it down to 2 words: butt time.
G. R.
