Author Archives: Doug Toft

About Doug Toft

Writer and development editor. I help busy experts finish their book manuscripts. More at dougtoft.net

Link Feast—Read These Before Writing Your Next Nonfiction Book

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Following are posts that I revisit periodically to regain perspective and tune up my writing process. I recommend them to you.

Note: You’ll find these most helpful if your purpose is to write a book that instructs people to solve a problem or learn a skill.

Writing a Self-Help Book 

I respect the folks at New Harbinger. They’ve been around for 40 years and published a lot of good books. Though their focus is self-help (defined as gaining essential life skills), this page of publishing guidelines offers wonderful ideas for organizing a manuscript and writing clear instructions. For example:

To effectively teach an individual step of a skill, follow this sequence: state the rule or instruction first. Be clear and to the point. Then, give an example of how someone else did this step. Lastly, provide the exercise for the reader to perform. This gives the reader three ways to learn the skill: intellectually by precept, emotionally through modeling, and experientially through action.

Chris Brogan on Writing Books

Chris Brogan produces a lot. In addition to frequent blog posts and magazine articles, he’s  written a couple of books that landed on the New York Times bestseller lists.

Chris’s series of posts on writing books offer good, actionable ideas for planning your project, organizing your ideas, getting it done, and promoting the published product. Please do read these:

B. J. Fogg on Habit Change

B. J. Fogg is a psychologist who teaches at Stanford University and consults with businesses. He specializes in helping people change habits through effective design rather than motivation. The key is to take baby steps: Link easy new behaviors to stable cues and reward yourself often.

Like over 10,000 other people, I took his Tiny Habits program—a week-long series of daily emails that coach you to apply his ideas. This blew me away. B. J.’s writing is clear as a bell and simple as a country creek. And, he’s on the cutting edge of his field.

If your purpose for writing a book is to change what readers actually do, then you cannot afford to overlook B. J.’s ideas. After doing Tiny Habits, check out his larger model of behavior change.

Chris Brogan on Finding Time to Write

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Write notes about your book into something like Evernote, which can be accessed from your phone, your desktop, and any web browser (meaning you have no excuses to take down ideas).

Keep 3×5 index cards in your pocket or bag, and jot notes there, too. A lot of writing is done before you sit down to actually write.

Build loose-but-useful outlines and seek out 20 minutes here and there to “shade them in.” People facing a blank page waste too much time thinking about the page. Instead, work on bits that need work.

If you work better speaking, look into a product like Dragon Naturally Speaking to do dictation for you.

Prone to distractions? Try Ommwriter for Mac (or PC).

Also, shutting off the Internet helps.

—Chris Brogan on Writing a Book—Finding Time

Discovering That You Have Nothing to Say

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Writing makes thinking visible. The process of writing reveals gaps in logic, mistaken assumptions, unanswered questions, holes in evidence, and every other species of confusion.

At times it reveals something on a grander scale: You really don’t have a book inside you right now.

I have seen this happen to people. And, it has happened to me.

It is not pleasant.

Sure, you have pages and words—maybe thousands of words.

But one morning you sit with a sobering cup of coffee and read all those words. And there comes a sudden discovery, a moment of sickening clarity.

My manuscript really doesn’t say anything.

Maybe it’s page after page of restating the obvious—attempts to say what’s been already been said much better by other people.

Perhaps the anecdotes fall flat. The examples are thin and don’t ring true. The text meanders from topic to topic with no logic or flow.

Or, you find page after page of abstraction and no actionable instructions. There’s nothing that would actually lead people to move their mouth, arms, or legs differently after reading your book.

Sometimes the wisest option is to completely rethink the project, to start over—or simply let the whole thing go.

This can hurt. A lot.

At such times, it’s important to choose your language carefully.

You could describe your discovery as a disaster.

Or, you could describe it as enlightenment.

You thought you knew something and had something to share—something that would light a fire in other people. And now you know that you don’t.

This is a sacred moment.

When you realize that you do not know, you are free to learn. You have reached a place that Shunryu Suzuki called ”beginner’s mind.”

And how wonderful you got there now—before you invest more time, money, and energy in the project.

Before trying to squeeze more drops from a dry intellectual sponge.

Before trying to publish and promote the book you thought you had.

Before the book gets slammed by reviewers and rejected by readers.

Remember that it’s just a manuscript. It’s not you. Word count is not the same as self-worth.

You can work with someone like me to fix the manuscript. Or you can put the project on the back burner and let it simmer for a while.

When you clear your mind and become willing to start over, you might find that something real enters to fill the void.

Writing can be as stern—and as enlightening—as a Zen master.

Making Time to Write—Two Mind Hacks from Bob Pozen

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Are you too busy to write? Before you answer, consider Bob Pozen.

Bob Pozen is busy. As chairman emeritus of MFS Investment and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, he essentially works 2 high-profile jobs.

At the same time, he’s a prolific writer. In addition to producing an avalanche of articles, he wrote Too Big To Save? How to Fix the US Financial System and The Mutual Fund Business, a seminal textbook.

How does he get all that writing done?

Pozen revealed his productivity secrets in a series of interviews conducted by Justin Fox for the Harvard Business Review blog network. These led Pozen to write yet another book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, published in 2012.

Focus on thinking—not time

Fox asked about how to write quickly, and Pozen’s reply blows me away. He turned the question around:

A lot of people confuse a thinking problem with a writing problem. In order to write quickly, I need to see the line of argument very clearly. If I don’t fully understand the line of argument, I cannot write even a paragraph. My brain won’t let my pen move.

In order to spell out the logic of the argument, you need to compose an outline before writing. Only by playing around with an outline can you get comfortable with the key steps in the argument. For an article or a speech, an outline does not have to be long or detailed. Just the four or five key points, with a few sub-points under each.

True, a book is more complicated than an article. For books, Pozen writes a detailed outline and then sends it out to reviewers before drafting chapters. The strategy is essentially the same—start by thinking clearly through the whole of what you want to say.

See the first draft as a process of discovery

Even though your outline (table of contents) represents a complete prototype for your book, you’re going to learn a lot more when you flesh it out into a series of chapters. As Pozen said:

After you clarify your thinking by writing an outline, you’ve got to be willing to write a first draft that is rough. Most people feel they have to write a really good first draft and that’s why they get writer’s block. In many cases, it’s only when you actually finish your first draft that it comes to you how the whole piece fits together. 

That short paragraph unpacks a lot. First comes one the most common pieces of writing advice—let the first draft be rough. Keep your expectations low.

Then Pozen adds something profound and easy to forget: When creating a first draft, you’re still finding out what you want to say.

In fact, we could justifiably call this process something other than “writing”—like creating a “discovery document” or “expanding the table of contents.” Don’t even say that you’re “writing a book” until you start the second draft.

Semantic games? Try it and see what happens.

Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write With Style

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My clients sometimes worry about developing their writing style and personal voice. I tell them that one of the surest ways to lose both is to try finding them. Rather, style and voice emerge naturally when you focus on other things.

Recently I unearthed an item from my files that confirms this point. It’s a reprint of an ad by International Paper—a copy-heavy 2-page spread that ran in national magazines way back in the 1970s (that dim, prehistoric, pre-Internet era when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth).

The author is—of all people—Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, and many other books.

This thing is a gem. And International Paper was way cool for letting this cranky novelist step into the corporate spotlight.

Unfortunately the ad is long out of print and hard to find. I’ll give you the essence right here.

So how do you develop style? Vonnegut gives a succinct list of answers.

Find a subject you care about

This comes first. As Vonnegut notes:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

Do not ramble

Enough said.

Keep it simple

People sometimes equate writing style with large words and complex sentences. But as Vonnegut reminds us:

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Have the guts to cut

One of the hardest and most useful ways to cultivate style is to delete the passages that fail to serve your purpose. Inevitably, these will include some of the most eloquent sentences in your draft. As Vonnegut notes:

If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Sound like yourself

English is a language of infinite possibilities, offering everything from the rhythms of Shakespeare and the King James Bible to the utilitarian prose of technical manuals.

Even so, Vonnegut urges us to retain the nuances of our first language—the diction and syntax that we learned as children:

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child….I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench…. I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.

Pity the readers

This is my favorite point. When focused on self-expression, we can easily forget our audience. They are people much like ourselves—short on time and overwhelmed with options. Our first obligation is to serve them with lean, lucid language:

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

Two Big Benefits of a Simple Structure

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Your manuscript will be easier to read—and to write.

What I mean by simple structure is a flat structure—just 2 levels of content in your manuscript:

  • Chapter headings
  • Chapter subheadings

A variation on this is:

  • Part headings
  • Chapter headings

In either case, there are only 2 levels of content for you to create—and for readers to consume.

Examples

For examples, go to Amazon or Google Books to look up the tables of contents for:

18 Minutes by Peter Bregman

The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Recovering My Kid by Joseph Lee*

Platform by Michael Hyatt

Contrast such books with those that use a complex structure—part headings, chapter headings, chapter subheadings, followed by sub-subheadings and sub-sub-subheadings. The full table of contents for such books would look like an outline with many levels of indentation.

In contrast, a flat structure is a thing of beauty—sparse, lean, and yet capable of holding everything you want to say.

Again, the benefits:

Ease of reading

It’s hard for people to remember the differences between multiple levels of headings. Many readers will just skip them.

Ease of writing

With a flat structure, you don’t need complex word processing or outlining software—such as the bloated and buggy Microsoft Word. A simple text editor will do. (Examples for the Mac include TextEdit and iA Writer.)

In addition, it’s easier for you to remember what level of content you’re creating at any given time. There are only 2 options.

Two caveats

I’m not saying that you’ll want to write every book with a simple structure. It’s just an option.

You might even find that creating a simple structure for your book yields so much clarity on your topic that you can naturally transition to a more complex structure. If it feels good, do it. Then get a few people to read your manuscript and ask them if it flows logically.

A flat structure can make the task of writing simpler—not simple. I doubt that finishing a book manuscript will ever become effortless.

Annie Dillard observed that “Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.”

A simple structure can decrease that impossibility.

* Full disclosure: I worked with Joe on this book.

The Two Minds of the Modern Writer—Books and Blogs

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I support the blog to book model — outlining your manuscript as a series of posts and writing them one at a time. Yet it’s important to note that this method will give you only the raw material for your book. You’ll need to transform that material in specific ways to make your ideas and stories come alive in a long piece of exposition or narration.

This ain’t easy. It’s analogous to translating a text from one language to another. Books and blogs represent two distinct rhetorical environments—two lenses on the world. Two distinct sets of writing strategies.

I was reminded of this in a juicy post by Jakob Nielsen, Writing Style for Print vs. Web. He deftly captures the differences.

In short, you can think of people on the Web as often impatient, hurried, and on the hunt for actionable content. Our job as writers is to deliver the goods with prose that’s as lean and efficient as possible.

This means that anecdotes and stories can easily fall flat and come off as fluff. On the Web, these will give way to:

  • short paragraphs
  • short sentences
  • short words
  • typographic cues (such as boldface for key words)
  • lists, lists, and more lists—both bulleted and numbered

It extends even to the way we write titles and sub-headings. To optimize them for search engines, begin them with key words. This accommodates readers who are scanning the left side of a list of articles or posts.

In contrast, books represent a more leisurely pace. If online reading is like “quickie” sex, then reading a book is like gazing tenderly into your lover’s eyes as a prelude to a full afternoon of passion.

With printed material or ebooks, readers are more patient. They give you implicit permission to slow down and drive the interaction:

  • Your sentences can loosen up and stretch a bit.
  • You can warm up to key points with personal confessions and extended stories.
  • You don’t have to worry as much about beginning titles with key words. In fact, you can even get away with a little titillating amiguity.

If you’re editing a series of blog posts into a book manuscript, you’ll notice something else right away: All those quickie paragraphs, lists, and boldfaced key words look kind of silly and affected on the page. You now get to fuse them, elaborate, comine, and discover new connections.

In addition, sentence fragments—which work well on the web—start looking like errors on the page. You get to fix those and take a deeper dive into what you truly wanted to say.

I’m not arguing that books are “better” than blogs. That’s like telling you that you can only enjoy Beethoven and have to give up the Beatles.

The point is simply that books and blogs serve different purposes with different means. The twenty-first century writer simply shows up with the appropriate tool box.

“Start Every Day as a Producer, Not a Consumer”

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The following words are currently rocking my life—particularly as someone with multiple books in process:

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until “later.” Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you’re working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc….

It sounds subtle, but these are the only days where I find myself getting anything done. I either start my day like this and feel normal and productive, or I look up and realize it’s early evening, I haven’t accomplished anything and I can’t bring myself to focus no matter how hard I want to.

—aceex

Aligns perfectly with Clay Johnson’s write 500 words before 8 am.