How to Plan Your Book Before You Start Writing: Lesson 1

All right. Hey everyone. I'm Joe Bunting, the founder of The Write Practice. So excited to have you here with me today and really this week as we talk about book plans, and how having the book plan is one of the best things that you can do. If you want to finish your book and finish a great book.

We have this three part short course available for you. It's gonna be really helpful.

This is how to plan your book before you write. And the subtitle of this short course is how I didn't plan for years and finished zero books.

That's true. I didn't create plans for years. I just started writing. I finished notebooks and then how I learned to create a plan and finished over a dozen books after that.

Planning has changed my life and I think it's gonna be so helpful for you as well. But a lot of people don't know to create a plan.

And so that's what we're gonna talk about in this three part course. If you don't know me, my name's Joe Bunting. I'm an author, Wall Street Journal bestselling writer the founder of The Write Practice. So excited to have you here with us today, learning about how to create a plan. Thanks for joining us.

And if you have ever struggled to finish a book if you've ever gotten to a place where you are just crushed by writer's block where you felt completely defeated, where you felt like you couldn't write where you couldn't finish your book, I just wanna say I've been there. I get it. If you haven't experienced that before, one, I'm jealous of you.

And I wouldn't be surprised if you do experience it at some point because writers' block hits every. Almost every writer I know has struggled with writer's block at some point in their career. Sometimes they've struggled with it regularly throughout their writing process. I still struggle with it now.

I've written more than a dozen books and I still struggle to finish them. But. Having a plan has changed everything for me and so Today and over the next couple of lessons, we're gonna talk about how I've used plans to finish my books and how you can do that too.

What happened for me is that I wrote books for years. Or tried to write them anyway. I studied creative writing in college. After college I got a job at a local newspaper. I had a blog. I did a lot of writing, but I still struggle to write a book for years.

And then I had this mentor who coached. Through the process of creating a plan. They were a New York Times bestselling author and they showed me the process to create a plan and it changed everything for me. I finished that book, I went on to write more books. I wrote book after a book. Now I wrote over a dozen books.

Finally, I started The Write Practice in 2011 to coach other writers to finish their books too. I've been teaching the process of creating plans in some form or other.

Since 2011, we've helped thousands of people finish their books, and we think we can do that for you as well. There are some reasons though that most people don't create a plan.

Actually creating a plan is kind of rare especially for aspiring writers. A lot of professional writers use plans, but when you're just getting started as a writer there are a lot of reasons that people don't use plans.

Maybe some of these ring true for.

One reason that people don't create a plan is because they're just excited about their idea and they just wanna start writing. And I get it. I've been there. You get an idea and you're like, Oh my gosh, this is it. This is the book that's going to make me a famous bestselling author.

I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna become a famous writer. I'm gonna earn a living at. Uh, And so you just sit down and you start writing. You're so excited about it, but there's a problem with that because eventually you're gonna experience something called Writer's Block. You're gonna get stuck. You're not gonna know what to write next.

And what happens is so many people fall off at that point. They have no idea what to do next. They don't have a plan, and so they get stuck and their book never gets finished. I don't want that to happen to you. Another reason people don't plan is because they're pantsers. There are two types of writers out there.

Planners, Right. People who need to plan out everything in their book. And there are pantsers people need, who need to write by the seat of their pants. Which one sounds most like you? Maybe you're kind of in the middle where you are like a planter, where you plan a little bit and then you write by the seat of your pants.

It's fine to be any of these. I think it's cool if you're a pantser.

Even so I would encourage you to create some kind of plan, to create part of a. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about what the components of the plan are in just a little bit.

Another reason why people don't plan is they don't know how to plan a book, right? We aren't born knowing how to write a book. This is not something that just comes naturally to us. Just like we're not born knowing how to read. We have to learn these things.

We have to practice these things. Since 2011, we've been teaching writers how to practice. And part of practicing if you wanna write books is learning how to plan writing a book.

And finally people don't plan because they find planning to be overwhelming. It's really hard at the beginning of the writing process, you get an idea and you just want to start writing it, but then you have to go and figure out how everything works and you're not really sure how everything works.

Okay, so in this training, we wanna give you a really simple, straightforward, step by step approach to get you writing as soon as possible. I want you to focus on your writing. I don't want you to be planning forever. No one is going to read your plan. They're not gonna buy your plan at a bookstore, right? You have to write your book. But if you don't have a plan, you're gonna be much less likely to actually get to the point where your book is ready to.

That it is ready to read, and I want you to get to that point. Okay. And I think a plan is essential. Part of getting.

So today, and in this series we're gonna make book planning simple. That's my goal, is to help you finish a book plan in a really simple way. We're gonna have exercises, we're gonna have resources, and we're gonna have these three lessons.

So first of all, what is a book plan? What does that even mean? And here's how we think about book plans at The Write Practice. A book plan allows you to think through every step in the book writing process, from initial idea to final draft, and even to the publishing process.

So every phase of the writing and publishing process before you start writing your book. It's really thinking about every step along the way so that you're prepared, so that you're ready when you get there.

There's a great quote from Dwight Eisenhower. He said This, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

All right. Your book plan alone isn't very useful, but the act of going through the planning process is going to prepare you to write your book. Just by spending the time planning on the front end before you start writing is gonna make you much more effecti. Much more likely to finish your book. So what is a book plan?

What are the components of a book plan? We think about seven different things that go into our book plans.

The first thing is the premise. It's your whole idea into a single sentence summary, taking your whole idea for your book and turning it into a single sentence summary.

Then you have a synopsis and or outline. So thinking through what is in your book, structure of your book, what does that look like?

Deadlines are an important part of a book plan, both the final deadline when you're gonna finish it, and kind of some milestones along the. Maybe weekly deadlines or daily deadlines.

A little bit about your team, right? Who is going to help you in this process? We think about writing a book as this solo thing that you do, maybe in your cabin, in the woods, or in your Paris apartment or something like that, right? We have a really idealistic picture of what book writing looks like, but the reality is, is that books always come from communities. You can just go look at an acknowledgement section of a book and see that books come from teams. They come from communities. So who's gonna be on your team? Who's going to give you accountability? Who's gonna read your writing and edit your writing?

Having a sense of who those people are at the beginning is helpful.

Inspiration is an important component of a book plan. These include comps, books that have come out in the last five years, include masterworks, kind of these big hallmark books that everyone knows about that are central inspiration to your book.

Reader avatar is helpful to have as a component of your book plan. Who's going to read your book? What kind of other books are they interested in? Having a sense of your reader, who your reader is, is helpful.

And finally, a publishing and marketing plan. What happens once you finish your book?

What are you going to do then? It might be weird to think about publishing and marketing as a component of a book plan when you're first started starting to write. But by thinking about this, you're actually much more likely to get.

All right, so how do you start? What's the first step that you can take to creating a plan? We're gonna make this really simple. All right? The first step is to write down everything that you know about your book. Write it down. What's gonna happen if you know who the main character is? Write that down. If you know the topic, main topic as a nonfiction book that you're gonna write down or that you're gonna write about, write that down.

Write down everything that you know about your book. Right. This could include all the points that you're gonna make if you're writing nonfiction, if you're writing a memoir, maybe the different life experiences and events that you're going to write about. Write down, if you're writing fiction, all the things that are gonna happen.

right? Maybe you don't know everything, but write down everything that you do know. Okay? If you know the ending, write that down. If you don't know the ending, that's. Don't write it down. Just write down everything that you know. This could be a page, it could be three pages. It could be five or 10 pages, but just write down everything that you know about your book, all right?

Don't go past 10 pages. That's too much. But write down as much as you know. Sound good? Work on that for your homework. Write down everything you know about your book. We're gonna talk about the next step in this planning process in our next video, so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, happy writing and we'll see you soon.