How to Plan Your Book Before You Start Writing: Lesson 2

All right. Hey everyone. We are back with our Planning mini course, How to Plan your Book Before You Start Writing. Also known as how I didn't plan for years and finish zero books, and then how I learned to create a plan and finished 12 books.

This is lesson two of this workshop. If you haven't watched lesson one, make sure to go back, watch that lesson. You'll have an email, hopefully have a link also down below to get back to lesson one. But it's so important for you to have done that lesson and to have done the exercise. So pause this, go back, do the exercise, write down everything that you know about your book and then come back here and we'll get started.

So I wanna begin with a question. Do you want to fail to finish your book? Do you want to fail? And I know that this is kind of an obvious question because of course you don't want to fail. Why would you even ask that question? It's obvious that you don't want to fail, but when you think about how to write a book, there's really two ways to fail.

First, you could write a bad book. You could spend hundreds of hours of your life, maybe even longer, putting words down on a page and end up with a bad book. That would be incredibly disappointing, right?

And there's another way that you could fail. You could never finish. You could start writing your book, you could get really excited about it and then end up never finishing.

And this, I think, is why it's so important to have a plan. A plan helps you make sure that you don't fail, that you write a great book, that you actually finish a great book.

So why plan? Why create a plan? Why do I think regardless of if you're a pantser, regardless of if you haven't written anything before, why do I think you should plan?

First because it makes you more likely to finish your book? We did an internal study within The Write Practice. We have a program called 100 Day Book where we guide people through the process of writing their book in a hundred days.

We found that people who created a book plan were 52% more likely to finish their books. Just by going through this planning process it makes you more likely to finish your book. So why plan? If you wanna finish your book, it will make you more likely to finish.

Creating a plan allows you to get feedback sooner. I think we all need feedback. Sometimes we need feedback from other writers. Sometimes we need feedback from editors or mentors or coaches. Part of the deliberate practice process is having a coach and getting feedback, right. And having a plan allows you to get feedback on your writing. You can get feedback sooner. You can start to spot the pitfalls, the things that aren't connecting with people sooner rather than later, so that you can make a better plan and make your book work for readers.

Because you can work out problems before you start. As you're planning, you might realize, Oh, this is kind of awkward. Oh, this doesn't quite work. Oh, what am I gonna do here? And you can think through those problems and start creating some solutions to those problems so that you don't get 10 or 20 or 50,000 words into your book before you realize you have a giant problem in your book and you have no idea how to solve it. That's a great recipe for a writer's block. But by creating a plan, you can work out some of those problems before you start.

Most of all, plans help you defeat writer's block. I think we all have to be working to defeat writer's block. You deserve to have your book finished. No matter what kind of book you're working on right now, how many years of experience you have as a writer, you deserve to finish your book, to take your idea and turn it into a finished book.

But the problem is writer's block, it's standing in your way. And if it's not currently in your way, I bet that you're probably gonna experience it at some point in this process. And you need to know how to defeat writer's block. And a plan is the first step. It's the first weapon, the first tool that you can use to defeat writer's block.

You probably already have an idea by now. If you don't have an idea, that's okay. We can help you come up with an idea. I'll have a link in the description that will help you come up with book ideas. But if you already have an idea, how do you go from having an idea about your book to a solid plan to accomplishing that idea?

Now, the first step that I'm gonna talk to you about is to write down what you know. Take everything that you already know about your book and just put it on paper, write it down. And the Cool thing is, is that you've already done this. You have written down what you know, in lesson one.

So you're already a step ahead. You're on the process to creating a solid plan for your book.

Now, what's the next step? You need to create an outline. Now, for some of you, you get really excited about this idea about creating an outline, uh, if that's. Then you're in the right spot if that causes some panic or even some moral outrage because the idea of creating an outline is just horrible to you.

I get that. I still think you should create a simple outline, no matter where you are on that stage. Create a simple outline so you feel more prepared for when you go to write your book and so that you can do all of the things that we talked about: start getting feedback on your idea, making your idea better, working out some of those problems in advance. Having an outline is a great way to start to do that.

So when you're creating your outline, there's a couple of different ways that we can do this. There's kind of an easy way, a medium way, and kind of a more advanced way for more advanced writers. And I'm gonna share all of these with you. And you just pick the one that feels the fastest, because again, no matter how good your outline is, no one wants to read your outline. They wanna read your book.

And so it's important to get through this process as quickly as you can so that you can get to the writing process, which is where it all happens.

Let's start with the easy method of outlining. You want to take everything that you wrote in the last lesson, everything that you know about your book, and to separate it into story events or main topics with bullets.

So just take everything that you've written, break it up into story events or main topics by bullets. Okay?

Now, one thing you can do is to separate those bullets into sections. So if you're writing a novel or a memoir, you might choose to separate in, into acts in a three act structure.

For the novelists and memoirists among us. here's kind of a general rule of thumb for how long each section should be. The first act generally takes about 25% of the content of the book, the second act has about 50%, and the third act has another 25%.

If you're writing a non-fiction book, you can separate into sections,

Okay, So look at your bullets and then think about, okay, which ones are gonna go in the first act, which goes in the second act, which goes into the final act. Now if you're more of an advanced writer, for the creative writers in particular, you can also structure your acts with the six elements of plot.

Now, the six elements of plot come from The Write Structure, which is a story structure framework that we teach at The Write Practice. And if you're not familiar with it, that's okay. Don't worry too much about it. We'll have a link in the description with a little bit more information about it.

I don't want you to get too caught up in this if you're not already familiar with it right now. Okay? Mostly it's important to just create a basic outline and then we can work more on this later, but if you're already familiar with it, having your acts with the six elements of plot can be extremely helpful.

Now if you're writing nonfiction, a little bit more advanced method is to structure your chapters using the nonfiction book types guide. There are seven nonfiction book types, and that really changes how you'll structure your book. We have a link in the description that will help you figure out what kind of type you are writing. And again, I don't want you to spend too much time on this, but it's just helpful to have as a resource in your pocket. All right, So that's your practice, that's your exercise, your homework for today.

I want you to create a basic outline of your story, taking what you already know about your book and breaking it up into bullets, into an outline. Okay? That's, it shouldn't take you more than 10 or 20 minutes, but put that outline together and then we'll talk more about what to do with it in the next lesson. We'll see you there.