How To Write A Book | Joel Trains Authors
Write a book. Start your own Internet business.
Thank you, dear reader. Whether this is your first visit to my site, or you’ve been here before, I appreciate you reading my words.
I want to connect with you, to learn who you are, to find out how I might serve you. It’s an important part of what I came here to do. Thank you for helping me fulfill my mission.
I think I am never any happier than when I am dwelling in gratitude.
Love and blessings,
Joel
You want a house. You have a lot. You’ve got a general idea of what the house should look like. So you think, “Time to act! I’ll just jump in.” You head off for the lumber yard. “Let’s see, I’ll probably need some 2×4′s. Oh yeah, and some cement. Some nails–I’ll get 50 pounds, and come back if I need more”…
A house? You think this track leads to your dream house? No way.
Why?
Very simply, because you have no idea what goes first, and what goes next. Never mind permitting and all the stuff that has to happen before construction. How about a foundation?
You get the idea.
Your book is the same.
Just start writing, and you’ll have… a bunch of writing. But it won’t be a book.
A book has structure. Create the structure first. Then write. That’s the quickest way to produce a book.
Kim Page and I, under the auspices of NextNow and Bill Daul, did this workshop on 10/24/10 in Palo Alto. Kim spoke about auditory voice, and I spoke about written “voice.”
PS To register: http://moreclients.eventbrite.com/
I took off the period from the Memorial of Trumpets (what most Jews call Rosh HaShana) through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at least in terms of blogging. I didn’t stop working entirely, but I did focus on just a couple of things, and on taking full advantage of joining with my people in reflection on the past year and the coming year, and on making things right with fellow humans.
In the Yom Kippur prayerbook, it says that in observing the day we can find forgiveness for offenses against God, but that for offenses between people, we must go to them. That’s a very practical and loving point of view, and I appreciate it.
And that goes for both asking and giving forgiveness.
Hmm…what if I cast a broader net here? OK. If I have offended you, my reader, in any way, I ask your forgiveness. And I invite you to write or call me and tell me about it, so that I can also seek not only forgiveness, but a place of reconciliation. I mean it. My cell number is 650-336-3937.
I’ve grown more and more aware of the significance of emotions in my life and in my communications. When I was a math grad student, good writing was elegant, and elegance meant succinctness. Expressing a thought in the fewest possible words and symbols was the peak of elegance. Unfortunately, I carried that over into my writing. My greatest challenge is to being juicy, and not just concise.
It’s odd, because I’m a very emotional person. I just didn’t accord emotions–mine or those of others–the weight they deserve in human discourse. Now I can say that I feel bad about that. Sorry, even. And determined to do better. (See? Feelings! 
)
Feelings enter naturally into fiction and memoirs. But less naturally into the books being written by my typical clients, who are typically trying to explain their “special sauce” to prospective clients. And that fact makes them all the more important. Emotions are what engage the reader, not facts. Facts are important, but feelings communicate.
Read this from Bob Stein, of the Institute for the Future of the Book:
the future of the app
08.02.2010, 10:37 AM
posted by bob stein
Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called “a book,” people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it’s true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called “a book,” since we don’t have that word yet, “book” works better than “institute for the future of discourse” or “institute for thinking about what comes after the book.” I end my answer by suggesting that one day we’ll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.
I’ve always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman’s First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate — “app.” It’s not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right.
The aha moment went like this . . . . while zoning in and out of the Feldman piece I started to think about the iPad that I’d been using for the past six weeks — not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.
The distinction between media types was a lot more important during the analog era of the mid-twentieth cenury. In 1950 no one would confuse a novel with a movie or a song with a TV show. But today we have e-books with video sequences, and movies published with extensive text-based supplements. Is Lady Gaga a music star or video star? More
What do you think? And if you’re in the neighborhood on September 13, come to my Meetup here in Mountain View, CA, to discuss it.
Well, it’s not really from Clippy, the hated Microsoft “helper” that came with Office and was finally buried in 2007. Clippy is mentioned in this fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal by Stanford professor Clifford Nass:
Alex Nabaum
By CLIFFORD NASS
When BMW introduced one of the most sophisticated navigation and telematics systems into its 5 Series car in Germany a decade ago, it represented the pinnacle of German engineering excellence, with great advances in accuracy and functionality. Yet BMW was forced to recall the product—because the system had a female voice. The service desk had received numerous calls from agitated German men who had the same basic complaint. They couldn’t trust a woman to give them directions. More
Go ahead, read the article. Then come back here.
What speaks to me in this piece is the significance of rapport, and the ease with which it can be created and broken–even with semi-animate objects. It makes me think: What about my book is generating rapport with my reader? What’s breaking rapport?
I’m using “rapport” in the sense that it is used in NLP–neurolingistic programming. Here’s one definition:
Rapport is the quality of harmony, recognition and mutual acceptance that exists between people when they are at ease with one another and where communication is occurring easily.
In general, we gravitate towards people that we consider similar to us, because people like people who are like themselves – like likes like. In rapport the common ground or similarities are emphasised and the differences are minimised.
Rapport is an essential basis for successful communication – if there is no rapport there is no (real) communication!
I’ve not seen writing teachers address rapport categorically. Maybe it’s time we do. What do you think?
David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to time and task management is simply unequaled. It is simple, understandable, and do-able. If you are trying to fit your book-writing into your schedule, you owe it to yourself to check him out. Lots of free resources, too. Here’s a piece from his latest email:
- Image via Wikipedia
LET THE LISTS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
Probably the most universal how-to question for GTD neophytes is this: How do I keep track of all the things that you’re recommending I keep out of my head? What’s the best tool? The answer is pretty simple: however you most effectively can create and review lists.
You will need a good filing system, an inbox and a ubiquitous capture tool, a box for stuff to read, and maybe a tickler file; but for the most part, all you need are lists. But you’ll need several. And they need to be complete. And you’ll need a place to keep them.
For many newbies, the multiple lists they may see in any of our systems can overwhelm them at first glance. More
Non-fiction authors often need to interview people. Of course you should record the interview, and electronic recorders are so inexpensive that they are commodities. Besides, most smart phones will record full interviews and let them be downloaded to your computer, where you can play them back.
What used to frustrate me was finding my way around long recordings. An hour or two of talking takes a long time to skim.
One of the few applications I regretted giving up in my last PC-to-Mac transition, about four years ago, was Microsoft OneNote. And my very favorite thing about OneNote was this: You can tell it to record audio while you take notes. Then, the audio is indexed by your notes.
So you can go back to your notes and click anywhere, and OneNote will play the portion of the audio that was being spoken at the moment you made that note. Very, very, very powerful.
Circus Ponies’ Notebook on the Mac did this, but it also crashed, lost stuff, and corrupted several months worth of notes irretrievable. I don’t trust that product, even though that miserable experience was three years ago.
I just discovered Pear Note from Useful Fruit software, a wonderful audio- and video-note taking app that focuses on this issue. It is beautifully designed and works. I haven’t been using it long enough to remark on its robustness, but it feels very good to me.
Another useful tool–at least for shorter interviews–is the LiveScribe Echo. It’s a pen with a built-in recorder. You take notes on special paper. The pen records (excellent quality) what’s being said, and also captures your writing or drawing. Dock the pen with your PC or Mac, and both the audio and the writing/drawing are now accessible.
Touch the pen to your writing, and it plays back what was being said at the time of that particular piece of writing. That also works on the computer, without the pen.
Image via CrunchBase
The recording is optionally binaural. When you record binaurally in a noisy environment, you can pull every softly spoke word out of the background with ease (when you also listen binaurally, of course).
My only complain about the pen: Battery life. I never get more than just over two hours. I’d carry a second pen for long meetings, but the syncing scheme makes that complicated.
EDIT: Just learned that Word 2004 and 2008 on the Mac, in “Notebook” mode, also do this!
