How To Write A Book In Ten Days
On Sunday 10th April, I started planning a new book.
On the 21st of April, that book was finished.
This article will talk about my current formula for writing books in ten days (hopefully, less. I’m aiming for seven days on the next one, which I’ll come back to later in this post.)
About The Book
The book is around 40,000 words, and will be around 200 pages in print. This article is not about pumping out a 3500 word article and releasing it on Kindle, it’s about building a “real” book.
It’s non-fiction. I’m still working out the kinks in my fiction writing process, because it doesn’t come as naturally to me as non-fiction writing does.
The book is currently not released. See yesterday’s post for more reasons why, but also I’m going to write “sequels” to it and I’m going to write them all so that I can add them to the back matter. I also have to get a cover commissioned (or made myself, but I’m probably going to have someone else do it so it’s not amateur.)
The things above could easily have been done within ten days though: I could have had the cover artist work on the cover whilst I was writing, and I could have not bothered with the ISBN stuff (Incidentally, if you’re in the US you don’t have to worry about this step as you can buy ISBNs from Amazon.)
That’s about all you need to know about the book itself.
Strategy and Planning Your Book
Some people can write without a plan of any sort, though it’s more common in fiction. Unless you are absolutely sure this is you, I suggest you don’t do this. However, we also don’t want to spend three days planning if our goal is to get a book written in ten days.
So we want a compromise. My compromise was to first write the titles of the chapters. So you’d have something like this on a sheet of paper:
BOOK TITLE
Introduction
Chapter ONE: What is your book about?
Chapter Two: Why Do You Want To Learn This?
Chapter Three: How Do You Learn This
Chapter Four: Let’s DO THIS
Or something similar. I aim for twenty to thirty chapters in a book to start with. This changes depending on what the topic is, who the target market is and various other bits and bobs. I also pick that number for another reason, which I’ll talk about in the writing section.
Once you’ve decided what chapters you’re going to have, then you want to break down those chapters into bullet points.
It might look something like this:
Chapter One: Why Eat Superfood X?
- It’s healthy
- It makes you socially awesome
- It makes you smarter
- It makes you happier
- Your cat will actually like you if you eat this
- Girls will flock to you like something out of a Lynx (Axe) advert
You get the picture. A few bullet points will help carry you through. Something I haven’t done in those bullet points is use a beginning-middle-end structure, which you’ll want to do so that your chapters flow. Hopefully your last bullet point will conclude the chapter and lead into the next one.
This stage will take you maybe one hour. Two if you’re still working your head around the subject. By the end of this stage, you’ll have a set of chapters, you’ll have a breakdown of what’s in those chapters, and you’ll be able to start writing… well, almost.
Planning and Research
I knew the topic of the book beforehand, and I strongly consider not writing a book about a topic you know nothing about. I had to research though, and you should probably do your research straight after you do your chapter breakdowns.
When you’re writing a book quickly, you don’t want to be learning as you go along. If in doubt, put off writing the book until you’ve learned what you need to so that writing is just a case of reciting what you already know.
As far as facts and figures, that’s what you need to have to hand after you’ve finished the research section. Don’t let this swallow your time. If you’ve done the breakdown of each chapter, then you’ll have a general idea of the narrative flow and where you’re going to need researched knowledge to support what you’re saying. Get the facts and figures you need, and forget everything else about the subject. It’s not needed.
(Obviously, if you’re trying to write the next Brief History of Everything or The Selfish Gene, you’re probably going to need to ignore me.)
Alright. You’ve got your facts and figures, you’ve got your breakdowns, let’s do what needs to be done.
Writing Your Book
I think I started writing my book on the Monday – which was the day after I planned it. I had a day or two where I didn’t write anything. I had a couple of days where I did a nominal amount because of other work. On one day I wrote about seven chapters. You’ll probably find that the project gets easier the more you have done; around chapter fourteen, I realised I was going to complete the book. I’ve written before about self-doubt melting away when you reach a certain point. That’s what will happen.
Here’s a general guide though: five chapters a day.
A thirty chapter book will take you six days, and a twenty chapter book will take you four days.
Now, some days you won’t hit that goal. For instance I had one chapter which I thought was going to be 1500 words but it actually turned out to be 4000. If they’d all been like that, I’d have to write 20,000 words a day to hit the goal of five chapters. That didn’t happen. Sometimes you’ll have short chapters that seem to take forever, sometimes you’ll race through a chapter and be able to do many in a day.
Five chapters are a lot when you lay down to sleep at night. If you do one chapter of a book, then you’ll go to sleep wondering “Will I ever finish this book?” If you do 20% of a book in one day, you’ll feel excellent and sleep like a baby (and wake up ready to go the next day, in my experience.)
Something I do when it comes to the structure of a book and chapter is design the book so the chapters are about the length you can concentrate for. I can write about 1500 words at a time – or, for forty five minutes – until I start to lose my train of thought. I design my chapters to be around 1500 words long for that reason.
It’s very easy to say, “I’m going to sit down and knock out a chapter.” Then you go and have a bathroom break, make a cup of tea, watch a YouTube video or something guilt-free. Of course, if you get really into your chapter and you work for two hours without a break, then that’s great.
I fought against this for a long time. I’ve tried the Pomodoro technique, I’ve tried forcing myself into writing non-stop without breaks. Ultimately, I think (at the moment) we all have a natural pace and a natural RAM/Processor (i.e. our brains can process a certain amount of data within our short term memory) and it’s better to work with that than fight it.
If you can write 4000 words or write for two hours or twenty minutes at a time before you get bored, then plan around that.
You’d be surprised how many 45 minute slots you can fit into the day. We’re looking for five. It’ll get easier once you’re three-quarters of the way through your book, and probably before then.
Editing Your Book
If you’re counting, then you’ve probably worked out that we’ve only used around five days of our budget of ten for this writing project.
Once you’ve written your book, it’s plain sailing: You know everything is within your grasp. However, you’ve got to do the tidy-up. Leave this for the rest of the day after you’ve finished your writing. Then read through and correct the grammar.
If you are paying attention, then there shouldn’t be too many mistakes. You want to be a first draft writer wherever and whenever you can. Still, edit out clunky passages and check for misused words. (I.e. ones the spellchecker doesn’t pick up.)
Creating a Document
I’ve already written lots of stuff about writing templates. In short, you want to have a single template document set up for all your future book writing projects. Have a table of contents built (so it just needs you to click “update”) have a section for your title page, dedications, and back matter and chapter pages. Then it’s just a case of copy-pasting your written work from wherever you wrote it into these final documents.
Final Thoughts
I think I’ve included everything. At the very least, you’ll want to budget a day when you’ve finished; you’ve got to write the blurb for your book, upload the book wherever you’re going to sell it and make sure the cover is finished and correct. There’s probably other stuff I’m forgetting as well, but it’s all finishing touches; we’ve gone through Ideas, Research, Writing, Editing and Creating a Manuscript.
I did this in ten days, and it was very much a part time endeavour. You could easily do it quicker than I did and make less mistakes than I have.
Hopefully, I’ll do exactly those things, and I’ll be able to update this process for you all so that it takes even less time and produces even better books.