Give Me 5 Minutes, and I Will Help You Make This Your Best Year Ever
The four questions below will help you make this your best year ever. Grab a journal or open a new document. Then jot down some answers to these questions. 1. What Made You Proud? As you look back, what do you feel really good about? What accomplishments make you proud? These could be related to work, fitness, personal, family, whatever. Take it in and soak it up. You did some good stuff this year!
5 Steps for Getting Your Mojo Back When Dealing with Rejection
I’m PUMPED to be guest posting over at Mary DeMuth’s blog today. Here’s what she says at the beginning of the piece… I normally don’t take guest posts (in fact, it’s pretty rare these days, though you’ll see another one on Monday), but I really loved what my friend and editor Chad had to say in this piece. This is for all those writers out there who face rejection on an ongoing basis. (Here’s a funny/sad truth: the farther you go in the publishing journey, THE MORE rejection you will receive.) So learning to navigate rejection is crucial. It makes the difference between succeeding and failing in the writing business. Want to read the post? Click here.
The Busy Person’s Guide to Writing a Nonfiction Book (Part 2)
How do busy people write books? Realistically, how does that happen? In my last post I wrote about coming up with a concept and an outline. Once these are in place, it’s time to begin writing using what I call the four rhythms of mastery. Write Using the Four Rhythms of Mastery I use the phrase “four rhythms of mastery” to describe the practices that make the writing journey sustainable. These practices are essential to staying committed to writing your book, especially if you’re busy. The following practices, which can be remembered with the acronym D. A. R. T., will help you hang in there:
The Busy Person’s Guide to Writing a Nonfiction Book (Part 1)
When I was young and got overwhelmed with this or that, my mom had a terrific way of helping me. She’d sit me down and help me think through what I could and couldn’t do to influence the situation. She led me through a process of deciding how to respond to each anxiety-producing factor, and that was all I needed. I always left our conversations feeling empowered and much more comfortable with life. Writing a book can be overwhelming. When one is staring at a blank page knowing that a decent-sized book is at least 50,000 words, it’s easy to feel like you’re not equal to the task. Many people know deep down they have a book inside them. They have this passion, this innate need to get a book out of them. But if you don’t have a plan for making that happen, this burning passion can turn into burning frustration! Add to this how busy we are, and it’s enough to blow this book-writing dream to smithereens. In fact, I’d say you may not need a plan if you have nothing else going on. If you don’t have any other commitments—to family, say, or colleagues—you might be able to get by without a plan. But the vast majority of us are not in that situation. The purpose of this post is to sit you down and talk you through how to write a nonfiction book. I want to empower you and help you feel comfortable with the process of writing a book. Develop a Compelling Concept and Title This is where it all starts. The most efficient and effective way I know of to kick around book ideas is to brainstorm titles and subtitles. This gives you a quick look at different ways your book can appear to potential readers. I encourage a process of individual and collective brainstorming. This can look various ways, but the process should go something like this: Brainstorm title and subtitle combinations on your own. Come up with a short list of possibilities. Ask a group of friends or colleagues you trust to comment on the short list. Ask them which combination is their favorite and what suggestions they have for improving it. I think this step is best done in person, but you can get ideas from your social media networks as well. It’s certainly worth a try to see what kind of feedback you get. Keep refining the list until you have isolated one title and subtitle combination as the best of the bunch. Now. How do you feel about this title and subtitle? Excited about it? Is it compelling enough to keep you energized through hours of writing? If so, you’re ready to move. If not, it’s time to do another round of brainstorming and to reengage your friends for input. Once you have a title and subtitle that you and your friends all think is compelling, you’re ready for step 2. Flesh It Out with an Outline Keeping your title and subtitle in mind, write out titles of possible chapters. At first don’t worry much about structure and whether a piece of content is a paragraph and not a chapter. Just get all your chapter ideas down. This again is a brainstorming process. You’re trying to get down any and all of the various chunks of content that potentially could fit somewhere within this book. Once you have a bunch of chapter titles down, scan them. Which ones seem most important? Set those to one side. Which ones seem like subtopics of other chapters? Go ahead and place those accordingly. Which ones seem like they might belong to a different book, a sequel to this one perhaps? Set those in a different place. Now consider the sequence of the chapters. Place them in a sequence that makes sense. Writing is a linear medium, and so good writing is well organized. Readers like to move from one topic to the next without thinking too much about the transitions. Finally, write out a 2- to 5-sentence description of each chapter. Doing this at this stage helps you determine what each chapter needs to do in light of the whole. Once you’ve got this step down, you’re read to engage the four rhythms of mastery, which I’ll cover in my next post. To read part 2 of this two-part series, click here. Got a book concept that you’d like some feedback on? Drop your working title and subtitle in a comment, and I’ll do my best to give you some input. And I hope you’ll comment on others’ concepts as well. If you think this post would be helpful to others,would you help me share it? I’d be grateful. Here’s a possible tweet: Want to write a book but feeling overwhelmed? This step-by-step post will help! <Tweet this!>
Two Chefs: A Parable for Writers
Imagine two chefs. One is a world-class culinary ninja who has logged thousands of hours in the kitchen. The other, for the sake of this parable, is me, who has logged about 43 minutes. We’re given the exact same recipe for pecan pie and as much baking time as we want. Whose pie would you rather be served? Here’s my point: it’s not about the recipe. Oh, the recipe is important as far as it goes, but we all can taste the difference between an amateur chef and a master. If you’ve been a writer for any length of time, you’ve heard the recipe for publication: brilliant concept massive platform amazing writing So what happens is writers try really hard to create a book proposal that follows the recipe. But it’s not about the recipe. It’s about becoming a master. It’s about improving your craft and building your platform over time. It’s about logging a lot of hours in your writing chair. These days, particularly with nonfiction, it’s about interacting with your audience long enough to know what they really need. If you want to be an amazing chef, don’t stare at the recipe. Start cooking. If you want to be an amazing writer, don’t stare at the proposal guidelines. Start writing. The other thing that happens when I list the three publishing criteria is writers get depressed! Most of us can’t say we have a brilliant concept, massive platform, and amazing writing. We might have some or one of them, but few of us have all three. The trick is to build practices into your life that help you stay the course. When it comes to writing, the long view is the only view that matters. Shoot for sustainability. That is ultimately how we’re going to get better as writers and keep making progress. What practices are you using to sustain yourself for the journey? ~~Tweetables~~ When it comes to writing, the long view is the only view that matters. <Tweet this!> If you want to be an amazing writer, don’t stare at the proposal guidelines. Start writing. <Tweet this!> Psssst: Writers, shoot for sustainability. Here’s why. <Tweet this!>
5 Ways to Take Your Writing to the Next Level
Earlier this year I coached Gary Neal Hansen through the process of writing a book proposal (See here for a post that will take you to the whole series.) It was a great experience. As a way to wrap things up, I asked Gary to write a guest post on the main things he’s taking away from the process. Gary Neal Hansen is the author of Kneeling with Giants: Learning to Pray with History’s Best Teachers (InterVarsity Press, 2012) and Associate Professor of Church History at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. He blogs at GaryNealHansen.com. You can connect with him there as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Guest Blogger: Gary Neal Hansen Writing a book proposal can be lonely and scary. You slave away in secret. You send it off. You wait. The rejection letter comes and you are no wiser about what would have helped. Then came Chad’s book proposal coaching project. Input from an industry insider before submitting it? I had to apply. He chose me. I rejoiced! I freaked out. Let me be clear: my “book” consisted of two things: First, I had a concept I absolutely loved: an exploration of historical movements with distinctive approaches to Christian community that sparked world-changing mission and service, a book to help Christians and communities rethink life together for a bigger, better impact out there. Second, I had a bunch of random scribbling on the topic in my journal. That was it. I could get Chad most of the proposal in a month as he asked, but a polished sample chapter was a long way off. He agreed. I was (gulp!) over the moon. It has been an honor and an education. I’ve learned way more than I can fit in a blog post. Here are five key lessons Chad has taught me. 1. Let generosity be your motive. Chad’s blog shows his own generous soul. He clearly wants to help his readers on real issues. He advises writers do the same, articulating the need their book will address for their readers. I have to fan the flames of my most generous motives. If I focus on helping people, the process will be life-giving. 2. Take a risk to learn from those who know. Chad’s post on my bio nailed key problems. That was the first of many golden opportunities to hear how my words do and don’t communicate to an expert reader. Every post helped me better understand how to tell the truth about myself and my project to convince a publisher that I really ought to write this book. 3. Plan around the shape of a marketable book. This includes everything from the quality of the concept to the number of chapters and total word count. It is easy to get all of this wrong. When I proposed my first book I overshot on the size and had to reduce every chapter I’d written by a full third. Getting a sense of what publishers want helps me to aim at the right target. 4. Grow your platform. Chad emphasized this from the beginning. If nobody knows who you are it is hard to sell anyone your book. If people are already listening to you on the topic, your book has a place to land. We took stock of my social media stats, and I went to work. He encouraged me to open a Facebook author page, so I converted my personal account. I renamed my then-dormant blog to “GaryNealHansen.com.” I aimed for two blog posts per week and four tweets per day, linking them to Facebook. Results so far: 342 Facebook friends growing to 442 “likes” on my page. 110 Twitter followers growing to 540. 20 or so blog subscribers growing to 117, and about 7000 page views. This is not stratospheric, but it is moving in the right direction — and was enough to get my blog into the top 100 on Anita Mathias’ “Blogogcracy”! The blog has been the most effective part of platform building, and the most fun, especially as I started blogging small sections of the project. It pushed me to keep sections short and engaging. It kept me writing during a very demanding season of my day job. And when I pasted the posts into an outline, I was suddenly editing a chapter instead of writing a rough draft. 5. Let your project live in community. I’ve been amazed to see how friendships developed through conversations on Chad’s blog. I’m deeply grateful to those of you who joined in so encouragingly, and especially Cynthia Herron and Lisa Van Engen who interviewed me on their blogs, and Natasha Crain who gave sterling advice on Facebook issues. Community really matters in this process. Here and on my blog the community has affirmed that when this actually becomes a book there are people eager to see it. There’s no better fuel for the process! How can you apply any of the lessons above to your own writing project? Tweetables “Plan around the shape of a marketable book” and 4 other tips for #writers. <Tweet this.> “Let your project live in community” and 4 other ways to take your #writing to the next level. <Tweet this.>
How to Craft a Winning Writing Sample for Your Book Proposal
Earlier this year I coached author and professor Gary Neal Hansen through the process of writing a book proposal. We covered every element of a typical nonfiction book proposal except the writing sample. This post will cover the writing sample. (To read the rest of the series, visit here.) Gary sent me his writing sample some weeks back, and as I’ve come to expect from Gary, it was a solid piece of work. I emailed him some feedback specific to his sample, but I couldn’t figure out a way to excerpt his sample and comment on it in a way that would be helpful within a blog post. So instead I’d like to offer the following guidelines to keep in mind as you put together your own writing sample. The rest is preamble. The rest of your book proposal is supportive material. Your writing sample is where you begin to actually execute the project. You’re not talking about the project here; you’re producing it. In many ways, then, the writing sample should be the diamond for which the rest of your proposal is the setting. In other words, do not neglect it. With some regularity my colleagues and I will review a proposal and say, “Wow, everything looked good until I got to the actual writing. Then the wheels came off.” Even if it means waiting several months before submitting your proposal, invest the time it takes to make sure your writing sample is compelling and well crafted. Long enough. Your writing sample should be a good-sized portion of your manuscript. Unless your chapters are really short, the introduction and first chapter are usually sufficient. Reading is an experience. To write, therefore, is to create an experience. It’s worth asking, what would I like the experience of reading my book to be like? Let the answer guide your writing. If experience A is what you’d like to create for your readers, what process will you need to follow in order to create that experience? I often refer to writers as experience architects, which is true. But they are also the engineers, the general contractors, and the construction workers for that experience, which brings me to the next point. Do the work. There’s no substitute for sitting down in your chair about the same time every day and writing. It’s hard work. It’s also rewarding work, but often the rewards come much, much later than we hoped. Never mind. If you know you’re called to this endeavor, do the work anyway. Get feedback. Somehow you have to plug into a community of supportive people who care about you and what you’re doing enough to give you some good feedback. The right reviewer can make all the difference in the world to how good your sample ends up being. Try asking a lot of people. Try buying lunch for the people whose feedback you would value most. Try paying someone to do it. Try offering to do the same in exchange for a writer friend or multiple writer friends. Do whatever it takes to get some insight into how to make your sample better. This feedback is important for the sample; it’s also important for the complete manuscript. So establishing a way to get feedback on the sample will help you later on. In short, the writing sample is where the rubber meets the road, where publishers get to glimpse your work. You might be able to fake a bio or the marketing section pretty well, but you can’t fake your writing sample. On the other hand, if you’ve done the work and are ready to go, your writing sample is where you get to shine. The above guidelines will give you your best shot at writing a sample that leads to a contract. How have you already begun to implement one of the above strategies? What are you doing this week that will help your writing sample shine? If you think this post would be helpful to others, would you help me share it? Working on a nonfiction book proposal? This post will help. <Tweet this!> Why the writing sample in your book proposal is so important, and how you can create a great one. <Tweet this!>
Who Else Wants to Travel the World for Cheap?
My wife had always wanted to visit Switzerland. When her elementary school teacher asked her to do a research project, Switzerland was her subject. She was a fan of the book Heidi, which was set in the Swiss Alps. When she visited Lake Placid, New York, she loved to wander the aisles of a store that was all about Switzerland. She even has a fondness for fondue. Problem is, Switzerland is a long way away from us in Michigan, right? It turns out, it’s not so very far, after all. The best part is our flights were very inexpensive (about $200 total), and so were our accommodations (about $600 for eight nights). How did we do it? Following are the six steps we used to take this trip. You can use the same steps to go virtually anywhere in the world for cheap. 1. Start with a destination in mind. This is an important step. Decide where you want to go. What’s your dream spot? This one was easy for us since my wife has always wanted to go to Switzerland. 2. Research the best airline for getting there. This doesn’t take long at all with sites like Travelocity, Orbitz, or my personal favorite, Kayak. 3. Research the big-chain hotels in the country and other cheap ways to stay. Big chains like Hilton, Marriott, Club Carlson, and IHG have hotels all over the world. Also research hostel, AirBnB, couchsurfing, and house swap options. 4. Develop a strategy for accruing the points you need for your flights and lodging. If you travel at all, you can funnel your resources through the brands that will help you get to the destination of your dreams. But by far the quickest way to accrue points is with credit card bonuses. Did I lose you? Hang with me for a minute. I’m guessing I’m a lot like you. When I first heard from people like Chis Guillebeau and Brian Kelly that the best way to load up on massive amounts of points was from credit cards, I was tempted to tune out. But I’m so glad I didn’t. One reason I was hesitant is because I assumed if I applied for a credit card, my credit rating would go down. I now can tell you from experience this simply isn’t true. As long as you don’t pick up a new credit card every month and as long as you pay off your credit cards right away, your score is more likely to go up. A second reason I was hesitant is because I thought I’d be slammed with annual fees. In the vast majority of cases the first year’s annual fee is waived. When you see the annual fee a year later, assuming you keep the card that long, you can call the company and ask them to waive the fee again. If they don’t, you can cancel the card to avoid paying the fee. That means you can get tens of thousands of points for both flights and hotels for free. 5. Access resources to be up on opportunities to bank serious points. I’ll point to just a few resources to get you started. – The first is Guillebeau’s credit card site: http://cardsfortravel.com/best-credit-cards/ – The second is Brian Kelly’s blog http://thepointsguy.com/ – Lastly, if you want to learn all the ins and outs of what some people call “travel hacking,” which is essentially the practice of accruing lots of miles/points to travel for cheap, check out the cleverly named Travel Hacking Cartel (AL). You can subscribe at the top level for 14 days for $1, then back off to the lowest level for $15/month, and it’s easy to stop your subscription. I highly recommend trying this for at least a couple months to see if it’s a good fit for you. At the very least you’ll learn a ton about hidden ways to load up on miles/points. The company guarantees four free plane tickets a year. 6. Go on the trip of your dreams. The points are worth nothing unless you use them. Go and have fun! So, I’m curious. If you could visit any place on earth (you can!), where would you go? Tweetables Who else wants to travel the world for cheap? This post will help you do just that! <Tweet this!> Blogger @ChadRAllen took his wife to Switzerland for cheap. He tells you how here. <Tweet this!>
10 Tips for Taming the Email Beast
Email, for all its benefits, is the scourge of our age. What began as a handy way to communicate has become a relentless slave driver. Who hasn’t arrived at one’s workstation ready to make solid progress on something that really matters only to find oneself a million hours later in servitude to email? I’m convinced email is the worst time suck the world has ever known. And as crazy as this sounds, I guarantee that if you follow the advice in this post, it will free you. No more trivial pursuits. No more rabbit trails of endless chatter. This post has the potential to change your life precisely because of how practical it is. How do I know? I’m not some master of productivity, but I have managed to slay this beast once and for all. I spend no more than an hour a day on email, usually much less than that, and I seldom leave my office without getting my inbox down to zero. Sound impossible? Let’s get started. The first two tips are important assumptions I bring to email. The rest are practical things you can do today, each of which has the potential to save you loads of time. 1. Realize that email is NOT the most important thing you do. If we don’t start here, we’re doomed. 2. Acknowledge that if you don’t respond to email within 24 hours, it will seem to others like you are incompetent, inefficient, or just plain mean. In today’s remote control world of apps and never-ending news cycles, we expect to hear back from people fast. Besides, who wants a cluttered email inbox? 3. Do not process email first thing in the morning. This is like so many vices. If you do it now, you’ll regret it later. Start the day with a project that is worthy of who you are. 4. Embrace the power of working “Offline.” You can keep your email client open, but set it to “Work Offline.” This way you can compose email if you need to, but email will not be sent or received until you’re back online. (In more recent versions of Outlook, “Work Offline” is located on the “Send/Receive” tab.) Choosing to work offline is an act of self-empowerment. You’re in charge. You decide when email comes in and goes out—not your email program. 5. Set 2 to 4 specific times during the day for processing email. I schedule a half hour twice a day to process email, usually around noon and 4:00. These are appointments on my calendar. I know these appointments are there so I’m freed up to do my most important work in the meantime. People who work with me regularly know they are not likely to hear from me right after they email me, but they will hear from me soon. 6. Use “Block Sender.” If it remotely resembles spam, right-click and block sender. You can always open your trash folder to see if you’re missing anything important. (Pssssst, you’re not.) 7. If you can respond in less than 2 minutes, do so. If not schedule it for later. When processing email, if you can reply or delegate it to someone in less than two minutes, go for it. If not, schedule it for later. Here’s how: find a spot in your calendar, open an appointment, use the “Attach Item” command to attach the email from your inbox to the appointment, label the appointment “Respond to this email,” and move the email out of your inbox. If you want, you can let the person know when to expect a response from you, but if it’s going to take longer than two minutes, they probably won’t expect a response right away anyway. 8. Use a simple folder system. A lot of people, including me until about a year or so ago, build elaborate folder systems for their email, creating a separate folder for each project. Then they painstakingly drag and drop each email into its corresponding folder. This is the email equivalent of a Chinese sweat shop. Please, please stop. If you do nothing else this post advises, for your own sake do this: create an “Internal Processed Email” folder for emails from coworkers and an “External Processed Email” folder for others. Begin sorting email into these two folders. You may want one or two more for ultra quick access (I have one called “Read/Review” for interesting emails that do not require a response and another for “Travel” where I store email related to flights, hotels, and whatnot.) Let your other folders languish as subfolders under a folder called “Old Folders” until you feel comfortable throwing them away. Then, good riddance. How will you find emails later? You will use your email client’s powerful built-in system of sorting and searching. This can be a big step for people who are accustomed to their folders, but trust me, it’s worth the effort. You can sort by sender, recipient, subject, you name it. You can also perform really sophisticated searches relatively quickly. “Search Tools/Advanced find” will open the search in a new window so it runs in the background while you do other things. 9. Use “Quick Steps.” Microsoft Outlook uses the term “Quick Steps” for a system of shortcuts that eliminates the time-consuming process of dragging and dropping. These are super easy to create, and Microsoft has conveniently provided some for you as defaults. I created a separate quick step that moves email to each of my folders, and I kept one from Microsoft called “Reply & Delete.” In short: click, don’t drag. Viva la revolution! 10. Do not send emotionally driven or critical emails. We’ve all been there. Something gets under your skin and you can’t help yourself. You fire off an email that you regret sending later. These situations seldom end well, either because they devolve into fights or because the other person does not respond and you’re left wondering how they feel. Email is great for information transfer.
One Simple Secret for Success as a Writer
Sometimes it feels like nobody’s listening,” my writer friend groaned. Can you relate? Have you ever poured your heart and soul into an article or proposal only to hear the cruel sound of silence? It’s frustrating. So we just keep slogging away, right? Well, yes, but there is a way of thinking about your writing that just might make all the difference in the world. To illustrate, let me tell you about my inventor friends Al and Andy. Al and Andy invented a device they call the “Nothin’ But Net Free Throw Trainer.” The purpose of this invention is to help basketball players become better free throw shooters, and it works. Nationally known coaches now use the device. The product is simple. It’s a four-inch piece of yellow plastic that stands vertically on the front of a basketball hoop. It’s the principle behind the device that’s so remarkable. The idea is to focus on this little piece of plastic rather than making the shot. The Free Throw Trainer teaches the shooter to focus on the process of making the shot instead of the outcome. Focusing on the process helps the shooter relax. Suddenly it’s not about adding points to the scoreboard. It’s about hitting that little piece of plastic. Writers: it’s not about watching copies fly off the shelves or filling seats at a reading. It’s about filling your own seat. [Tweet “One Simple Secret for Success as a Writer #askeditor #amwriting”] The best writers focus on the process of writing rather than on the audience they hope to have. Relax and keep hitting that yellow piece of plastic. If you keep doing that, the outcome will take care of itself. What does the process actually look like? What’s the writing equivalent to the Free Throw Trainer? You know the fundamentals already: writing and reading. To become great writers, we have to spend significant time doing both. But to be honest, from there it varies. The particulars of your process are less important than thinking about and deciding on a process that makes sense to you. Stick to it for a period of time and see how it goes, then reevaluate and make tweaks. Do your best to fall in love with your process. I don’t mean you’re always going to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s hard work. But if you trust that your writing is improving as you engage the process, you can push through. If you can keep doing that over time, you will build an audience. Process over outcome. It’s not easy, but you can do it. And we need you to do it. What’s your writing process? I designed a worksheet to help you get intentional about your writing process. It’s a fillable PDF so you can fill it out and print or save it for your reference. It’s completely free. To download your copy and begin customizing your writing process, click here. What did you find most helpful in this article?