Welcome to day three of the 28-day writing challenge. I’m glad you’re joining me today.
Yesterday we talked about the number of chapters that we’re trying to get our books to. In my case, I figured out that I had enough material I had already written for seven chapters. Now of course some of that will have to be tweaked, but I think I have that much material.
My goal is to do maybe five more chapters. Now that’s not set in stone. That will just bring me up to 125 pages. I can go as high as 200 pages if that’s what it takes to cover my topic. Right now, however, I’m looking for enough ideas for five more chapters.
Time Management
What I want to talk about on day three is time management. You typically want to set aside 75 to 90 minutes a day for working on your book. Some of you may be able to do this in 45 minutes or so, but that would probably be the exception. Generally speaking for me I’m thinking of 75 to 90 minutes every day. Of course, I do have to work around my other schedules.
How are we going to accomplish this? In my case, I’m going to use my magic kitchen timer. What that does is it forces us forces me not to edit too much as I’m going along. This is not the final product, so nobody’s going to see this but me. So the timer forces me not to edit too much as I’m going along. I can allow some typos and spelling errors as I’m doing this because it’s all going to be rearranged before I get to the final product. The timer creates an artificial deadline and we respond to deadlines.
What’s Next?
Today, I want to do two things. One was going to Amazon and researching books that are similar to the ones that we want to write. Now, I will say that since my book is about valuing your spouse, I suspect I may have a little challenge in finding other books on that topic. I am writing about the importance of valuing your spouse and the importance of having similar values. Now there’ll be a lot of books about values and Christian values. So I’ll be looking at some of those as I’m going along.
The second thing: I’m going to set my timer for 15 minutes as I do this. I don’t know how much research I’ll get done in the first 15 minutes, but I will set it again and I may do it as many as three times.
But after that the times up, I’m going to take a sheet of paper and fold it over, and I’m going to just start writing down ideas. I’ll have the timer set for this also, probably for 15 minutes. I’ll fill up that side, flip it over, and fill up that side. If I need more room, I’ll get another sheet of paper. fill up the page. So that’s how I do what I call a “brain dump.”
Getting Organized
Then if you have time, you can see in the above video, I have several different symbols drawn. There’s a checkmark, left and right arrows, up and down arrows, triangles, squares, and circles. You’ll have this big list of random ideas and you will use a symbol to group similar ideas together. So all of those that are similar under the checkmarks, and then other ones that are similar under squares, and so on. That’s how we’re going to do that. We’re going to do the “brain dump” and then classify ideas into groups.
These steps will be very helpful because the groups may end up being our chapters.
So that’s the plan for what I’m going to do next. Then tomorrow, we will create the plan for the writing of our books. In my case, I may only need five days in the 28-day plan we actually have 20 days. So if I get my five days to work the way that I want to, then I will have some time to do more editing of the book than I would have in a normal 28 Day Challenge.
However, if you are planning on 20 chapters, then you’re probably going to fill up the 20 days if you are using 75 to 90 minutes a day.
So today I will research similar books, I’m going to do a brain dump and I’m going to group those ideas. I want to set my timer in 15-minute intervals. Tomorrow I’ll talk more about how you can create a plan that will cry out to you to write your book and you will look at that and it will just say, “Write me!”
I hope you had a good day today. Remember, YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK!