Make writing better? Isn’t that what any author would want to do?
In the last blog post, “How to Come Up With Great Content Ideas for Your Book Chapters”, we talked about using mind maps and brainstorming sessions to come up with chapter ideas. This is part two of that.
What We Did Before
We’re still talking about coming up with great content ideas. In the last blog, we talked about coming up with 12 to 18 ideas. The reason why we wanted 12 to 18, is because we want our chapters to be anywhere from six to 10 pages long. We started our writing plan. Now we are continuing our attempt to make writing better.
Here, we’ll be talking about taking those ideas and “tightening” them.
It will all come together at the end of these few blog sessions as to why you need that many ideas. For now, just keep in mind that you need 12 to 18 chapter ideas. Your chapter ideas can be full sentences, phrases, or just one word, but you need to have 12 to 18 keywords that would help you remember what those ideas are.
What We Can Do Now
Now, we’re going to make these ideas better. I know you’ve worked so hard, coming up with those 12 ideas or 18 ideas or anywhere in between. Now we’re going to tighten those ideas.
How?
Eliminate three. I know you’re probably thinking, “That’s easy for you to say. How do you do that?”
Well, here’s how you can do it
First of all, you may have added some ideas by using the question words. Well, then you will probably know which one of those is the least important or the least necessary, so just get rid of some of those lesser important ideas you came up with by using the question words.
It may be that you came up with 18 ideas that were just wonderful, and you’re really having a hard time eliminating any one of them.
If you look closely at the relationships between the ideas, you might be able to combine two into one. When you do that, you still have what you want and you have eliminated one number on the list.
Likewise if you could combine three of the ideas, then you will have eliminated two.
Doing the hard work of making these choices now will help in producing a better rough draft.
Let me suggest that you get your creative juices going. You can combine two similar ideas. If you do this, you’ve eliminated one idea already. It may be that you have three similar ideas, and you can combine them into one, so you’ve eliminated 2 ideas. Allow your brain to work a little and let the creative side kick in.
Tightening our list of ideas will indeed make writing better.
In the next session, it will all come together as to why I asked you to come up with that number of ideas, why we tightened it a little bit, and how to put them together in a way that you can have a blueprint for writing your chapter.
If you would like to take your writing to the next level, you can check out my 6-Figure Writing Course Here.
As always, you can see more writing tips on this blog.