How I use writing as a process to get organized

This post is an example of the content I share every Friday in my Living by Experience Magazine. If you’d like your free copy, just click here.

People often think that if you’ve written a book about something, you must have all the answers. I sure used to look up to my mentors who had written a book on a topic I wanted to learn more about. But now that I’ve written a few books myself, I realized writing a book is simply a matter of harvesting and structuring information in a certain way. Writing is becoming aware of the fact that you already possess the majority of the information needed to complete the entire book – even if you don’t have all the answers just yet.

The real step is to simply to organize what you know into a list of usable ideas. That list will help you identify and organize the information you need (and already have) into building blocks of information to begin shaping your book. As I teach my students in my Write a Book in a Week program, good books aren’t written, they’re structured in a certain way that makes the book a success. By analyzing your life experiences and stories into building blocks, you will be ready to write the entire book much faster.

Here’s a few pointers to help you get started.

You Know More Than You Think

You have already achieved a certain level of success in your field, career or even hobby. You may be an active consultant, business owner, photographer, speaker, or writer. Whatever you have done so far, you have been constantly learning and observing. On your path to success through failures, successes and opportunities, you have already accumulated most of the information you need to complete your book. Through the process of continually doing what you do, you have gained a wealth of knowledge and information – and your book will help you share that valuable information with the world.

The challenge is that your knowledge is unorganized. Once you learn the structure for organizing your ideas, your ability to create your book (or even multiple books) will quickly begin to take shape. I can teach you the structure as part of my book writing class.

Divide and conquer

Break your wealth of knowledge into chunks of information. The beginning point is to begin separate your files, speeches, articles into general topics. For example, I have bodies of information for my inspirational writing and a whole other body or topic for business writing. The various categories of topics on my blog Living by Experience help me gather and structure a lot of the information I use for other writing and teaching projects. Read my post here on why you might want to start a blog yourself.

You’ll notice that as you organize the information you already possess, you will also uncover some areas where your knowledge is bit weak. Once you identify those areas, you can look for the answers you need and literally fill in the gaps.

Create a framework

Once you have an inventory of all your ideas, start building a framework to organize them. For a short book, simply creating a list of every idea related to your book’s topic is a great starting point. After your ideas have been categorized, you can spot patterns of what will help you to write a book on a topic you are most passionate about. In the Planning module of my book writing program, we’ll do various interactive exercises that will help you uncover your (hidden) passions in life and discover your purpose for writing a book that will help others.

Once the framework is in place, it’s literally a matter of filling in the gaps to write your entire book – which can be done in well under a single week when you follow my proven method. If you’re ready to get started on your book idea after reading this post, why not take the next step right away and apply to join my Write a Book in a Week program today? I would love to have you on board.

P.S. Questions, comments, compliments? Text me: 604-210-8668. I’d love to hear from you.

If this post helped you, please consider buying one of my books, or checking out a more in-depth course on one of the topics I talk about. Thanks! 🙂