5 Lessons I Learned While Writing a Book (and a bonus lesson)

A friend who is an author many times over said that every time she launches a book, she just hopes that her ‘baby she birthed’ is ready to take what the world will give her. I never quite thought of personifying a book this way, but it is like having a piece of you take on a life of its own. The difference is that the gestation of birthing a book is significantly longer than nine months.
As I reflect on my writing process, I thought I’d share some lessons I’ve learned in writing a non-fiction book.
- Find support. I belong to three mastermind groups, all of which I’ve helped to start because I got tired of being in my own head with all my self-talk that I wanted someone else to accompany me. I meet with each of these groups once a month. These are the groups that give the ‘atta-girl’ I need when I want to stop because it gets too hard. These are the individuals that keep reminding me when I feel everything I’m saying has been said, they tell me “But it hasn’t been said in your voice.”
- Just do it. Nike don’t sue me, but these three words are the words I need to say to myself over and over. Just get that butt in the chair, open up that document, and write! I just let my thoughts flow freely and make sense of them later. I just do it and get the words/ideas/thoughts out of my head.
- Stop the perfection or it will stop you. You can Google lots of author advice and you will see over and over that a lot of authors fight this and just do a brain dump in a first draft. That’s a start to at least get it out.
- Find accountability partners. I was really stuck and not producing anything for a while. When I got tired of so many people asking me “How’s the book coming along” after a few years, I needed to stop them and finish it! I found some friends who I knew would hold me to my words. I told them I wanted to be accountable to them by sending them an email every week about what I wrote and what I was going to write. My productivity skyrocketed.
- Get professional editing and be ready to be humbled. I got an amazing editor, Linda O’Doughda, through my publisher. I thought I had a good book with my idea of the flow and layout. Linda made it so much better. Remember I said writing a book to publication is like having a baby. Having an editor is like having an outsider tell you how to raise your kid. You hear the advice, you get angry because it feels like a personal attack, you don’t want to believe it, then you see the truth in it. She brought in the objectivity of what would make it a better flowing book as well as more readable.
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