Do you know a lot of information but can’t seem to get focussed enough to write a book? This is one of my biggest problems. I start trying to write down everything that I think is important and before long I’m looking at pages of information that are as overwhelming as what is in my head.

This problem never gets in the way when someone comes up and asks me for help! When that happens, I can zero in on my audience and give the information that is necessary to answer their questions.

A visitor to this website recently asked me a few simple questions and I ended up writing a 780 word mini-article in response (rendered in 12 point Arial type on a 5.5″ x 8.5″ page - that’s 4 solid pages of text!) This lead me to my ‘ah ha!’ moment. (I’m sure I didn’t invent this, it just finally occurred to me.)

The 20 Questions Book Writing System

This idea couldn’t be any simpler. Recruit one or more people who would benefit from the book you want to write. Ask them to provide you with 20 questions on your topic that they have always wanted answered. Steer them to ask big picture questions rather than detailed ones.

When you get the questions back, sort them into a sequence that makes sense to you. If a question is too narrow, try to make it more general and group together related topics into sections. This list is the chapter structure of your book. Now it is time to get to work.

Answer each question with a 5 or 6 page response that is directed toward your audience. You are on your way to a first draft of your book. I recommend creating your document in the same physical format as you envision for the final format. I have a 5×8_book_template in Microsoft Word format that you can download and use as a basis for your project.
Give your answers back to the people who provided the questions and have them review your responses. Ask them to give notes about anything that is unclear or extraneous.

Revise your first draft using the notes you get back from your question team and then start looking for experts in your field to submit chapters to for professional feedback. (Do not send them the whole text, just the chapters that are focussed on their specific expertise.) These are also the people you will want to approach for promotional blurbs for your book cover, front matter, and promotional materials. (Thanks go to Dan Poynter for this strategy.)

Revise your book using the notes provided by your subject matter experts. This draft should be a fairly well developed manuscript. At this stage it is a good idea to hire a professional editor to edit your book for spelling, grammer, consistency, and style. You may chose to go it alone, but a good editor will give your work a level of polish that is hard to do by yourself. If you don’t know any editors, a service like OnlineProofReaders.com can help you locate one.

Next Stop, The Printing Press

Once you have your manuscript is done, it is time to decide how to publish your book. You can create an e-book, submit it to publishing houses and agents, or go the self-publishing route. (If you want to pursue a traditional publisher, you should consider submitting your chapter outline - the list of 20 questions - and a sample chapter earlier in the process. If they want the book, this may be enough to get a contract.)

There are lots of layout and design issues to consider before your work is complete, but you have a book now!

I have been wanting to write a book on video lighting for independant movies for a while now. I asked a good friend, who is planning his own movie project right now, to help me with my 20 questions. I’m also soliciting questions on my indie film blog too! I expect this to be a useful strategy in my writing endeavors.

The Go-To Guy

Listen to an Audio Version of this Article

While reading an article on the LifeHacker website about Asking Good Questions, the author quoted a Wikipedia article about the folk story Stone Soup. The quote was a summary of the lessons to be taken from the story and it is a brilliant insight into motivating group participation.

If you want to get people to do something, don’t tell them how desperately they are needed. Don’t try to appeal to their sympathy and kindness. Instead, create the impression that you are giving them the opportunity to be part of your success.

I have seen a number of websites being promoted recently that want visitors to contribute content to them. Interactive collaboration is one of the exciting potential applications of new Internet technology. The problem is that, while most of these sites are trying to generate advertising revenue from the traffic generated by this new content, several high profile sites have no intention of sharing any of the revenue with the content creators. Some even claim complete ownership of materials posted to their sites.

Following the lead of the Stone Soup story, there is a much better chance of success if you invite people to share in your success rather than beg and cajole them into participating. Make sure there is something valuable in it for them, and then make sure they are aware of what you are offering them.

I am working on several projects right now that will benefit from this kind of thinking and I’m grateful for the reminder to focus on inviting others to share the success. My approach to promoting the projects and recruiting helpers will be different.

The Go-To Guy

P.S. My wife wrote a children’s musical based on this story, you’d think I would have already learned this lesson!

It’s not hard to imagine one’s life experiences flowing like a stream. People you meet, conversations you have, flashes of insight, emotions - these things and more wash steadily past. The essence of one’s life is dispersed in this river.

You cannot hold onto a river. Grasp at it and you get nothing more than an empty wet hand that will dry soon enough. But, no matter how clear the water appears, it carries with it artifacts of where it has been. Don’t believe me? Put a rock in the stream and wait.

The rock interrupts the flow. Water swirls around it leaving small pools of calmer water behind the rock. As the water slows, a magical thing happens. Those artifacts become too heavy for the current to carry and they settle to the bottom.

Put a rock in your life and the same thing happens. A house is like a rock in most people’s lives. You settle into one, and in 10 or 20 years, its nooks and crannies become filled with the artifacts of your life. Books, photographes, the car seat you bought for the child you just sent off to college. But rocks can do more than just collect your old stuff.

The Power Of Rocks

I have a wide range of interests. Often, a new momentary passion rises up while I’m exploring another. I also tend to keep coming back to old favorites, but with a new perspective.

The result of my particular pattern of curiosity is that I know a fair amount about a wide range of topics, but never seem to get enough momentum going in any one direction to make much out of it. It is a reality I decided to change.

How can a person like me get enough material together to write a book, create a business, or shoot a movie? My mind and body seem to race along from one thing to the next so quickly that good ideas and best intentions get swept away too soon.

One answer is to begin placing some rocks in my life - carefully placed obstacles designed to slow me down a little and let those good ideas have a chance to settle out of the stream.

Placing The First Stone

This website was created to be a rock. Every week it seems that someone comes to me for some kind of help or advice. It might be damaged drywall needing a repair or, like today, a friend who needed help writing up a quote for a video production project.

When you’ve worked as a house painter, media producer, hotel night auditor, home theater installer, automotive assembly line worker, website designer, director of photographer, carpet cleaner, furniture salesman, building superintendant, set designer, director, and more, the experience builds up. When you add in hobbies, a love of reading, and the random bits of other things that get picked up along the way, it’s no wonder people think I might know something helpful.

In January of 2006, I decided that I would write about my projects, hobbies, and the answers a gave people to the questions they asked. I installed blogging software on my server (another set of skills) and began writing. Now, instead of my advice fading into silence after the words are spoke, I slow down and let them settle onto this website.

So far I’ve written more than 56 posts. The majority are longer pieces, like this one. Printed out at the font sizes and page dimensions of a typical book, that amounts to more than 100 pages. That is a success by my accounting.

Adding More Rocks To My Stream

Just creating the blog site was not enough. I needed a few other rocks placed around me to ensure that I would generate the habits required to easily capture the bits of knowledge and experience I wanted to write about. I bought a small audio recorder to carry with me so I can dictate notes when I’m working on something worth writing about. I’ve also begun carrying notebooks and a camera.

Each one of these things causes tiny pieces of my experiences to settle into a growing mound of resources that I can use and share. It is exciting to see how people from all over the world have found my article on bookbinding. It is even more exciting that people are starting to ask me questions through my website. The very fact of this website’s existence is helping to inspire new articles and connect me to new people and opportunities.

Try putting a few rocks in your stream. Who knows, you may just have a book in you, or the idea for then next big business breakthrough. Whatever it is, you will find great satisfaction in being able to share it with other people.

The Go-To Guy

My friend Allen came by the office today to check out the new video equipment we have recently purchased. After a while we got to talking about the book I’ve been reading called Refuse to Choose!. I recently wrote an article on how this book has inspired me. Seems he’s a bit of a Scanner himself.

One of the things I mentioned to him was a mind mapping program that I like to use called Freemind. When Allen outlines an idea, he already uses mind mapping techniques with paper and pencil, so he was excited to discover a free software package that does the same thing.

If you are not familiar with the concept of mind mapping, basically it is a visually oriented way of showing the relationships between things.

Using Mind Maps

One of my favorite ways to use mind mapping (especially with Freemind) is for brainstorming website and book ideas.

I start with a central idea or topic and then keep branching off that until I’ve exhausted my thinking on the subject. This will usually inspire some new research after which I go back to the mind map and expand it some more.

With Freemind you can expand and collapse the different branches of your map and quickly add new branches and expand branches. Some people will prefer to draw their maps with colored pencils on big sheets of paper including lots of little illustrations peppered throughout. Use whatever works for you.

You can export a mind map from Freemind into an HTML file. This outline style list can be used as the table of contents for a book or as the site structure for a website. There are other formats you can export to as well.

If you want to get the same result from a hand drawn mind map you will need to type up the text in outline format. Branches and sub-branches get indented further at each level. (Automating this process is one of the big reasons I love the software.)

You can embed all of the content for a book or website into the electronic version, but I find the tool most helpful in brainstorming the framework for an idea and then using other tools to flesh it out.

There are also a number of free web based mind mapping tools available. One that looks promising can be found at www.Bubbl.us.

Tools like Microsoft Project use indented lists to organize steps in a process. Creating a mind map is a great way to lead a team through the first stages of project planning with the results being quickly imported into the Project Management software for further development of the Project Plan.

I’m sure there are tons of other uses for a mind map. If you’ve got a cool and creative way of using them, leave a comment and let me know what you do.

The Go-To Guy