Writing a book is a solitary pursuit. You must sit down at your keyboard and write all by yourself. That can be satisfying, but it can also be dangerous. Every author runs the risk of creating their own little echo chamber where all their ideas seem wonderful, and all their prose is lucid and insightful. That’s » Read More
Tag: Good Writing
Rules to Write By
Most of my clients have never written a book when they come to me for the first time Part of my job as a coach is to help them master the basics of the book-writing process. Over the years I developed the following rules as easy ways to remember and talk about good book-writing practice. The Dabo Swinney Rule When » Read More
Who are you writing to?
A book is not a broadcast. Only one person reads a book at a time, and you will write a better book if you write to that one person. The trick is figuring out which person to write to. That special someone Let’s be clear about a couple of things. You should write to a real person, not an avatar, a persona, or » Read More
The Long Game of Writing
I didn’t know whether to puke or sit down and have a good cry or both. I was going through some old boxes, and I found manuscripts for a couple of the first articles I wrote over 50 years ago. Gosh, they were bad! It took a couple of minutes to realize that those articles illustrated something very good. They » Read More
Creativity for Nonfiction Authors
If you want to write a great book, you need to be creative. “Creative nonfiction” is a style of writing where you use fiction writing techniques to make nonfiction more interesting. That’s a powerful way to make your book better. Stories are the way human beings have been sharing ideas since we first crawled out » Read More