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Four Things I Learned About Writing by Writing a Book

Six years ago I wrote “For the Love of Writing,” about my love of writing as well as the discipline of it. We think of writing as a romantic, unknowable thing — creative inspiration strikes and we’re off to the races, or it’s suddenly dried up and we have nothing to say. But I don’t think creativity really works this way. I think it’s a lot less sexy than that. It’s mostly about hard work.

In my earlier post, I shared some tips, tricks, and tools for getting started. In this post, I’ll share four things I’ve learned since working on my most ambitious writing project yet — writing a book.

1. Think about the big picture. Before I started writing Listen Like You Mean It, I knew that for an average blog post, I’d need about an hour from start to finish before sending it off to my editor. But that didn’t quite translate to writing a book. Some author friends advised writing many “posts” and then stringing them together, but I felt like I’d miss out on the depth of insight and storytelling I wanted to bring to the book. I focused instead on a chapter by chapter level of writing: each chapter had a clear scope and point I wanted to make. It was fairly easy to approach in this way. But in doing so, I missed the big picture. My first draft of the book was 12 tidy chapters that in no way spoke to each other. In my focus on chapters, I had…