Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet o help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling books in eight minutes a day. Now in yesterday’s episode, we were actually talking about how to actually come up with a bit of a plan or a formula for actually -- your book and where do I actually kind of start when it comes to the writing process because I believe that before you should start writing, you need to get all the ideas out of your head and you need to get them into some format that’s going to work for you. Now, yesterday we spoke about the notebook theory and that how you should carry your notebook around you everywhere you go because you're going to have pockets and windows of time in all different places and when you get five minutes here, five minutes there, you just write down any ideas that come up. Just put them in bullet point format or you can -- if you're very visual you can draw pictures, you can draw a mine map but the main message is to get the ideas out of your head and get them onto paper. That’s really, really important. The other thing that we spoke about -- the second things was about using post it notes. That’s a really good way of going about doing it because you can write words or even draw pictures on the post it notes and then you actually stick them into your book. So your book has a bunch of post it notes inside and you can carry it with you anywhere you go and then you actually put them up here on a white board. And so you get home and then you can start to plan it out. And then -- so what you can then do, you can basically pick anyone of these of and say today, I’m going to write about this. Because if you’ve got 20 minutes or half an hour, you just start punching into it if that idea starts to kind of slow down and you can’t write really as well, that’s fine. Put it back up on the board and pick off something else and then continue with the whole process. So that is also another really good strategy and one that I would highly recommend for all types of writers.
Now the third method is something that may work better for some people or it may not work but it’s actually using a Dictaphone. Now, I had a Dictaphone for many years. I actually started about a couple -- I started with one that recorded onto cassette tapes. And, it was sort of this big, quite large and bulky but I had it at home and I would -- just if I had ideas, I just put it onto that tape recorder and record it down and it could be, you know, the final story or I could talk about the history of Henry Ford, whatever it is and I would just record it into my little recorder. Now, that was a bit of an issue because it wasn’t really a little recorder and I couldn’t carry it with me everywhere I went. But then later on I invested in another smaller one that actually didn’t just go into a type but it actually was a digital recorder. That was much better it was it was much smaller and lighter and I can carry it with me in my pocket or put it in my bag so I normally ha it on me at all times. But what I’m really excited about now is this that now, its actually part of my phone. I’ve got here an iPhone. I’ll be talking more about Apple and Apple Products in future episodes but what I love about this is sometimes I forget my recorder but because it’s now in my phone I can, you know, I can basically have it anywhere, every time I’ve got my recorder. Now, I’ve got this little application here which is called SpeakEasy and if you have an iPhone, in my opinion this is probably one of the best recorders going around at the moment. There is a whole bunch of them. This is the one that I like and that I use and all I do is I just click on this button here and it starts to record everything that I am saying. So it’s recording everything right now. When I finished, I press stop and then I can just click another button and go save or --
Or I can just play it back instantly. So that’s a really, really good way of being able to get your ideas down if you're more of a person that prefers speaking as opposed to just kind of writing. So you can have this around and you can just talk when you're out going for a walk or when you're in the bus. Maybe when you’ve got ideas or flashes of inspiration while at you're work. And they're all just going in there and then the cool thing about having it in your phone is that when it comes time to actually charge your phone or sync with your computer, you plug-in your cable and then all of those tracks download onto your computer. So it works for some people where it doesn’t work for other people is you obviously have to go back and listen to those again and you probably still need to actually write them down and if you want to do something like this or what you're probably going to do is actually type them up and start to do it, you know, just type it straight away and then you can start to edit it in your computer just by chopping and changing different paragraphs and using the old cut and paste keys on your computer. So we’ve covered now three different options, the first one is written notebook, number two is post it notes, number three is actually a recorder or a Dictaphone. I’m going to give you a fourth one and that is using a computer based program. Now, if you actually go online and you search writing software, there's a number of different software developers that have created programs to actually help authors to help get their ideas down. So, you know, basically it’s like a bit of a -- it’s the whole thing, what we are talking about but they have just done it through a digital piece of software. Now, I haven’t used any of these personally. I’m not a huge fan them but they work really well for some people. And what you basically do is you type down all of your random thoughts into a particular list and then you’d basically -- each of those list blocks,, then you can order those blocks in different areas then you flesh out those blocks with sub points and then you can start to actually fill in the actual text and its basically the whole process but just in a digital format.
So if any one out there has had experience in using any of those software programs and would like to leave some comments, then please leave some comments on the GetPublishedTV.com website and I’ll certainly check them out. And other people can check them out. Let me know what's actually worked for you. So now we’ve talked about 4 different ways in order to help you to start the whole writing process. In that way it makes it a lot easier when it comes -- the time to write your book a lot faster, a lot more efficient because all the ideas are now out of your head and they are ready to be written down and you can really get into action. So that wraps up this video and that’s the end of part 2 on this particular topic. We will talk more about the subject and writing cover it from different angles and explain some other techniques a little bit later. But we’re going to wrap up right now. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks for watching. See you again next time.
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