Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling book in 8 minutes a day. In today’s episode, we’re going to explore three different processes or ways in which you can actually start writing your book. Because the reason why so many people come into that thing called writer’s block is that they don’t have a plan. They don’t actually know where they're going. In a future episode, we’re going to talk about how to actually develop a plan and structure but it’s actually a process that goes before that which is what I sometimes call the brain dumped, is getting the information out of your head and getting it in to a particular format. So, what we’re going to look at are three different ways in order to do that.
The first way in order to get your ideas out of your head is of course the classic notebook. And what you need to do is go out there and buy a notebook and actually just start writing down ideas, just writing down thoughts. It doesn’t have to be structured. It doesn’t have to be pretty but just start dumping them down and put them on paper. So, because we all have time, we all have time but it’s just not -- sometimes blocks of time. We got like little pockets, maybe you arrive at work ten minutes early or maybe you probably don’t arrive early but you’ve got time on the bus or maybe on the train or in a taxi cab and you got ideas, so just make a note of them. Or maybe when you get home and after you’ve put the kids to sleep and you know having a glass of red wine or a cup of coffee, you can again just take a few minutes to write things down. But if you’ve got this on you at all times, just start putting down, either stories or maybe its sentences, just what I would call memory triggers. You don’t need to write down the whole thing but if you just write down like -- for me, there's a little story that I tell called the final story. Maybe one day in a future I’ll talk abut the final story and how it actually works. But for me, if I just said myself the final story that’s a whole five minute conversation that I could have and it probably would turn into maybe 5 or 10 pages in my book by just triggering those particular words. So that’s what you do. So you write down the final story. Or you write down any thing else. It maybe a childhood memory, it might be a little example, it might be whatever, you just write down all your thoughts and idea. Forget about the order, forget about the structure, don’t make it look neither pretty, just get the ideas out of your head and on paper.
Now at the beginning, it’s probably going to start quite slow but what will happen is, once it starts picking they’ll come very fast and very quick and then you just be writing. And then what will happen is eventually after your empty or on the way to being empty, you’ll start to actually slow down again and that maybe a signal that you’ve got out the majority of your information or it could be a short term lull and then you'll find the ideas picked up again and again. You'll come up with another 20 or 30 different point but start actually doing that. And I probably recommend that for at least one month, you just write down points. You don’t actually write your book, you just write down points and ideas because what a lot of people do is they say, “I’m going to start to write my book now.” And they don’t really have any points there and then maybe he get one or maybe he get two but then they get stuck because they don’t know what to kind of write next. But if you’ve got like in a note book, you’ve got like 10 or 20 pages of different dot points or different kinds of bubbles of ideas. Some of you would maybe prefer to do it in a mine map form where you have your topic area there and all of the offshoots of that in different bubble around the side. And it makes it so much easier to write. And then when you feel yourself slowing down on a particular point or maybe ideas aren’t flowing, maybe its not quite coming together then just leave it there and pick another bubble or pick another point and start writing again on that because you never ever have writer’s block in every single area all at the same time. And what you'll find is you may have a writer’s block on one particular topic or one particular idea but if you get stuck, then forget it, come back to it later on. Go on to something else. And then again, that flow will start to come and then always it happens when you revisit that original point after you’ve maybe ignored it for a few days or even a few weeks, bang, you have a break through and you start writing much quicker and faster. So that’s the first tip, having a notebook with you. Carrying with you everywhere you go and writing down different ideas that pop into your head.
The second thing, second strategy is what I call the post it note, post it stamp or post it note strategy and you all do, I’m pretty sure that -- someone said to me, “Do you have post it notes in Australia?” The answer yes. I think this will become a world wide phenomena, these are post it stamps everywhere. Simply, it’s just a little bit of paper with a bit of sticky on the back and you just have this pad with you and you just write down those, you know, woulds. As I said before, the final story. So, I’m writing that down now and either what I could I do is if I like, is just stick it in my book like that and I just fill up my book with a whole lot of this because why, this is portable. And then when I get home, what I can actually do is I can take all the post it notes out of my book and I can start to actually stick them up on a board. And I’ve got dozens of these things and what I can then start to do is I can start putting them into chapters. So, you can even start, break it up like this with different chapters. Use chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four and you can actually start playing around with these. So, chapter one starting to take shape and then you can go to chapter two and start filling that out and all these ideas were just random thoughts in no particular order but now you’ve actually starting structure. Now, you can actually start to write much easier. And if you feel like an idea after you’ve got them all out there, then you may fill, you know what, this one here actually belongs in chapter four as opposed to chapter one. And you can start to play around because what you might find is one particular chapter has maybe 12 or 13 post its and another one is you only got one. And so therefore, it’s a bit lonely, there's maybe not enough depth or substance to that particular idea so therefore you can chop and change and I find that that’s a really cool way to go -- is to write it on post t notes, stick it in a book because you can take that anywhere and then take those post it notes out of your book and stick them on onto a wall or maybe you can’t draw on your wall so maybe it’s a white board. Or you can do it on just sheets of paper that you stick up on the wall. There's a couple of different ways but you know buying a white board from any type of office store isn’t very expensive. I think this one is around about 70 or 80 bucks. Not very expensive but they can be really valuable for you to just get your ideas out there or on paper. Again, this works for writing non-fiction and also the same ideas works for writing fiction as well. Same principles apply.
That’s another particular method with the -- in that same vine, he got another theory which is the 3 by 5 cards. So, this is similar to the post it notes where you just basically write down, maybe he don’t just write down a trigger but maybe even if you an write down sub points because you got some more space to actually work with here. You can even draw pictures or you can do examples. The only negative with this is you kind of actually stick them into your book or what you can do is just put it an elastic band around them and carry them in your pocket but then the good thing about this as opposed to just a book is that you can then start to order them and put them into an actual order. And once you’ve got your order then you can number them. And then when you're actually sitting down to actually write your book you just think, where am I going to start for today and you go through it and go, okay, I’ll start with number 7 or I’ll start with number 12 and you start writing about that until all of those topic areas have been fleshed out. So, that is the second one.
And the third strategy, actually I think I’ve been talking now for -- close to 8 minutes. So rather than trying to go through his third idea, I am not really going to give it justice, I’m actually going to cover it again. I’m going to cover it on tomorrow’s episode. So we’ve covered number one which is the notebook method. If call it that. Number two is the post it stamp method and you got to come back for tomorrow which is number three of some ideas and strategies to get the ideas out of your head and then give yourself a bit of a plan to work with to make your writing so much better. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Publish TV. Thanks for watching. See you again next time.
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