Eight lousy sentences: A new way to finish your book

Do you have a great book in you that has been unfinished for ages? Perhaps a novel, or a non-fiction book proposal? You know it's good, but somehow you can never make time for it. Or when you sit down to write, you just can't seem to get the words out.

You may even look at this unfinished book as a moral failing. If only somehow you could discipline yourself to work harder, and write more, then you could be the author you know you really are.

I recently finished the graduate work to become a psychotherapist – and after hundreds of therapy sessions dealing with people's fears and phobias, I actually see a strong parallel between these issues and wannabe writers. And in the end, it all boils down to this belief that you aren't writing enough.

In fact, your problem has exactly the opposite cause: you are writing too much.

Let me explain. Suppose you are afraid of heights. So one day you suck up your courage and force yourself to go to the 40th floor of a building – because you view your problem as a lack of bravery. In reality, however, you are sensitizing yourself to something I want you to de-sensitize to. This is why over and over, I watch people finally get well once they stop being brave and start taking tiny baby steps. By staying in their comfort zone, and gradually expanding it in a way that lets them be fully present in the situation, they get over their fears.

The same thing is true about your writing. You sit down and think, "Ugh! I should work harder on this. So I am going to force myself to write another thousand words, even if it kills me! And it had better be good!" The end result? You start to associate writing with failure, and eventually your subconscious throws up a big red flag when you even think about doing more writing. It starts telling you, "You're not good enough. You never finish anything. And you're always getting stuck."

If this sounds like you, here is what I want you to do. Sit down tonight and write 200 words – about eight lousy sentences. Even if they are complete tripe. Then stop writing. You are done for the night.

If you can comfortably write eight sentences every night, you will accomplish two important things. First, do this for a year and you will complete a 60,000 word book. Second, and more important, you will be feeding your subconscious lots and lots of success. You are only supposed to write eight sentences, and by golly, you are doing it – so this gets chalked up in your memory banks as a win. Your subconscious loves success, by the way.

Best of all, keep doing it and eventually these eight sentences will seem like nothing, and you will write more. This is exactly the same mechanism by which people get over their fears. Clinically, the act of practicing is much more important than how much you practice, so taking small steps eventually leads to breakthroughs. In time, you start look at writing – or things you used to fear – with the warm glow of success and mastery, one easy step at a time.

Now, some of you are saying to yourselves, "Gosh – I can't even write eight sentences. Now what?" No problem. Just lower the bar to wherever you are comfortable, and start there. The goal is to have success every day, long enough for the thought of being a writer to start ringing your "success" chime. Then, trust me, things will expand from there.

I practice what I preach here. I've cranked out a published book, for myself or for ghostwriting clients, every year for close to 15 years now. And as much as I hate to admit this, I don't just write with passion, style, or heart. I write with a calculator. I set a wordcount goal for myself, on comes the word processor, and out come the words.

The same approach can completely change your success as a writer. This is why I am prescribing eight sentences, or the equivalent of talking to someone for a minute or so, every night. Stop straining, start winning, and watch what happens to your writing!

Going for the title

If you are reading this blog, I am guessing that you might want to write a book. (Great!) If so, here is a simple step that will get you a long way towards successfully publishing it.

That step is to simply go to your favorite bookstore and purchase a book. Preferably a book in the field you yourself want to write in. Then answer the following question: Why did this book's title make me want to take it off the shelf?

New authors think that people buy their books because of the great content that hides within the 60,000 words or so of turgid prose that they write. That is only kinda sorta true. In reality, that one line on the spine (or the Amazon search) is what really hooks readers to explore further. If you can write truly great titles, you are more than halfway down the football field to making your book happen. And with the very best of titles, the book practically writes itself.

Look at the titles on your bookshelf. If they are nonfiction books, chances are that they sell a benefit, credential the book, or tell you everything you need to know about what's between the covers. For fiction books, they probably create a mental image that hooks you, or spill the beans on the book setting and its genre. If they are truly great titles, they probably make you smile or make you think.

When Tim Ferriss decided to title his book "The Four-Hour Work Week," I believe he had a bestseller on his hands even before he wrote a word. Conversely, there are some great books out there buried under bland, generic titles. So what's your title?

Divide and conquer

Many people will come up to me and say, "Gosh, I could never write a book!"

Here is my response to them: can you write a sentence?

Let's drill down on this a little further. Can you write a sentence that introduces something? Can you write a sentence that describes something? Can you write a sentence that summarizes something? Guess what: if you can write ten chapters with four or five hundred of these sentences, over a period of a few months – say, a few dozen a day – then you can write a book.

Most people look at book projects in terms of their enormity. I look at them in terms of a bunch of nice, small chunks that you can master. So if you are thinking about a book project yourself, don't think about boiling the ocean. Start with one sentence, and make that sentence absolutely incredible. Then put those sentences to work in paragraphs that teach people something.

Don't think about your next book project as being hard. Think of it as being lots and lots of easy. Then divide and conquer!

The secret to getting published: study the genre

I recently installed a new bookshelf along the wall of our family room - a beautiful, glass-enclosed space that overlooks the hills of upstate New York - and for the first time ever, devoted a shelf to hold one copy of each book I've ever written, ghostwritten, or contributed to. And it is quite a big shelf! Including things like foreign editions, second printings, and the like, there are close to 30 books there. And on average, I have cranked out one nationally published book every year or so since the mid-1990s.

So how do you get to be a "repeat offender" like me? Hard work? Well, perhaps, but I really enjoy writing and have never succeeded at anything just because of Calvinistic toil. Born with a silver-tounged pen? Nope, I was a C student in writing at Cornell decades ago. The right connections? Sorry, I live in the middle of nowhere, and was a humble lay middle manager with no agent when I first hit the bookshelves.

But there is one thing I do differently than almost any wannabe writer I know, and it is the single biggest reason I am successful: I study the genre I am writing in.

Go to a bookstore sometime, and you will see most people browsing through books. Go to one when I'm there and you'll see me pulling one book after another off the shelf, running my finger along the pages, muttering to myself, and occasionally even pulling out a calculator. (Did I tell you I have an engineering degree?) While other people are reading books, I am deconstructing them. And when I finally sit down to write, it is a thoughtfully composed performance informed by the style of the genre.

Studying the genre is NOT the same as copying another person's style. I have my own style, thank you. In fact, I have lots of them, having published in genres that include popular business books, social science, and even fictional stories. Rather, I have a good, general sense of the audience I am writing for.

Take business fables, one of my most successful genres. These projects never top 25,000 words, use short paragraphs, and are built around simple ideas. If I write a thick book with lots of jargon, no matter how funny or well-written I make it, I can't play in this market. Similarly, my non-fiction business self-help books generally tip the scales at 60-70,000 words, have a clear reader benefit in each chapter, are written in third person, and use lots of "eye candy" such as sidebars and examples to break up a wall of prose.

So, do you want to write a weighty tome like James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds, a thought leadership book like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, or a quick read like Seth Godin's Tribes? Surowiecki runs out his anecdotes over several pages, Gladwell hooks your attention with "aha" moments at the beginning of each chapter, and Godin uses tons of micro-examples written in second person ("You need to be using Twitter. Now."). Each of them "smell" the way they do because of reproducible points of style.

So go out there and break down your favorite books. Study their opening hooks, their paragraph lengths, their chapter structures, and the way they keep your interest flowing. Think of how these things might affect your own unique writing voice, and how you want your own books to be seen. Then get writing. Have fun!

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