Are you getting lost in the book you’re trying to write?

Once upon a time I was a programmer.  I wrote long programs to do complex data processing.   Now I’m an author and copywriter – and I’m still organising and translating complexity.

When I started writing complex programs, I was taught that the best way to work was to those programs from their headings downward.   (Don’t panic, no scary complicated stuff coming!)  The headings were a short phrase summarising what the section was for.

So to calculate an invoice total for a sales order, we would:

Process each order line:

Calculate the line total

Calculate the tax on the line total

Repeat

Calculate the order total

Starting work on a new business book (on the emotionally loaded area of climate change) recently, I found that I was getting overwhelmed by what  to write.  There was so much I COULD write that I kept getting lost in WHAT to write.

Back to the future

So I went back to how I used to write programs, and started to organise my chapter headings by their function.  I deliberately DIDN’T put in the content of what I was going to write.

Introduction – why business readers will benefit from this book

Benefit explanation 1

Benefit explanation 2

Benefit explanation 3

Chapter 1 – What’s stopping business people seeing opportunities

Reason 1

Reason 2

Reason 3

Chapter 2 – Proof of businesses making money from sustainability

Proof 1

Proof 2

Proof 3

Organise the PURPOSE of what you’re writing

Are you writing something long?  Something targeted to achieve a particular purpose? Something that you know so much about that getting organised is important.

Organising what you’re writing into sections based on section purpose (instead of section content) might help you move forward more effectively.