Eight Pivots to Keep Your Book On Track
You might have heard how grueling and painful it is to write a book. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s even worse than that. It’s a slow and lonely slog through the prose equivalent of the vast and miserable Siberian tundra. While you journey, you’ll be torn away from your loved ones for dreary, ceaseless stretches. And the slog offers no shortcuts (unless you’re one amazing plagiarist): you’ll have no choice but to slash your way through tens of thousands of words and hour upon countless hour to reach a destination unknown at the start.
Seriously, it can be bad.
Successful non-fiction authors — the ones who actually finish — reach their destination because they keep working on their books regularly and steadily over months and even years. Even if they don’t manage to generate verbiage every day, they’re at least thinking about their ideas on a regular basis, usually daily. These authors manage to keep their subconscious minds in the game just enough that they can hit the ground running each time they sit down to work. They don’t waste time getting back into the swing of writing because they never stopped long enough to lose the thread.
Given the challenges of the writing journey, how might you keep your mind on task rather than coming to a screeching halt? By pivoting.
There are many, many ways to work on a book. Believe it or not, writing the words is only one. So are planning, rewriting, structuring, restructuring, researching, sketching, synthesizing, and talking over your ideas with others. If you hit a wall with writing or any of these modes, pivoting to another is key. You’ll still be keeping your mind engaged with your material, and you’ll still be productive. And you’ll eventually pivot back to writing with far less effort to reengage than you’d expend after an extended break from your book.
Following are a few simple and useful pivots to keep your mind in the game and your book on track when you’ve hit a wall with your writing.
Pivot #1: Get the words out by saying them out loud
If you’re stuck on writing an especially critical piece of content—say, a chapter opener, or the description of a complicated framework—step away from your keyboard and try saying it out loud. Enlist a trusted friend or colleague to listen if you’re not comfortable talking out loud by yourself. Be sure to record yourself and transcribe it.
Saying your ideas out loud—or even talking about them—forces your brain to synthesize your ideas and render them as words on the fly—often at a much faster pace than if you stay glued to your computer, trying to pound them out of your keyboard. If nothing else, you’ll have generated a crappy but useful straw man to move your writing forward.
Pivot #2: The blue book approach
Give yourself a small amount of time—a minute, maybe two—to explain a critical concept. Use a timer. Capture it in writing or, as suggested above, say it out loud. And when time’s up, pencils down!
The result won’t be the perfect prose you were looking for, but it will be a start in the right direction. And the gun-to-your-head nature of a time limit may force you to synthesize your idea on the fly.
Time really can be on your side if you employ a deadline. In fact, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that if you gave yourself a full hour, you’d still get most of your work done in that very last minute or two before the timer goes off. (Related time-based self-hack: many Rosenfeld Media authors swear by the Pomodoro Technique.)
Pivot #3: Pan back
It’s too easy to get lost generating long-form prose. Really, it’s worse than getting lost; you may feel more like you’ve skidded off the road completely. I can remember all too well that queasy feeling of, an hour or two into a session, having completely forgotten what exactly it was that I was writing. And why.
At moments like that, stop trying to write, step out of the weeds, and pivot back to the big picture. Keep your book’s outline handy, and take the opportunity to noodle on it some. Use all the time you need to reconnect to your book’s narrative arc. While you may feel like you’re on a writing journey, your goal is to produce a reading journey. Remember where you’re planning to take the reader, and if you’re not sure, work on that outline until it’s damned clear where your book is headed. You are absolutely forbidden from going back to writing until it is. (So it’s handy, here’s some advice on how to structure your book.)
Pivot #4: Zoom in
Similarly, when you’ve gotten sick and tired of outlining, outlining some more, and outlining again, jump back in to the writing. It’ll be a refreshingly welcome break from mapping out the reader’s journey.
Pivot #5: Take the stage
Jump on any opportunity to give a presentation about your book’s topic or to teach a workshop on it. Sure, you may not be done with your research and writing, but teaching your material to a live audience is a uniquely good way to develop your content without writing it. And it has the added bonus of serving as a forcing function, as mentioned earlier.
Think about it: your first chapter is basically a keynote talk, isn’t it? You’ll tell the story how you got involved in it, explain how it impacts your audience, and then begin a journey together to explore it (for some guidance on how to do this, see the “I + You = We” section of this article). And the meaty chapters at the core of your book are essentially the day-long workshop on your topic.
So, if you’re invited to present on your topic, go for it—even if you don’t feel you’re ready. And if you’re not invited, well, can you create opportunities to present? After all, in this remote era, all the Zoom is a stage.
Pivot #6: Visualize it
We often hit the writing wall because we’re trying to communicate an idea that is immensely complex—maybe too complex for words. These ideas tend to reside in your book’s first chapter, and refer to themselves as “frameworks,” “systems,” and “models”. (If they’re really full of themselves: “methodologies”.) And they are often foundational for the rest of your book’s content, so you might feel extra pressure to nail them, leading to, um, a touch of performance anxiety.
When you encounter such confoundingly complex ideas, set aside your keyboard and try sketching them instead. And if you can’t, find someone with visual communication chops who can work with you (some publishers will help you do this). Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, those particular thousand might be the words that are by far hardest to write. So, if you can, show rather than tell.
Pivot #7: Critique the other guy
If you get stuck, find a similar and, possibly, competitive article or book on the same or similar topic as yours. Then critique it. (Privately, of course.) You might find yourself disagreeing so strongly with what you read that it inspires in you a frenzied desire to right all wrongs and correct the record about your topic — in your book, of course.
Alternately, if you like what you read, you might be inspired to stand on the shoulders of giants and write down your own humble contribution to the topic. Either way, you can compare and contrast your way into a burst of energy that can get you back to writing.
Pivot #8: Your subconscious, the gig worker
Your subconscious is like a really useful, omnipresent, and underpaid Fiverr contractor: it will cheerfully solve problems of all sorts in the background while you do whatever it is you need to do. That might mean going for a walk, taking a nap, balancing your checkbook—whatever non-book stuff that needs to get done. Your subconscious will do just about anything you need it to while the rest of you lives your life—as long as you remember to ask it.
While you write, jot down those tough questions, and before you take that break to step away from writing, ask your subconcscious to tackle the one at the top of your list. (I find it especially effective when I hear myself ask Mr. Subconscious Lou out loud.) You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how often the answer will be waiting for you when you sit back down again to write.
Remember: as with so many creative pursuits, iteration is key. Flip back and forth between writing and these various alternative modes to working on your book. Each will only take you so far before you’ll need to pivot again. The key is to keep doing something that keeps you on track with your book, even if no words are being written, rather than stopping all together. Because if you do stop, the time costs of starting back up can be immense, and the risk of never getting back on track is dangerously high.
If you have other examples of pivots that you’ve found useful for keeping your writing on track, I’d love to hear about them; please comment below. Good luck pivoting!
