Creating an Outline & Table of Contents: How to Write a Non Fiction Book

"I’m Bobbi Linkemer on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I’d like to invite you to visit my website at writeanonfictionbook.com. How you approach the writing, first of all by writing your proposal. One of the things that the proposal asks you to do is write down your main points. This is very, very rough mind map; it looks like a spider. If you’re somebody who’s kind of graphic in the way you think; more visual then you are linear, you probably use something like this. So in each one of these lines, you would write a main point that you want to cover in your book. There is software if you like really high-tech mind maps. If you’re somebody who thinks in outlined form, skip the mind map all together and just do your roman numerals on a outline. The next thing you do is you put in all the key points under each main heading. Those will end up being your subheads. Then you end up taking this whole very messy looking thing and you’re probably not going to do it on a form, you’re probably just going to scribble it on some kind of blank paper, and you refine it into a table of contents. That’s your first organization, is your outline. The way I write and the way I teach this is that you build that outline; you keep filling in material under each one of those key points, until pretty soon you have a chapter and pretty soon you have a lot of chapters. Then you have the inside point of your book, your messages in your chapters."