Steps to Writing a Book

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Laura and I'm from youngwritersworkshops.com. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some steps to writing a book. The first step in writing a book is deciding what you're going to write about, and this can be - it sounds very simple but it can be a pretty big decision. You need to figure out what chunk of - what size of a chunk you're going to take on, if it's a fiction book you've got a whole other road to follow but for a non-fiction book, you need to kind of pare down your topic to a manageable size but one that's big enough to have a whole book in it. We're talking about a non-fiction book so let's talk about the next step in that area is going to be research. You need to do lots of research both from a competitive point of view, finding what else is out there on the subject, and also some of the research that you're going to use to pull information together for your book. This process can take a while, but at the same time you're going to start making notes, pulling a draft together, finding sources and generally creating an outline for your non-fiction book. The next step after you've created an outline that you're happy with, is to start to write to the outline. Now this could also lead you back to revise your outline, which happens a lot, once you start writing you may change your outline quite a bit, but that's kind of a starting point for you, you're going to do a chapter, a list of chapters once you get a little bit clearer on your outline. Use the draft process, write a first draft, get some feedback, revise and go back and do another draft. This process should yield you a strong first complete draft of your book that you can take to a publisher. And you can find a little bit more about the publishing aspect of writing a book by doing a little bit more research. But those are some ideas about steps to writing a book."