In recent years I have found myself more and more drawn to the act and craft or writing. It allows me to find some clarity in my thoughts, and create stronger ways for myself to view the world. In 2019 I have set forth with the intention of writing a book. It will likely be a shorter book, my first book doesn’t need to be a masterpiece or comprehensive in any way. I chose to write about lifting weights. Lifting weights is the subject I know most about in this world, and I thought it would require little research. I have completed the first draft of the book. I am sure this process has made me a better writer, I also think it is making me a better product manager.
In the end a book is a product. This book is not an artistic endeavor, it is a manual on lifting weights. Everything that goes into the book must make people either stronger, or healthier. With 20 years of personal experience lifting weights and researching, I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of thoughts. Managing these ideas, and weaving a narrative has been an interesting experience. I have little experience in writing something more than a few pages for a college course. I don’t know how to “write good.” I on this project have had to rely on my subject knowledge and product manager experience to carry me through the project. I like to think I am starting to learn and think more correctly about this writing process.
The first lesson I have learned is that blogposts are a great start, but only a start. Before starting this project I had written probably 20 blogposts on various topics relating to fitness and lifting weights. My first thought with the book was that I could take these blogposts, and use them as the start to the book. I could just make a chapter around each one. I thought I could then put an intro and conclusion onto the posts and then just fill in a few gaps and have a book. This was a nice theory, and it might work for other people but it did not work for me.
I think it mostly did not work for me because their was not much connecting the blogposts beyond the fact they were on the subject of fitness. Fitness is just way too large of a topic to cover in a book. I ended up with something that would have had to have been titled “Nehemiah’s Thoughts on Random Fitness Topics.” Plenty of books take this approach, and if you have a strong following I think you can publish this kind of book and sell some copies. I am not some well followed expert in any subject though, so I felt as though I needed a more coherent narrative. At this point in things, the real writing of the book started to take place. I formed a bit more of a thesis and had to niche down on what I was really trying to write. I kept the original blogposts, and most of their content is still in the book draft in some way. I however had to take a few steps forward and create a real product out of this book.
To create a book product with some measure of credibility behind it I had to evaluate where I could niche down. What has resulted is a book that has become a mixture of “Big Brother Advice”, how to organize your training, and some fitness hacks. I feel like anyone that reads this book will know how to get strong, and continue to get strong for years to come. I have crafted a framework from these blogposts and random thoughts that give people a roadmap for continued strength for years to come.
The whole “throw some blogposts together and get a book” it was a good first step. I did however think it would get me 90% of the way to where I wanted to get. In reality it got me closer to 5% of the way to an actual book. This method gave me a lot of baggage to deal with as well. Each blogpost in the context of a book needed reworked. It is debatable if a fresh start would have gotten me to my first draft faster, but the ideas from the blogposts did provide ideas. In the end I have learned my writing is not prolific enough to just take some other pieces and smash them together into something cool. Other authors have done it with success, for me though it was just a start. I think sometimes this results in a book full of “random disjointed things” and that is beneath the standards I hold myself to. In the future I would be rather hesitant to use the “just smash blogposts together and get a book” method.
On a more tactical level one method I did use that let me get started fast was to commit to learning no new tools for this book project. I decided to use Microsoft Word for writing this and avoid book writing tools. I wanted to spend zero time on tools and worry just about writing. In my past I have written a lot of code for websites. One of the greatest frustrations of writing code was working with software development tools. There were days when I spent all day working with the tools, and not writing any code whatsoever. I wanted to avoid this with this book. I can write in English. I can do this in a Word document. I decided to for this project at least, do things the simplest way possible and that was with a simple Word document. I was able to from day one, just write the book, not spend time learning a bunch of tools before I started writing.
Each section or chapter of the book has been given its own Word document. Then I combine the documents to get a book. This has cost me time, because putting the book together as a whole involves me opening document after document and copy and pasting the contents of each section into a single document. There is little as far as version management. If I make a major change, I just create a new document and save the old version for a backup. In the future I think I will look at writing tools for projects.
I am happy I have done this book project without those tools though. I think it got me to a real draft of the book faster rather than spending tons of time learning writer’s tools. This seemed to be an important thing at this point for me. Getting discouraged with tools and losing momentum seemed like a bad idea to me. I think having done things this way will give me perspective to better choose tools in the future. I think it is a lot like learning math without a calculator. It is a good thing to do for perspective, and when you add in tools later on like a calculator and spreadsheet, you can go really fast with things and do awesome things. If you never learn how to do math, these tools will not be as powerful to you when you use them.
The most powerful tool in getting this book draft finished did in fact end up being an Excell sheet. Progress was slow on this book for me. It took approximately a year to accumulate the first 48 pages (with lots of stops and starts, and changes.) I wrote the next 34 pages and reworked a lot of those 48 ages in 2 weeks. The big change I made was I started logging the words I wrote each day, and just tried to keep beating my records for most words written in a day. Keeping track of these word counts kept me from spinning my wheels and “working on the book” but not getting anything done. I needed that accountability. I think I will keep doing this kind of word tracking and challenging in the future, it’s a good push. I set super modest goals with this method and I think that helped. I could get to my daily words really easily, but it kept he progress going. This is not a big insight, but it was the push I needed to finish the first draft of this book.
The last major thing I have learned by writing this book is that its not THAT hard to write something useful for people. I have written a book that will be useful to readers. Is it a great literary work? Nope. I am not some great writer. I have ideas and these ideas can help some people. I think that is all I need. I have the first draft written and have much work to do to get this book publishable. It is just a matter of time before that is done though. All I have to do is put in the time and work. This book demystified the writing process. I feel like now I can write lots of useful things in the future, and probably will.
Viewing this book as a product and not some literary work has framed the project in a good way for me. I know how to tackle projects and this is no different. I still have much to learn about the writing process and in time I am sure I will. While I may not create a great awesome literary work, I have created something that is useful to people. This book will help some people get more fit, more strong, and have more fun in the gym. That seems like a good start for draft one.