If you’re the kind of person, which probably is everybody, that deep down inside says, “I want to write a book but I don’t know where to start,” or you already have a book, or several, or a library and just find it difficult coming up with an outline, well, there are a couple of things you can do about that. I specialize in non-fiction but I am interested in fiction and I’ve done a couple of short stories under a pen name that I won’t tell no matter what.
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The tactics are similar so I’ll just talk about the non-fiction for now. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but if you can simply find a book that is related to what you want to do over on Amazon, you can always see the table of contents. If you choose the top 5 best rated, best reviewed, most impacting books and, don’t directly copy, but get an idea of what each major section, maybe 5 major sections, what each one of the books covers. Or just grab the table of contents from everything, put it all together and see what’s in common and what’s missing, you can come up with a list of what is successful.
It’s already been proven. That’s where you stop and look for ideas from those sources. You look at that skeleton, that structure, that format, that way of presenting a topic that has already been useful to other people. You’re not directly copying. You’re not going to use that as your table of contents, but it’s going to help train your thoughts into the way they should go and then you’re going add the muscles and the flesh on top of that. That one is extremely useful as a starter.
There are a lot of sites out there that have the online training CBT, the Computer Based Training courses, and most of the time they’re laid down in a fashion that is very congruent with adult learning theory and more often than not, as you’re going through the course, if you just simply jot down the headings or the major points of each section, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how you should also flow your information and data for whatever book or product you’re creating.
So those two ideas, the outline or the making your own high level notes of a training course, are more than enough to get you a library of infinity. Get out there, make your outline, have no excuses, write, write, write, dictate if you can and get your thoughts immortally memorized, memorialized, recorded and shared with the rest of the world. You’ve got the rest of your life, how many more can you do?