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Help-seeking behaviours

If you’re …

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And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. […] Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great - that is for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’. - Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

Writing is silly, isn’t it?

You know that silly fee…

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1. Read novels. The very best way to learn how to write one is to read lots of them, especially in the genre you want to write in, but not necessarily at the same time as drafting your novel.

2. Forget about the novel you should write. Writers carry round expectations …

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Me talking about why it’s obligatory to write something rubbish first before redrafting:

Part three of the series on Writing Short Stories. In case you missed the first two, they’re linked from this one:

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Work with me on your writing goals. First Wednesday of the month at Hove Yellowave. More here: https://www.louisetondeur.co.uk/workshops

Afrori…

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I contributed to a Thrive workshop in Brighton this morning on creativity, and I wanted to recommend Brené Brown’s work, as she discusses ‘shitty first drafts’ (she calls them SFDs) in Rising Strong on pages 85-88. Here I am reading from page 85.

Clearly the universe wants me to finish reading Strong Ground, her latest book, because I embarrassed myself by saying the wrong (actually right) book title several times while trying to remember the title of the new one. Ironic, given Brené Brown is famous for her TED talk on vulnerability.

Writers tend to exist on a continuum from ‘always free writes first’ through to ‘find it hard to finish a sentence without editing it’. If you’re up at the free writing end of the continuum, you probably need help with structure and organising your ideas, if you’re editing sentences as you go, you might need help with generating ideas and perfectionism or ‘fear of the blank page’. Lean into the skill that you’re good at while finding resources to help you with the skills you need. Some of this is mindset stuff, but that’s always true.

For instance, if you’d like more on this idea of writing imperfectly and accepting the self-critical voice go here and for more on free writing, go here. For help with structure, go here. The resources at the end of this post will help with mindset.

Posting this mainly for those who came to the workshop to give you the title of the book but also to recommend Rising Strong, Strong Ground, and Bird by Bird to anyone who wants to get better at writing creatively.

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1. Start with your topic as a heading. Divide it into subtopics. Get everything down without evaluation. Then disregard any subtopics that you don’t wish to include. This may result in a narrowing of the topic, which is a good thing. Paradoxically, constraint helps creativity rather than hindering it.

2. Write a one- or two-line summary of what you…

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1. The feeling of the new. Picture this: you go to a new city or visit a seaside town you haven’t been to before or go away somewhere remote. Focus on the newness of the experience. What sensations do you get in your body? What thoughts are going through your head? Now imagine that you get some time on your own, away from your friends or from whatever it is you’re doing. You get some time to stare at the sea from a balcony, look out of the window of a skyscraper, or take in the view from your cottage. How do you feel? The places you inhabit influence how you are in the world. It’s easy to become enmeshed in familiar places, to the point that we don’t realise how bound up we are until we go somewhere new. Short story writing tip: Have one of your characters go somewhere new or experience something for the first time and be specific about the location. Use your senses.

2. A trysting place. The term ‘trysting place’ means ‘meeting place’ but it also suggests that the place is special and there’s a commitment involved. As a writer, a trysting place can be somewhere you meet with, connect to and commit to yourself. Short story writing tip: Find a trysting place. That is, somewhere special to you. It could be a café or a favourite walking spot (it doesn’t have to be extraordinary) and you commit to turning up in it. Use it to notice detail. The pattern on a leaf. The smell of the coffee. The texture of the bark. This might turn into a walk taking in your trysting place, but not necessarily.

3. Mulling is writing. Mull over a place in advance, without forcing yourself to come up with ideas, and your brain gets a chance to work away at the story so that it won’t be completely new territory when you sit down to write. You also get a chance to notice things. Mulling could be walking, having a bath, sitting in the garden, eating an ice cream on the beach, swimming or a five-minute pause on a bench. Mulling is about giving yourself some space, looking after yourself and noticing your concerns, your dreams and your ideas. You might find a story or object that makes you curious or a character who won’t leave you alone. Short story writing tip: Build some mulling time into your day.

4. Go a different way. Take yourself out of your usual surroundings and you (literally and figuratively) see the world differently. Go a different route. Sit in a different chair. Move around. Dance. Sing. Plant something. (Unless you’re a professional dancer, singer or gardener, in which case, find something new.) You gain perspective. The matrix slips for a fraction of a second. Short story writing tip: do something different, anything that causes the matrix to slip for a moment. Write during or immediately afterwards.

5. Why is place important in short stories? We’re intrinsically bound up with the worlds we inhabit and so are fictional characters. Your readers will experience characters as inauthentic if you write them any other way. As I said in the introduction, place is like an explosion of different stories. Remember that a moment in time is also a moment in place. Short story writing tip: experience an explosion of stories. Take one moment in one place and jot down several (not all as that’s probably impossible) stories that could emanate from it. This will probably start with the provenance of an object or with a person.

6. Direct observation from life. Writers can be like artists by painting a picture (writing a picture) en plein air. Take yourself off somewhere interesting and record what you see. It’s as simple as that. But you have to be prepared to stay where you are. Short story writing tip: If you want to, make up a story that is site specific, fit for the place in which you’re writing, or set the story in the place or simply be inspired by your surroundings. I once sat near London’s Guildhall, for instance, and wrote a story about someone lost, looking for the Roman Amphitheatre. (There were no signs up in those days.)

7. Still life. We can also be like painters by noticing the detail, like we’re painting a still life, although it isn’t ever still. Notice the small things, the subtleties that other people don’t notice. You do that by bothering to stop, to take time out and observe. Develop writer’s eyes, notice the colours, textures, smells, sounds, and tastes too. If you don’t have the use of one or more of your senses, write about that or focus on the others. Short story writing tip: Go somewhere and notice the details. Capture the atmosphere of a place so that you can conjure it up later. Use the senses, and the specific detail that readers/characters would only see if they were there, and if you can visualise the place as you read what you write in the second or third draft, chances are they will be able to when they read it for themselves. Try it out on someone by reading it out loud to a friend (or a stranger?) and ask them what they see.

Summing up

Here’s a summary of all 7 tips:

1. Use the feeling of the new

2. Find a trysting place

3. Remember mulling is writing

4. Go a different way

5. Consider why is place important your story

6. Use direct observation from life

7. Think still life

More soon. Until then, happy writing,

Lou

P.S. The first article in this series is here: Rules for Writing Short Stories and the third article in this series is here: How to write short stories part 3.

Quick tips

1. Remember ‘scene not summary’.

2. Practice observation of the world by going on daily walks.

3. Take out redundant words (probably adjectives and adverbs).

4. Let the verbs do the heavy lifting.

5. Invest heavily in sense of place.

6. Write ‘be specific’ on a sticky note and stick it to your computer.

7. Use a character’s job to help with characterisation and plot.

8. Raise the stakes. Introduce jeopardy. This may solve all of your structure, character and plotting problems.

9. Sit with it for a while.

10. If in doubt, focus on the sensory experience of a character in a moment of time.

Three writing experiments:

1. Try this, as an experiment: use one thread, two or three characters, show us - by what they do - whether the main character gets what they want.

2. Try this, as another experiment: go somewhere interesting you’ll be able to write in and about. A quirky building with a cafe works or a park with a bench. Write about what you observe. People, parts of the place, nature, colours. Later craft one of those observations into a story.

3. Here’s another experiment to try: find a short story competition. Divide the required number of words by 4. Your beginning and end will be a quarter of your story. Your middle will be half of your story. Note down the number of words for each. Divide it again in the same way if you like. The beginning also has a beginning, middle and end etc. Note the number of words. Set a timer and free write for 25 minutes. Stay in the room. Use one point of view and one setting per 25 minute writing burst. How many words did you write? You should now be able to work out how many 25 minute sessions you need for your beginning, middle and end.

Here’s the next article in the series.

More soon. Until then, happy writing,

Lou

P.S. I have some mentoring slots available for short story writers. Find out more here: https://www.louisetondeur.co.uk/workwithlou

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Over the last few months I’ve been posting a series called ‘I want to write a book but’. You can see a list of all of t…

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Over the last few months I’ve been posting a series called ‘I want to write a book but’. You can see a list of all of t…

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The judge will turn up

So far in this ‘I want to write a book but’ series I’ve talked about finding time to write, ideas, getting started and structure. This post is all about self-criticism. Both Natalie Goldberg and Dorothea Brande talk about this phenomenon in their bestselling books on the writing process. Brande calls it ‘the judge’ and Goldberg ‘the editor.’ The judge or the editor is our critical faculty, given a voice. I’ll call it ‘the judge’ here because ‘editor’ has a writing-related homonym: being an editor is a whole other writing role. The judge will turn up – so don’t try to push it away – it’s our attitude to it that counts, and that’s what this post is about. Below I discuss the following:

1. How our brains are trained to look for problems

2. Sometimes the judge is personified

3. The judge can often turn up when it’s not needed

4. The judge is not necessarily a bad thing

5. If the judge shows up, you must be making progress

1. Our brains are trained to look for problems

Our brains scan for danger to keep us safe. It’s normal to have a critical faculty. Without it, we’d walk into traffic. Being aware that the judge exists and that it’s totally normal, everyone has one, is the first step in coming to terms with it. Sometimes in our writing life this critical faculty can become overly critical, by a little or a lot. What can we do? The first step is acceptance and awareness.

2. Sometimes the judge is personified

Occasionally ‘the judge’ is the voice of a critical parent or teacher, for example, and we associate it with a negative experience. For some writers this happens to such an extent that they find it hard to get going or to write anything at all. Sometimes (and this could be a difficult leap) laughing at the judge or at least not taking it too seriously is the key.

3. The judge can often turn up when it’s not needed

When you’re staring at a blank page, when you’re trying to write a first draft, when you’re reworking a scene, and you’re channelling your creative powers, an overly judgemental critical faculty can make us contract and to censor ourselves, to edit before we’ve even written a sentence. If this happens, in line with what Brande says in Becoming a Writer, tell it to come back later when you could do with some critical assistance.

4. The judge is not necessarily a bad thing

If we add mindful awareness to the mix, the judge gives us a chance to identify our sticking points, the areas that the brain has decided are a problem. We can then offer ourselves reassurance, such as ‘I know you’re worried about this, but it’s ok, I can handle it.’ You could also take positive action. If your brain throws up ‘You’ve always been terrible at planning, why should this novel be any different?’ you could decide to read over your favourite book on planning or join a short course.

5. If the judge shows up, you must be making progress.

The primitive part of our brains likes ease, familiarity and safety. It will try to avoid difficulty, lack of familiarity and danger. Whenever we step outside our comfort zone, all three of those things come up, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot and the judge will show up in an effort to get us to change course. So if the judge shows up, you know must be making progress by moving into unfamiliar territory, challenging yourself by making things slightly less easy and safe.

What to do about it

How we think about ‘the judge’ is all important. In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests that we write anyway, that we don’t try to suppress the voice that tells us we’ll never be a writer, the thought that says ‘who do you think you are anyway?’ and tells us to give up. Instead we can listen to it, acknowledge it and then ignore it or laugh at it. An alternative, which I learnt during Sophie Hannah’s Dream Author coaching programme, is to deliberately design alternative thoughts to think whenever the judge comes up strongly, not by trying to push away or replace the judgemental thought but by introducing something different. I give an example under four above. Other examples include:

• ‘I am a writer because I write.’

• ‘All I need to do is turn up.’

• ‘My voice deserves to be heard as much as anyone else’s.’

• ‘I’m taking small steps.’

• ‘I don’t have to be perfect, I’m practising.’

• ‘I’m writing shitty first drafts.’ (from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird) or ‘SFDs’ as Brené Brown calls them in Rising Strong.

In a similar move, meditation teacher Jeff Warren suggests using ‘welcome to the party’ in a meditation of the same name, which he has put up online here.

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Focus on turning up

Another thing you can do, if you’re affected by the judge a lot, is to simply focus on turning up and to reward yourself for it, no matter how many words you write. What matters is that you sit down at your desk.

Gradually, as you form the habit, it will become familiar to you. We know that our primitive brains like familiarity, along with ease and safety. A regular writing habit removes one of the three ‘problems’ – lack of familiarity – that our primitive brain tries to avoid. You can also make it as easy as possible to get into your writing, by organising your writing on your computer so it’s easy to find, or by carrying a notebook. Here’s James Clear on why systems are better than goals.

You can make your habit feel safe by writing in the same comfortable space each time, and by following a routine - if routines tend to work for you. A small ritual, like making your favourite tea or coffee before you write, helps you to get into the zone.

Focus on self-care

If ease, familiarity and safety are all challenged by a particular writing project - for example, it’s mentally taxing, it’s unfamiliar, and you feel vulnerable - it’s possible you’ll hear ‘the judge’ more often or more clearly. In which case, my advice would be to look after yourself in other areas of your life as much as possible. Make other areas of your life easy, familiar and safe, at least temporarily, and practise extreme or radical self-care. Read up on the idea of rest as resistance too.

What next?

The other posts in this series are listed here. Next week it’s ‘I want to write a book but I don’t know the rules’! Feel free to share any of the exercises or ideas with others, but please credit my Substack if you do. 🙏 I’ve put together a very short Google form to find out what you’d most like to learn about, writing-wise. It will take you a couple of minutes to complete, tops, and would really help!

Hope to see you at the workshops. Here are the details.

More soon. Until then, happy writing,

Lou

From 2011 to 2026

In 2012 I published a book called The Small Steps Guide to Goal Setting and Time Management. The updated edition came out in 2023. This article is about one way to structure a nonfiction book using this book as an example.

At the end of the post I will list the steps in an easy to follow format, a cut-out-and-keep guide to how it works, if you like. So if you want the TLDR version: scroll to the end!

I’ll say it again for emphasis before I get started: this is only one way to do it. It worked for me because my brain works in the opposite way so it helped me to create a framework. If this method doesn’t work for you in its entirety, do steps 1-3 anyway - they might be all you need.

Below, you’ll learn how to:

• use this structuring device to break down a book project into manageable chunks of words

• work out roughly how much time it will take to write each chapter

• schedule writing sessions accordingly - although that step isn’t necessary for this method of structuring a book to hold good

• use this approach to generate a research ‘to do list’.

In other words, the structure allows you to create and implement a plan for actually writing the book.

I used this structure in 2011/2012 partly because I only had one afternoon a week to write it and partly because the book itself was about breaking tasks down into small (tiny) steps and partly because, having struggled with structuring, I’m fascinated by how it works. Your proposal and pitch for your nonfiction book will depend on the publisher and what they’ve asked for in the submission guidelines, but I also used this particular structure to create the proposal document, and therefore to sell my first nonfiction book.

It’s interesting to compare the process to the book I’m working on at the moment - on writing and mindfulness. Writing an academic book is different (but not entirely different) and I’m using a similar planning device.

Gather material

First, I gathered the hodgepodge of material I had on my topic. I had a lot of stuff on goal setting and time management – i.e. what the book was about – from teaching first year students in an introductory module, which covered study skills and things like deadlines, organisational skills, and life at university. I also did a survey of the materials I had from my own personal journey into goal setting and time management; a journey which didn’t stop with the book as I went on to discover that my interest in researching executive functioning skills came from undiagnosed neurodivergence, but that’s another story. In a way I was surveying the materials (or the puzzle?) I had compiled so far on ‘how come I have a PhD but can’t get my head around scheduling and prioritising?' and ‘what have other people said about structure and time management?’ but I didn’t know that yet.

Take the tiniest step possible

My ‘big idea’ or USP was to write about taking small steps towards a goal. In fact, I didn’t simply mean small steps - although I used that phrase in the title and in subsequent books - I meant micro steps, i.e. the tiniest step possible. It was 2011 and we had just had a baby and wanted to buy a house. I can still picture the swirly wallpaper (our landlords had interesting taste in home décor) as I sat in our North London home and realised that I could take tiny steps towards buying a house – or any goal at all – and then let go of both the outcome and rest of the tasks required. And by tiny I mean something so small that one can easily fit it into a day without much resistance. Go and pick up a leaflet about mortgages from the bank on the walk home, for example. Therefore as I was gathering my material, I was looking at it through that lens. It definitely helps to have a theme while in the gathering phase.

Here’s an idea, using exactly the principle that occurred to me in our swirly wallpapered front room. Take the tiniest step possible towards writing a book, whatever tiniest means to you. Use that tiny step to calm your nervous system right down. For instance, turn up in your writing space for five minutes. Or write a sentence. Or get your coloured pens out and start a mind map.

Find some stablemates

At this point I also looked at previous books published by my target publisher, otherwise known as potential stablemates, by borrowing a few from the library. Most were actually much shorter than the book I ended up writing, but crucially they broke down their topic in a simple and direct way. Using these books as inspiration, I came up with a structure based on the material I already had plus what I most wanted to say about taking small steps. You may wish to find complementary titles from a range of publishers to help you to pitch the book and show there’s a market for it, but that’s not what I mean here: you’re looking for books published by the target publisher to discover the house style and patterns in structure that you can emulate or deviate from with intention.

I ended up buying two of my stablemates secondhand. As you can see in the photo, the imprint I was aiming for was ‘A Straightforward Guide’. I wanted to simplify and demystify goal setting and time management - and subsequently the writing process - for the reader but also for myself. The book was too long for this imprint in the end so was published as part of the Emerald business guide series instead. But this is where I started. I annotated Stephen Wade’s A Straightforward Guide to Freelance Writing (2011) to understand the structure and use of subheadings. I compared it to Pauline Rogers’ guide to CV writing (2007) and another called Writing Your Autobiography by Jackie Sherman (2011) which I no longer have. You can see some of my annotations and how my book compared to the house style below.

Get everything down on one page

I can’t remember if I mind mapped, but I definitely got all of the stuff in my head onto a large piece of paper and then ordered it. This wasn’t easy but it was productive. Essentially, this step is: do a brain download in any order and then start to find connections and therefore a structure. You can colour-code, draw, add arrows and numbers, circle what you’ve written, cross things out, underline, make it as messy and workable as possible. This is why I suggest a big piece of paper. Don’t be afraid to do more than one draft. If you like visualising plans, an A2 sketchpad is a good investment.

Layers of subheadings

I ended up with a list of the main aspects of my topic, which became my chapter headings, subheadings for each, then mini subheadings under each of those. I kept creating subheadings until I got to paragraph level. Did I overthink it? Yes. But I was leaning into my capacity to overthink and representing that on the page. By the time I had finished this structuring document, I had an outline for the whole book. I used this to pitch to the publisher.

Having these layers of subheadings helped a lot when they said yes. I was on maternity leave, so I had one afternoon a week to write the book, which meant freewriting under subheadings (using both divergent thinking and a tight structure) was useful for limiting the amount of time it took to write each section. Adding word counts to each of the subheadings helped with this too.

I used maths to workout how many subheadings and sub-subheadings I needed for a whole book: as you can see from my annotations on Stephen Wade’s book I had already done my homework by figuring out the typical number of words under subheadings in books that the publisher had already produced.

I changed some subheadings as I went, mainly by combining them or removing repetition, but the skeleton was mostly unchanged. When I added two new chapters to the 2^nd edition, which came out in 2023, I used the same method. As you can see from the photos above, I was emulating the house style by leaving the subheadings in place but you can easily use subheadings and sub-subheadings to structure a nonfiction book and then remove them in the final drafts.

I should point out that this is way outside my comfort zone – I don’t usually approach writing with as much structure – but on this occasion it worked, probably because I usually do the opposite!

If you’ve got a proposal document already, and you haven’t got these layers of subheadings, have a go at adding them in. You can use a number of subheadings that feels comfortable to you. There’s no need to get to paragraph level if that’s too much.

Creating a research plan

The benefit of the structural plan I drew up meant I could also see where I needed to do research. Instead of creating a research ‘to do list’, personally I find it’s much better to ask questions. For example, ‘read more books on time management’ is vague and overwhelming, whereas ‘which of the approaches I’ve already read about do I want to use as examples? And can I find 3 more?’ is easier to answer. Written out as questions, research tasks become specific and actionable. You can keep adding to this list of research questions as you write your first draft, instead of allowing a missing piece of information to cause writer’s block or to send you down an internet rabbit hole

The subheadings in action

Here are the contents pages from the first edition of the book, so you can see how the subheadings turned out in the published version:

Small Steps Contents

173KB ∙ PDF file

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And here’s the original draft of my plan for a chapter on discovering what your goals are, from 2011, where you can see the original subheadings. This became chapter 3:

Plan For Chapter On Discovering Your Goals

172KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

And here’s a sample chapter from the 2nd edition of the book where you can see how I kept the subheadings in place. This chapter is also about using the subheadings method, which is why I’ve included it! I sometimes use it with students, as a handy way to teach the technique. Feel free to do similar but please credit my Substack!

Goal Setting And Time Management Final Chapter 14

167KB ∙ PDF file

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Chunking: number of words and time

Knowing the subheadings plus target word counts for each also allowed me to predict how much I could write in one sitting. I could plan to write under, say, two of my subheadings at 250 words each. It also made those 250 words easier to write as the target spurred me on to fill in the required words. I had broken down a book about small steps into small steps in other words. Time yourself to work out how long it takes you to write a particular chunk of words, say 250, or how much you can write (without editing) in 25 minutes, and it follows that you’ll be able to work out how long a chapter will take to draft.

Add time of day, environment and energy

The subheadings method works on its own without this extra layer of chunking and timing yourself so there’s no need to go that far to get the benefit. However, if you are going to go to the trouble of working out the maths regarding how long a chunk takes to write, I suggest that you also record the best time of day and the best working environment for you. For example, one way to approach this is to keep a diary over a week. Time yourself writing in 25 minute chunks in various locations and times of day and record number of words written and what your energy was like:

• Wrote 1,000 words in bed at 5am with tea. Felt good.

• Wrote 500 words in the library at lunch time. Felt tired.

• Woke up in the middle of the night. Wrote gobbledygook and fell asleep cuddling my notebook.

You’ll start to see some patterns emerging. I’ve written more about doing the maths in this post.

Introduction, conclusion, examples and resources

To finish the first draft, I went through the book and added an introduction and conclusion to each chapter plus some more examples. I think it was at that point that I wrote the introductory chapter and put together a list of resources. The resources were very important to me because I wanted readers to be able to follow up on the stuff that chimed with them.

To and fro with the publisher

After a couple of redrafts, I printed and proof-read the manuscript and sent it off to the publisher who came back with edits and suggestions (this is normal so don’t be alarmed when this happens!) which meant going over the book a couple more times. I’m summarising but that was essentially how it went. By the way, they had already come up with a cover design, before the book was written. I argued for a slightly nicer cover for the new edition, proving to myself that it is worth asking for what you want, but again that’s another story.

How the current book is the same/different

As I said, I’m writing an academic book at the moment on writing and mindfulness and although the pitch did include chapter summaries, it had to be more involved than the goal setting book, with a literature review, rationale and a methodology. I created chapters in two halves, so had already broken the book down into small steps. Once that proposal had been sent out to reviewers and received a positive response, I took the chapter outlines out of that academic plan and pasted them into a new document.

After that I added the subheadings – essentially abbreviating what I had promised in the chapter outlines – until I got to paragraph level. Because I had already created sample bibliographies for each chapter, I could also add in the key texts I would look at throughout each chapter. This outlining was a substantial piece of work, which took several days, but it meant that I could take the route that worked previously, at least for the first draft. I could write under subheadings, one chunk at a time. For this book, I was also able to use the subheadings to check that I was including everything I had said I would in the proposal. As the proposal was complicated, this was a useful exercise, if only for that reason.

Again, the subheadings method proved practically useful: I could write in chunks and predict how long each chapter would take. Writing one chunk at a time was less applicable, because the way that ideas and examples connect in an academic book warrants a joined up approach – and, practically speaking, writing more than a couple of chunks at a time helps with making those connections. Redrafting will allow me to make further connections and will mean I can reread the proposal for each chapter and edit for what I intended to say or cite if necessary.

The steps

Here’s a summary of the approach, broken down into steps you can adapt:

1. Find other books published by the same publisher and look at the layout. Take onboard any advice you’ve been given about structure but don’t let it faze you because you can always redraft with their preferred structure in mind.

2. Gather all your material in one place.

3. Get your ideas down on one large sheet of paper. Mind map, abbreviate, create keys, draw, use symbols and diagrams, or make lists – whatever it takes to get what’s in your head onto the page. Writing by hand is good at this stage.

4. Begin to structure, by colour coding your mind map, for example, or circling and highlighting ideas, or numbering, gradually connecting information together.

5. Decide on 8-15 main sub-topics and number them. Work out which bits of your brain download fit within each of these categories. Connect them with colours, symbols, arrows etc. These are your initial chapter headings. They can change later.

6. Create subheadings for each, then mini subheadings under each of those. (And more subheadings under those if you like.)

7. Add a potential word count to each subheading if you find that idea motivating.

8. At this stage you can - if you think it will help - figure out how long it takes you to write a particular chunk of words, at what time of day, and in which environment.

9. Doing the maths like this will enable you, at least in theory, to schedule your writing sessions. You’ll also be able to figure out, roughly, how long the first draft will take.

10. You can use these layers of subheadings to:

• create a proposal or pitch document

• create a writing schedule

• write chunks of your book

• ask yourself specific research questions.

Resources

• I’ve talked about using the subheadings method before in a much more practical post, so if you’d like to learn how to apply it to a variety of situations, including planning a book, go here.

• Here’s a video I made last year on how to plan your book using numbers and here’s the post that discusses the use of maths and chunking to plan a book.

• For more on planning an article using subheadings and numbers, go here.

• I’ve also written about structuring a book in this ‘I want to write a book but’ post

• To buy a copy of the book discussed in this post, go here.

• Here are the writing guides I wrote based on the Small Steps Method.

Signing off

Feel free to share any of the exercises with others, but please credit my Substack if you do. 🙏 I’ve put together a very short Google form to find out what you’d most like to learn about, writing-wise. It will take you a couple of minutes to complete, tops, and would really help!

Hope to see you at the Yellowave workshops.

More soon. Until then, happy writing,

Lou

I thought it would be handy to have all of the posts on mindful goal setting in one place, so here they all are. I hope they’re useful. Here’s the first post, introducing mindful goal setting for writers:

This next post is essentially about making lists of tiny everyday things and then acting on them - taking micro-actions in other words:

This post is about the goal setting book from the 90s that inspired me to write and publish my first novel:

I wrote four posts in January on your writing intentions using journal exercises designed to help you to see the reasons behind your writing goals and whether you really want to achieve them. They’re also designed to eliminate the ‘shoulds’:

Let me know how you get on with these, and feel free to share them with others, but please credit my Substack if you do. 🙏 I’ve put together a very short Google form to find out what you’d most like to learn about, writing-wise. It will take you a couple of minutes to complete, tops, and would really help!

Hope to see you at the Yellowave workshops.

More soon. Until then, happy writing,

Lou