Getting the Book Out of Yourself
It’s been said that everybody has at least one book in them. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be. After this weekend, I’m ready to believe it.
Living in Thailand, I enjoy getting together with other foreigners (“Farang”) once in a while, so I attend the Expats Club every two weeks.
A couple of months ago, after one of the meetings, I went up and asked the meeting director if he thought anybody might be interested in a speech on how to write a book fast, put it on the Internet and sell it. He said he’d take my suggestion to the organizers’ committee and see what they thought.
It took them a month to get back to me, but they finally decided that yes, they wanted me to come and talk.
So today, May 22, I got up and gave my first ever presentation on a non-inspirational topic. And the audience was amazing. During the session, I asked how many people had already written a book. Out of an audience of around 100, I was surprised to see about 15 or 20 hands go up. That’s a pretty high concentration of doers.
Chris, the MC, said that’s the first time he had ever seen virtually everybody in an expat audience taking notes. I think it might be because I gave loads of nuts-n-bolts, how-to information. A whole crowd of people came up afterward with questions and offers to do lunch to “go over a few questions.”
Now, the funny thing is, when I first mentioned this idea, it was almost an idle thought. But as I was putting the speech together, the idea grew. And grew.
The other day it occurred to me that if I could tell people how to write a book really fast, then maybe I should just do exactly that – and practice what I preach – by writing a book fast on how to write a book fast. Aside from the obvious double-talk, it seemed like a pretty good idea, so I sat down and in about an hour scribbled down an outline for the book… titled Makin’ Book. The next day I wrote all of chapter one.
So just because it’s fun, I’m continuing with this project. It should be finished on June 15 or before. When it’s done and ready for readers, I’ll post a notice here.
Update June 30, 2010: The book was finished on time. Then I took another couple of weeks to add a number of bonus resources to go with it and to create a website. Everything is posted on the website, and it’s all available for you to download now.
Later, I’ll also be holding a 12 week Rocket-Write™ coaching class based on the material in the book. Those who take the class can expect to come out the other end with a finished ebook in PDF format ready for them to set it up and sell it on the Internet.
More info to come.
Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles
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Charles
It always amazes me how quickly something can grow from nothing. There are many days when Maggie will ask me when she leaves for work in the morning, “What are you planning to write about today, Honey?” I have to tell her, “I have absolutely NO idea.” Yet when she comes home, I’m proudly beaming over my latest little gem.
I’ll do the usual read and scan of the Internet, particularly my favorite forums and blogs to see what’s hot. But more often than not, I go back to my own well of experience; those seemingly hum-drum, every day kind of experiences that you might suspect NOBODY would find interesting. Then ‘magic’ happens as I relive my adventure, taking liberal writer’s license to embellish (Maggie would more correctly call it exaggerate) the actual events. It’s so much fun to watch my wife read my stuff, eyebrows raising whenever I ‘bend’ the truth a tad.
You are absolutely right when you (and others) say, “Everybody has at least one book in them.”
We often take our lives so much for granted that we dismiss them as uninteresting or unimportant. NOT TRUE! One of the biggest compliments I received recently was from a fellow blogger who told me:
“Relatability I think is the word. You and Maggie give the sense of offering empathy, help and hope in a friendly, comfortable approach, as apposed to the more clinical and lecturing way some personal developers have.”
Painful experiences like my recent bone marrow biopsy are HILARIOUS because I choose to make it so.
http://lovethatfeeling.com/blog/well-tickle-my-funny-bone/
What do you get when you have a grumpy time-freak picking up his kid (ON TIME of course) from a birthday party? My ‘common every day’ experience is the exact same fodder that made old sitcom shows like ‘Leave It to Beaver’ so popular.
http://lovethatfeeling.com/blog/am-i-the-only-one/
Yes, we ALL have at least one book in us. And while we may share common every day experiences, nobody tells our own stories like we do ourselves.
All the best from Toronto,
Russ
OK, Charles, I’m in.
The plan’s to use posts on my personal growth blog as the raw material.