Today’s article focuses on nonfiction manuals. Cristina Centeno is a psychologist, researcher, disseminator and facilitator of decisions and changes (both individual and organizational), and a happy expatriate. It helps individuals and professionals to get out of a state of blockage, passivity, confusion, crisis, and indecision, and to stop feeling victims of circumstances, recovering the helm of their lives to make decisions and lead changes (of the profession, of housing, of partner, place of residence, etc.), with the best possible equipment.

After an experience of more than fifteen years accompanying individuals and groups, and doing research, he has published eight academic books linked to the social health field and emotional well-being. If you want to know her better, I invite you to read her articles and visit her page. Do you want to discover everything she is willing to teach you?

To Open Mouth.

Many well-meaning professionals with remarkable writing skills (spelling, grammar, syntax, etc.) find themselves unable to sit down and articulate a plan to write and “land” their book on paper. Here is the Achilles heel of many potential academic book authors. Knowing how to write well and having illusions is already an important and necessary lighthouse as a pillar of support to face the entire writing journey. However, in order to successfully and smoothly get to the port of our first manual, we need to integrate many more tools into our writing kit.

If you are a budding researcher, popularizer, scientist or writer, and you think you have a pending issue related to the way you approach the planning and writing of a non-fiction text, keep reading because I am going to show you a methodology to focus and write your posts. Writing a book is at your fingertips, and this post contains the “breadcrumbs” or the planning, structuring, argumentation and writing strategies that you were looking for, to gain confidence, efficiency, clarity and enjoyment at the time of giving to the “little keyboard”.

From Anarchy and Chaos, To Polishing My Own Method

I must confess, on this small stretcher table that Celia has given me so generously, that, when she proposed to write an entry for her magnificent blog about the best strategy to face the structuring and writing of a non-fiction book, I did not hesitate a second. The question quickly struck me: What would I have liked to know before launching into writing my first book?

In my own skin I have experienced the need to set and fulfill a good roadmap to reach a good port in our written productions. How many headaches it would have saved me, if I had had the right support and an optimal strategy when tackling this complex job of writing!

The truth is that there are many things that I would have liked to know before writing my first book, since they were all doubts, insecurities, erraticism and advances and setbacks in those first commissioned books. Unfortunately, when I began to write my first manual over fifteen years ago, there was not much information available on the Internet, so I began to do it gropingly and with intuition as the driving force and thread of each decision, each word, each epigraph and each chapter to write.

I don’t want to miss the opportunity to share with you a list of points that you should consider before writing a manual: useful and condensed information to write your first job without being shipwrecked during the journey.

Departure Requirements

The first thing to clarify is the type of text that you are preparing to write, because writing a report is not the same as writing a monograph, an essay or a doctoral thesis.

Basic characteristics that you’re manual should meet:

  • Your text must be intertextual. Other texts are often resorted to to substantiate or validate their approaches, or to refute or reinforce their conclusions. Herein lies the value of citations in your writing.
  • Your text develops in and for a context. You must consider who will be the main recipients of your work.
  • The objective of your text is to communicate or make known the resultsof an intellectual process (rigorous and systematic) of research or reflection on a specific object. Our work must therefore make a significant contribution to the subject area in which it is framed.
  • With your text you seek to persuade or convince the readerabout the validity of your results and the relevance of your contributions. Remember that, in this context, if your work is scientific, it must be recognized and accepted by a scientific community.
  • Your text must be supported by clear arguments. Despite reporting results, your works are also, to a greater or lesser extent, argumentative as they expose your perspective. However, your arguments should not be the reflection of any kind of prejudice and prejudice. Clarity, precision and brevity should always prevail in your presentation (Mari Mut, 2013).
  • Your written production must always maintain a formal speech. Our writing differs from other texts and from the colloquial language spoken by the use of a sober and formal language. In addition, our texts will use terminology consistent with their approaches and with the subject area in which they are framed.
  • Your text should follow a logical order. We carry out an orderly presentation in differentiated and logically consecutive parts. In any case, the particular order and the specific sections will depend on the type of text we are dealing with and the institutional parameters in which it is developed.

The purpose of this post is to show you that writing a book is possible, even with the multiple obligations that we all have in our daily lives. I want both of us to be clear about the following: what you need is not more time, but to think about writing differently and to organize yourself better to be able to do it. The first thing we have to avoid is, as Becker (1984) points out, the pretense of writing “in one fell swoop”. Writing with the deadline attached to the neck will inevitably connect you with urgency, frustration, the increase in errors and inaccuracies in its writing and structure, the lack of fluency during the process, the impossibility of reviewing everything written or dissatisfaction with the final result.

At this point, you should face the first important dose of reality: A nonfiction text is not something that springs from a final inspiration or a “muse” that takes us in a straight line from the happy idea to a polished and perfect text. It is a continuum:

STEPS AND SPECIFICATIONS OF THE WRITING PROCESS by Book Writing Inc 

To face the complex task of structuring and writing your first nonfiction book successfully, it is necessary that you equip yourself, with passion and with your best psycho-biological disposition for writing, and that you introduce steps, rituals and habits of sustainable writing and effective over time. Pay attention to the following points of the journey:

  1. Rate Your Starting Point and Your Final Destination, And Create A Plan
  • It is important that you connect with the illusion, as the starting engine, and that you choose writing theme that is motivating, attractive and accessible to you. It is very hard to write about something that does not interest us!
  • Make a plan. Writing a book is like building a blueprint, and everyone starts with a consistent, solid blueprint to get the best possible results. Think carefully about what you want to tell, how you are going to organize the information into chapters, how you are going to finish it.
  • Contextualize your publication: the context will give meaning and value to the text.
  • Get an idea of ​​who and what your potential readers will be like. How much are they supposed to know about the subject? Are they experts, semi-experts or totally laypersons?
  • Screen and filter the starting information in a timely manner. Not all “happy ideas” serve our purpose!
  1. Write The First Draft Of Your Book: It Will Be Your First Conquest.

Your first draft is for experimentation and should be a text devoid of expectations. It is good that you understand that the first thing you are going to write will be a draft that you will have to review, edit and rewrite several times until you obtain a satisfactory final result. When you review, at a later time, you can eliminate everything that is not solid or does not convince you, but take advantage and remove everything that you carry inside.

Your first draft will likely be just a set of ideas or thoughts, in the form of a confusing diagram. This is perfect. Each stage has its own criteria of excellence and at this stage what we seek is to have a clear idea of ​​what we want to write and mark a good “roadmap” for our navigation. There is nothing more difficult than writing a text when we don’t know what we want to write.

The activities to write your first draft are:

  • Get out your agenda and set the deadline for the writing of your draft and for the final writing of the book. This will be your ground wire and will set the intensity and your writing rate. Taking a whole year to write a manual is not the same as having a three-month deadline for the delivery of the final product. I usually spend between six and eight weeks in the preparation of the first draft, and I need about four or five months for the structuring and final writing of my books.
  • Design, in a logical and coherent way, a weekly writing schedule in which you can anticipate possible obstacles and interruptions. Plan your writing and writing time to confront the two great ghosts of the writer: the tendency to procrastinate and the lack of concentration.

I remind you, at this point, that regularity and discipline, to meet your deadlines and to tame your writer’s brain, will be your lifesavers during the long process: if you commit to writing every day two hours, in six weeks it is You will probably get a better text than sitting for twelve hours at a time one day a week, since by writing little each day you will be able to review what has been written, re-edit and rewrite it.

  • Organize the place to write and rewrite. Ideally, we can sit every day in astable, bright, comfortable, quiet place with good views to face the writing time each day. It’s amazing what we can achieve when we turn off email, phone and isolate ourselves from the world!

Still, I also encourage you to be flexible and combine “regulated writing times” with other times and contexts. We can take advantage of many of the “dead” times that we have in our agendas to write, edit or rewrite. For example, if I have to travel by train to Frankfurt and the journey takes eighty minutes, I can use that time to review or write the text that I am working on. Regardless of your schedule for the day, it will be much easier for you to find small moments than to find a block of several hours. Use, at this point, the new digital tools to better organize yourself when writing.

  • Don’t be defeated by the blank page. Every adventure begins with a first step, with a “yes, go ahead!” And a book is written word by word, like a good stew over a slow fire. Don’t forget that everything you write can later be corrected, rewritten or even erased, so just write. Without haste, without pressure, but with perseverance. Remember that this is not about writing a masterpiece, just finishing your book.
  • Keep your writing fresh and pick up your text every day. If you stop working on your text for several days without working, when you resume writing it will take you several minutes, even half an hour, to get in tune with the ideas you want to develop.
  • Read a lot …reading will be your oxygen to inspire and motivate you.
  • Review the available bibliography on the subject, select supporting texts and ideas to develop. Remember that a good writer is a great reader,so fill your head with arguments and knowledge of disciplines related to your topic to give your arguments more credibility. For the writing of the first draft it is necessary that you check if what you want to write you have already elaborated or outlined, even in part, sometime in an article, work or previous project. In this case, having prior support material will always allow you to give more argumentative strength to the writing process.

In each of my books, outlining the names of the provisional chapters of the book helped me regain my starting points. The name of each chapter already opened a roadmap or a path to begin to weave my thoughts and arguments chapter by chapter. Another good way to systematize arguments is to do it through a blog. If you blog regularly, you can collect these articles in your book.

  • Minimize chaos and separate the chaos from the wheat by facing important decisions in your first writing. What ideas or arguments do you discard and with what premises are you going to commit to analyze and develop until the end? Look for the connections between the most interesting ideas to be developed and use bibliographic references as an anchor to support your arguments.
  • Write a summary to rethink your text. Your summary should include:
    1. The context: information about the period, the geographic region and the social conditions.
    2. The object of study: the phenomenon to be investigated and the works that discuss it.
    3. The significance of your contribution: an explanation of the uniqueness of the subject or the particular way of approaching it.
    4. The theoretical framework: the theoretical perspective that you use to analyze and discuss the topic.
    5. The argument: what your analysis has revealed about the object of study, of the current approaches related to the object of study or regarding the examined society.
    6. The tests: evidence that confirm your arguments about the object of study or about the specific elements that you analyze.
  • Sharing is living, so allow yourself to clarify your ideas and gather suggestions for improvement by sharing with a colleague, colleague or publisher the results of your first draft or the summary that you have written.
  • Print and reread your first draft. With a red pen in hand, take advantage of this point to reread the printed copy and write a list of revision tasks, writing what you need to improve in each paragraph, such as: correcting errors in logic or argumentative leaps, eliminating redundancies and elements superfluous, add sections, additional sources or citations, move paragraphs, strengthen your evidence with current bibliography, review arguments, include more examples, graphics or tables that support your ideas, etc.
  • Estimate a time and space in the week schedule for each review task.

Paraphrasing Jaume Vicent, you must bear in mind that writing is putting words on the page. Editing is turning those words into something meaningful. The first draft is the birth of your book, of “your baby”, but now it has to grow. Editing and rewriting will be his adolescence and his maturity. During that time, your project still has a lot to learn.

  1. Face The Writing Of Your Final Text, Taking Great Care Of The Form And The Substance.
  • You learn writing by writing, so take it as a practice.
  • Clarify and review your main ideas and arguments on the topic. Take up, set up and give body, structure and solidity to the most pertinent and specific arguments of your book. Do not stitch without thread when describing and analyzing all your data contemplated in the initial thesis, eliminating the superfluous or irrelevant in the argumentative body and in the conclusions.
  • Take great care of the structure of your book. Remember that your writing needs an introduction, a development and a conclusion composed of stable strategies between the different types of non-fiction texts.
  • To open your mouth, in the introduction you present the problem, the argument, the hypothesis, the objectives of the text and the methodology you use. Some people include a brief summary of the organization of the text. Among the strategies of the introduction are the description of your topic, the indication of a gap in knowledge or problem, the clarification of the purpose of your text and the anticipation of the structuring of the content of the writing.
  • The development of the text considers the information and the analysis that we have carried out. It can be organized into sections that facilitate the reading and organization of the arguments. In the development, you must ensure that the ideas presented are in accordance with the purpose of your text. To develop the ideas you must use different modes (argumentative, expository or explanatory), depending on the nature of the text you are writing.
  • The conclusions recover the results of the analysis presented in the sections. In the conclusion, you must incorporate a synthesis of what was previously developed and a conclusion in which you must perform different actions, depending on the type of text you are developing.
  • Check if the bibliography you have cited is recent and if it refers to the debates that are taking place in your discipline.
  • Behold the latest form of varnish. Bet on the authenticity and naturalness of your texts and remember that “less is more”.
  • Avoid obscure composition or rhetoric in writing: wording supported by big, bombastic words is not smarter text, nor does it necessarily express a great idea.
  • Decrease the use of adjectives and leave those strictly necessary to add clarity to the subject.
  • Minimize passive builds.
  • Use short sentences to facilitate understanding.
  • Be patient in your writing and work hard, I assure you that the end result will be worth it. The best thing to do is read, re-read and forget about the fear of erasing. If you are not convinced by what is written, change it. Don’t stop until you are really happy with the result.

The hours that I would have saved myself from knowing these keys … Or paying attention to them! I would have minimized quite long and unproductive days of ruminating millions of “happy ideas” in my head, of writing wildly without order or concert, of leaving chapters halfway, of writing several drafts for a book, and so on. The pity is that I cannot go back in time!

  1. Put The Closing Loop On Your Text And Hand Over Your Book.

When you have finished all the previous activities, you will be very close to finishing your text and being able to deliver it.

  • When you finish the book, let it sit for a few days and then read it again with new eyes. Don’t be afraid to rearrange chapters, alter phrases or expressions, or even cut out whole chunks. Words are your work material, mold them as you need. It will be essential that you check at this point: the spelling, the grammar, the general editing of the text (homogenize the font, line spacing, margins, font color, etc.).
  • Plan and tackle (alone or with help) your cover design.
  • Publish your book:If you don’t have a publisher that endorses publishing your book, you can do an internet search to find companies to help you publish. On Amazon, you can put your books for sale. Now we will not go into the specific aspects of the final publication of the book, because this would already be the content of another post. In any case, you are ready to send your text! Ahead!
  • Launch your book by planning an event or party to make it known. You could also offer free lectures or plan some incentives for people to want to get a copy of you.

LIKE A CHERRY

I’m not going to say goodbye without giving you some last guidelines and tips to succeed like Coca-Cola with your book. Here they go!

  • Connect with the illusion and choose a topic that is motivating and attractive to you.
  • Contextualize your publication: the context will give meaning and value to the text.
  • Screen and filter the information in a timely manner. Not all “happy ideas” serve our purpose!
  • Use the new digital tools to better organize yourself when writing.
  • Passion, authenticity and attitude. Do it, and do it passionately.
  • Take great care of the shape and structure of your book; Remember that your writing needs an introduction, a development and a conclusion composed of stable strategies.
  • Be patient in your writing and work hard. The best thing to do is read, reread and forget about the fear of erasing. If you are not convinced by what is written, change it. Don’t stop until you are really happy with the result.

Oscar Wilde would tell us “There are only two rules for writing: have something to say and say it.” I would add, at this point, say it nice and write it well!