A Three-Phase Process that Actually Works (So You Don’t Get Stuck in the Creative Chaos)
Our bedroom was filled with scrap fabric.
Our kitchen table was covered with sketches.
My dress form stood in the living room, more pincushion than outfit—and time was running out.
I’d been invited to participate in a unique fashion show called Modified Style, where each designer received a bag of scrap material and free reign to do what they will.
My husband came home as I was desperately sketching, draping, and pinning in order to come up with a unique design. As he walked up the stairs to enter our tiny apartment, his eyes widened at the chaos.
I winced apologetically at my stacks of notes and sewing supplies on the dining table.
“We might have to go to out to eat tonight,” I said. “I can’t clean this up until I’ve figured out what I’m making.”
If you have a physical hobby like sewing, you know that chaos is often part of the creative process. Maybe less so when you’re following a step-by-step tutorial, but if you’re formulating something from scratch, chaos is a prerequisite for creative epiphany.
It’s no different when you’re writing a book.
Creativity is just messy! Which can be fun at times. But it can also be incredibly demoralizing when you’re stuck in the middle of it, unable to see progress.
How to Harness the Creative Mess
What I’m about to tell you won’t eliminate the creative mess. But it will help contain it, and make the process of writing a book more easeful.
When I talk to new authors who are stuck in their project, it often boils down to this. They don’t know the best way to break down the book writing process into something manageable. Which means they get stuck in the quagmire of creativity, rather than harnessing it to make progress.
So let’s talk about how a simple nonfiction book writing system can tame the mess of writing a book without losing that all-important creative process.
We’ll do this by breaking the book into three different phases, starting with my favorite: Magpie Mode.
(By the way—in case you were curious, my Modified Style scrap bag contained about a yard and a half of cream-colored satin, matching lace, and some hot pink knit jersey. Here’s the final result, modeled by my wonderful friend Adrian!)
Stage One: Magpie Mode
Discovering What the Work Wants to Be
I’ve always identified with the raucous black-and-white magpies that lived around the farm where I grew up in Eastern Washington State.
Magpies are members of the Corvidae family, and share their crow cousins’ high intelligence, curiosity, and desire for collecting trinkets. As a farm kid whose favorite activity was scouring the junk heap for treasures and making up stories about what I found, I felt a kinship with the playful, hoarding magpies.
I don’t hang out in junk heaps any more (sadly). But I still do collect mental treasures and use them as the basis for storytelling.
Magpie Mode is all about collecting shiny, interesting things to inform and shape your work.
- That intriguing story you heard on a podcast.
- That cool framework you heard from your therapist.
- A newspaper clipping about a business owner in your town.
- A family story, an anecdote from the coffee shop, an offhand comment from a client—all of it goes in the bucket.
(By bucket, I mean a digital or physical file folder. Though you could also write things out on cards on sticky notes and throw them in a physical box if you like a more tactile process.)
Magpie Mode is about trusting your intuition. When you’re in this stage, don’t worry too much about where a piece will fit. If something attracts your attention, trust it will find a home somewhere—whether in this project or the next.
Pro tip: Along with gathering outside material that strikes your fancy, you should also collect your own materials that relate to this book. What previous articles or essays have you written? What have you posted on LinkedIn that got great comments from your network? What stories or anecdotes do you want to include? Have you done any great podcast interviews that would be relevant? Delivered any speeches or workshops?
Exploring Your Treasures
Magpie Mode isn’t just about collecting.
You also need to make time to deliberately pull out your notes and play with the way the ideas interact. Ask yourself:
- What new ideas spark when you see two disparate things together?
- What rabbit trails of research are you inspired to pursue?
- What shape and structure is starting to arise from your collection of treasured thoughts?
Magpie Mode can be super fun—and it can even be collaborative. One of my clients came to me with a question he’d been wrestling with for years. He wanted to examine it in book form. He’d collected dozens of articles, anecdotes, and epiphanies along the way, and he brought that hoarded treasure to our first meeting.
Our coaching sessions were all about exploring everything he’d collected in Magpie Mode. We refined his perspective as I gently guided him through interview questions designed to help him gather his thoughts and synthesize his insights.
Depending on how straightforward your project is, Magpie Mode may be pretty simple. You’re just gathering up the things you know about this topic into one place so that you can start to see the shape of the book that you’re writing.
Even so, I invite you to spend some time wrestling with ideas in Magpie Mode. Let your curiosity guide you into a creating a deeper, more impactful book.
Phase Two: Planning
Giving Your Ideas Shape
Once you’ve spent some time gathering, developing, and wrestling with your ideas, the next step is to structure them into the most logical flow.
In some cases, this will be pretty straightforward. Certain things will have to come before others—especially if you’re writing about a process or framework that you’ve taught for years.
For example, one of my clients was writing a book based on a 1:1 coaching framework that she had led over a thousand people through. The process had distinct steps, and you couldn’t do them out of order.
Logically, the heart of the book needed to be organized according to those steps. But my client also taught several other frameworks and tools that supported her central methodology. We had to make decisions as to where to place those in the book.
In the end, it made most sense to do things this way:
- First, we presented tools that invited people to think more deeply about themselves early in the book.
- Next, we sent them through the main self-coaching exercise.
- Finally, we wrapped up the book with frameworks that taught the reader to communicate their message to the outside world.
By structuring the material that way, we were able to break the book into a neat three parts. Each part was approximately equal length, and each built on each other without feeling like filler.
Outlining vs. Discovery Writing
I want to acknowledge that every author’s brain works a bit differently—especially when it comes to outlining before writing.
Some like to break each chapter down into detailed bullet points before they write a single word of the draft. Others discover where they’re going through the process of drafting.
Broadly, we call those two ends of the spectrum “outline writers” and “discovery writers.”
Are you a confident writer who knows you simply work best in discovery mode? Don’t let me break your stride. But if you’re getting stuck in your draft and don’t know why, it can really help to spend some more time in the structure phase.
The more books I’ve written, the more I’m a convert. Outlining can save you so much time in the writing phase.
If you’re writing as a way to simply explore your ideas, you may not need to spend as much time in the outlining phase. But if you’re trying to write a book designed to get a specific ROI for your business (like a lead magnet), you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this step.
Outlining…
- Helps you spot the gaps and logic flaws in your argument before you’ve spent too much time writing
- Gives you a map to keep you on track while you’re drafting
- Helps ensure you’re meeting reader expectations and hitting the marks that are expected of any book
Oh—and it’s a necessary part of writing a proposal to sell your book to a traditional publisher. (If that’s the route you’re taking.)
Stage Three: Drafting
Bringing the Book to Life
This is the stage where you sit down and write the damn book.
There aren’t many shortcuts to making the drafting phase go faster. Though, if you’ve front-loaded your efforts in Magpie Mode and the planning stage, you’ll find it easier to stay on track while drafting.
The biggest trick is that when you’re drafting, you should be drafting.
What I mean is, if you want to be efficient in writing your book, you need to stay focused when writing. Don’t wander away to do research. Don’t spend too much time polishing or worrying about being grammatically correct.
Use your writing time for writing.
(I’ll tell you my best tip for distraction-free writing in a minute.)
Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to write the entire messy draft of a book before you go back and revise anything. Especially for nonfiction, I think it’s helpful to work on a chapter-by-chapter basis and polish as you go.
This can be highly motivating, too, since you’ll be working off the outline you created in the Planning stage. Each chapter you check off your outline gets you one step closer to the finish line. It’s a great way to build your momentum.
Distraction-Free Drafting
I’ll be the first to admit it: it’s easier said than done to avoid being distracted during the drafting phase.
Some writers go so far as to buy a smart typewriter/keyboard that only allows you to type. (Like the Freewrite or Alphasmart Neo.) Others might use an old laptop that doesn’t connect to the internet.
These are great ways to force yourself to keep going forward instead of getting caught in a cycle of revision and research. (Or, let’s face it, slipping into social media or endlessly checking email.)
But my favorite way to draft distraction-free is dictation.
I started dictating as a way to reduce wrist pain from typing, but over the years it’s become my preferred method of first-drafting. I just print up an outline of whatever chapter I’m supposed to be writing and go talk it out as I wander through my neighborhood.
Being untethered from my screen and its myriad distractions enables me to blaze through those first drafts.
I recommend dictation all the time to my book coaching clients. (For my ghostwriting clients, the interview process works similarly by allowing the client to talk through the material in a natural way.)
One client thought best while walking. So I sent him my list of questions and he sent me back recordings taken while hiking.
Another client discovered dictation before he hired me, and I love the way he decided to keep himself accountable. He made weekly appointments with a tarot reader in his town, paying for an hour of her time to just sit and listen while he told his story one chapter at a time.
By the time he hired me to help him with the book’s structure, he had over 40 hours of recordings. Pure gold.
Further reading: Write a Book to Grow Your Business
How Long Does Writing a Nonfiction Book Take?
If you’re serious and life doesn’t get in the way, completing your nonfiction book draft should take you four to six months. If you have less time to devote, that timeline will probably stretch to about a year.
(Of course, this depends on how long you’ve already been wrestling with your questions, how well you know your frameworks, and how much time you have to devote the project.)
Here’s the rough breakdown.
- Magpie Mode might take you years of slow curiosity. Or, it might be a matter of booking a working vacation for a long weekend and wrestling through all of the content that you’ve already gathered.
- Planning could take you weeks as you tweak your ideas and research similar books. Or, it might just be an afternoon of putting things together until they click solidly.
- And as for Drafting, it’s totally reasonable to write a chapter a week even if you’re juggling a full-time job. Especially if you use tools like dictation to help that go faster.
Once you have a solid first draft, the revision stage will probably take a month or so. Though this could be longer if you’re working with a traditional publisher, or if you skipped too much early prep work.
How do I Know this Nonfiction Book Writing System Works?
These are the lessons learned from writing over 25 books for myself and clients, and coaching people through endless more.
Breaking the book-writing process into these three phases works because:
- It aligns with how your brain naturally creates
- It dramatically reduces overwhelm
- It helps you make decisions one time—not 47 times, keeping you from repeating a bunch of work
- It gives you the confidence of a proven process that supports your creativity
- It’s flexible enough to fit in your life
- It works whether you are writing alone or working with the support of a book coach, co-author, or ghostwriter.
You’ve got this.
What if I Want to Go Deeper?
Ready to go deeper into the exact process, tools, and frameworks I use with my own books and those of my ghostwriting book coaching clients? I’m sharing my complete nonfiction book writing system in the 10-Step Impact Book Blueprint.
This system is designed to make writing a book as efficient as possible while creating space for your creativity to bloom.
In this 51-page PDF I break down each of these three phases even further. I point out the pitfalls and give my best tips. I also talk about the specific tools and techniques for organizing, outlining, and drafting.
As a bonus, I also share how to use the system with your collaborator. These tips are gold if you happen to be working with a developmental editor, book coach, or ghostwriter.
Your future reader is waiting. Let’s get your book out into the world—sooner rather than later.
Get the entire nonfiction book writing system for just $17.
Get the 10-Step Impact Book Blueprint System
