Some of my speaker-first clients have the hardest time writing through the book authoring process. It's like they are needing to take off one identity and put on another, fully competent and up to speed on the whole writing craft. Many have never written a book before and battle with discouragement, feeling like a fish out of water. If you are a speaker who is now writing a book, this may bring up familiar feelings.
As a writing coach, literary agent, and editor, one of my roles is to help first-time authors accept the call to write books and discover a writing path that showcases the power of their messages. Here are three of the tips I share with them along the way:
1. Repurpose Your Preparation Practice
Open your mind to see that content creation is content creation. Whether it's book writing, songwriting, speaking, painting, or photography, the process of developing a cohesive piece is generally the same. (Google "creative process" and see what I mean.) Consider your last workshop, keynote, sermon, or address: How did you prepare? How did you set up your introduction, main points, and anecdotes or illustrations to drive your message home? Repurpose these actions to outline your book and structure your chapters.
2. Talk It Out
If you are a speaker-first author, this may mean that processing your thoughts and ideas by talking through them feels more natural to you than writing them. Your ideas may get their flow as you talk about them more and more. You don't need to box yourself in to what you've seen writer-first authors do. When you get to a place in your writing that feels hard to get to or through, try talking out those sections as if you are teaching or delivering it to an audience. Capture those words with a recorder, get them transcribed, and then fine-tune or edit them so they flow with the rest of the book.
3. Write to That One Person
As a speaker, your audience is a community of folks gathered under one purpose. It’s appropriate to use inclusive language like “Some of you...” or “How many of us...” But have you ever been speaking and caught the eye of someone looking a little lost or desperate near the back of the room, or maybe you keep meeting the rapt gaze of someone sitting front and center, smiling and cheering you on?
This is who you are writing to when you are writing a book. This is your audience of one. Write to them, and make your appeal individual and intimate, using "me," "you," "we," "our." Keep this front of mind: your book is a transformative conversation between you and that one person.
Going from speaker to writer can be a big shift in expression. If you are a speaker-first author, what other methods do you use to get compelling words on the page?