As an award-winning author with ten published titles to my name, it has not all run smoothly and I have certainly made more than a few mistakes along the way, when it comes to writing. I wanted to share with you some of the common errors in non-fiction authoring and some of the ways in which you can avoid these and increase your productivity as a result.
Mistake 1: forgetting who you’re writing for
It’s so important as you begin writing a book to have in mind the type of reader you’re hoping to attract. The style of writing can range from formal and academic to chatty and colloquial and will need to be pitched appropriately or you’ll miss you putt. So before you begin to write, sit down and take time to picture a group of your intended readers. Who are they? What is there motivation for reading your work? Do they want depth and rigor or will they want light touch and easy assimilation? Are they going to enjoy dipping into the book or will they read it diligently cover to cover? Will they require graphics or be content with a dense text? Visualising them carefully ( whether that’s as pictures, or listening in your head to the dialogue they have between themselves or just a feeling you get about these readers doesn’t matter) really directs your writing.
Mistake 2: writing for too many audiences in one book
I made a big mistake with an early book that ended up, never being published. I quite simply tried to write it for too many different groups of people. I thought I was being so clever, weaving in examples for so many reader types, that it became confusing and lacked focus. The end result was a year of writing without a publishable outcome. Couple this with Mistake 4 and you’ve wasted a lot of your valuable time. Of course you can always rescue something of value from such a lot of writing, but far better to be on task and on audience from the start.
Mistake 3: not sharing your work with others early on. I alluded to this writing error in Mistake 3. It’s so easy to write away and keep your work private until you’re ready to publish, only to find your work is off kilter or would have benefitted from a cracking idea for layout that some one sees and now you’ve got to go back through it rather than incorporating it as you go. Worst still if your idea sucks and you’ve missed an important angle. It can be nerve wracking to get feedback, but in my experience, if you choose wisely who you share you work with, the results of gaining opinion always improve the end product.
Mistake 4: not giving examples. As a non-fiction writer, there is a danger that your work can become highly theoretical and rather abstract. This bores your reader and makes it less likely they’ll stay with you or worse still recommend you or buy another one of you books. So you writing mist have life whether it is at the lighter or heavier end of the spectrum it must relate to the reader’s experience. One of the ways to hold you reader is to think carefully about the structure of your book in terms of chapters and devices like summaries and reflective questions throughout. The other is to pepper your work with lively, relevant and realistic examples so the reader can see the theory and the ideas come to life in everyday situations. A good rule of thumb is that a 25-30% of your chapter should be made up of examples or situations, and this keeps it engaging and real.
Mistake 5: believing that you’re not good enough. This my dear reader is the holy grail of mistakes. With this little beauty in place you can be sure you’ll never finish the first chapter, and if by some miracle you manage to depress your way through the whole book, you’ll never let another soul read it and it will never make it through a commissioning editor to a publishing contract. I suffered terribly with this one in my early writing days, and it was very painful. It probably explains why it was into my thirties before I began writing seriously. The good news is: it’s just a belief. And beliefs are just ideas we no longer question. So now is the time to question this belief, because it’s never really true for anyone. If you run the write-feedback-improve-write cycle you’ll always be enhancing your work and you will get it to publishable standard. So kick this belief into touch, and if you think that you can’t sink this belief (and that thinking is also a flaky belief) then get a coach quick and nip this one in the bud.
As a coach and mentor to up and coming writers, I will be posting further support on this blog in hte coming months.
For more help with writing non-fiction click here
