This training video is all about some rules for speakers who want to publish a book. I’m going to be covering step five which is relax about writing. A lot of people can communicate well. They believe just using the power of the word.
Unfortunately perhaps through
- bad experiences at school and teachers picking on you
- perhaps it’s felt slow and painful writing a particularly dull report at some time
you start to get these ideas that you’re not a good writer.
You start to think, it’s all going to be “slow” and “painful” and… well… pretty “horrible”.
It shouldn’t really be like that because I want you to think of your writing as nothing more than “dictating to yourself” – it’s just like what you would say on stage.
What you’re dictating to yourself, you’re just putting it on paper. That’s all it is.
There’s no need to use long complicated “nevertheless”, “nevermore”, “notwithstanding” type words. You don’t need to do any of that.
Just make it short, sweet, precise, inspiring, “followable”.
That’s all you need to do.
If you write that clearly and concisely, you’ll find it’s actually a lot easier to write in the “short-word” way.
Two tips for that
- use the shortest word available
- write the shortest sentence you can
You’ll find that your quality of writing goes up in leaps and bounds.
Back to the point. Writing a book is very much like writing. You’ll only need to do something in the region of “talking around a simple fifteen slide presentation”.
- you’ve got a slide introducing the topic that you’re going to be covering in the presentation.
- you’ll have a little bit about you.
- there’s a little bit to set the scene about what you’ll be covering
- and there’s the sequence and the structure of your presentation.
- then you would have the main body of the presentation.
- then summing up thoughts and how people can get in touch with you at the end.
That would be a typical presentation.
You only need that much information realistically to actually write a book. You need about forty to fifty “points” to expand upon – roughly, five hundred words per point. If you think you can speak a hundred and fifty words a minute typically on stage, five hundred words per point really isn’t very much as all – 3 minutes or so. It’s very doable.
That’s why I know you can relax about writing – you know what to do, you just need to write it down.
If you want to, there’s nothing stopping you in using something like a smart phone or your laptop, your computer with a built-in microphone, to actually dictating your book and doing it that way, literally talking around the slides and turning that into a book.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing that.
There’s lots of services online that can help or if you want I can help you with getting your material perfectly transcribed and turned into a book. That’s fine. (In fact these blog posts are transcribed using a great online service).
You can also use things like voice recognition software which is really good if you’re writing a book with fairly standard language in it.
If you’re writing something that’s talking about perhaps, Russian cookery recipes with very unique and infrequently used words, the voice recognition software is going to struggle. This is because there’s going to be a lot of unfamiliar terms in there and you’re going to have to teach your what those unfamiliar terms are. (“Borscht” is not the same as “Porch”).
If you’re writing a fairly “typical” book, then you’ll find voice recognition software works really well. It’s going to recognize ninety-nine point nine percent of what you’re saying. It’s going to be great, if you want to use that for your book project. Plus. it’s inexpensive. Voice recognition is worth thinking about. It’s a great (even critical) thing to consider really if you want to cut down on the actual physical “time at the keyboard…writing” aspect of producing your book.
