The ADD of Writing

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 | 0 comments

The ADD of Writing

Glory be to heaven’s above I have a nice problem to share today: my publisher, Manor House Publishing, has asked me to go ahead and complete my first non-fiction book and they want it done by the end of August.

Say what?

End. Of. August.

With a working title of “The ADD of Writing” you can probably guess what it’s about – I’m taking a look at the lessons I’ve learned over 30-plus years as a professional writer in the fields of journalism, government and corporate communications, marketing and creative writing. And I’m distilling it all down into a book that is designed to help people navigate their way through writing conventions in each of those fields.

But I have a confession: I think how-to books are usually hideously boring. I like reading fiction, biographies and books about history, psychology, time management and quantum physics. But handing me a book about how to do something is akin to inviting me to use it as a door stop. It is very hard for me to get excited about the step-by-step of anything, although I have laboured through parts of books aime at teaching me about gardening, knitting, financial management and child birth. I believe there needs to be an element of creativity in everything we do on this planet and following rules about something bores me to smithereens.

I remember working at the London Free Press and Canadian Press very early on in my career and feeling oodles of delight at devising strange new words that my editors, naturally, excised. It was always worth a try.

Thus the ADD part of the story: ADD shares a lot of DNA with creativity.  You sit down to complete a task (like writing a book). You stare at a blank computer screen. You hear a car going by outside your window. It is making a strange sound. You get up to investigate. You sit back down. The phone rings. You answer it. You’ve forgotten where you were so you stare at the computer screen for a moment and realize what you’d really like is a nice hot cup of coffee. As you wait for the coffee to brew you realize you haven’t gone to get the mail at the superbox for a few days. You decide to take the dog with you and because it’s a sunny day, you go for a longer walk than you had intended. You come back from your walk and realize the coffee is old. You brew another pot. You also realize that you forgot to get the mail. Damn!

You go back up to your computer and stare at the screen again. What were you going to write today again? Oh yes, the book outline. Gotcha. A book outline. A. Book. Outline. What’s the best way to write a book outline you wonder? You Google it. Ahh, OK, there are 5,190,000 entries for “How to write a book outline”. You wonder why there are so many. Does that mean there are a lot of incorrect methodologies out there? Who are all these people who write instructions for book outlines, anyway.  Are they writers? Editors? Publishers. Oh, and there’s that “how to” piece again. Do you really want to get into a tedious “How-To” spiral of ineffectiveness at 4:37 in the afternoon?

I’m sure you get my drift. My challenge will be in making this new book interesting enough that even I will want to read it. And interesting enough that I will also want to write it! Stay tuned for more news!

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