My Brain Hurts

Planning a book can be daunting. You know so much, and you don’t know how to fit it all in a book. You don’t even know how long a book should be.

Here’s an approach to help you come up with a skeleton outline.

First, write down all the general subjects you think you might want to cover in your book. The list can be as long as you like.

Then think about who you want to read the book and what subjects they’ll be most interested in. Go through the list a few times and try to trim it down to around 10 of the most important subjects. Keep the subjects more rather than less inclusive.

Those subjects give you your rough chapters. (Around 10 chapters works pretty well. In an average book, it means each chapter will be about 12–18 pages long.)

Take each subject and make a list of all the subjects you could cover in that chapter. Again, decide which out of your list is the most important subject your reader needs to know about. Then think about the next most important, and so on. Use that approach to trim each list to the 10 or 12 most important points.

Those are the main subjects of each chapter.

Repeat the process 10 times, and you’ve got a rough Table of Contents.

You’ll notice a couple of things:

• There’s a lot of cross pollination.
Ideas from your general list may reappear as topics within a chapter. Topics you leave out of one chapter may fit well in another.

• There’s a lot of wastage.
It’s disheartening but it’s inevitable. You can’t fit everything you know in a book. If you try, it will make writing the book more difficult—and reading it impossible.

The contents list you generate with this method might not be what you actually end up using in your book. But if nothing else, forcing yourself to exclude subjects will help you figure what you are writing about … and what you’re not.