How I Wrote My First Book

I am always interested to learn the habits of other writers and how they organize their time and content. Presently I am wrestling with ideas for good systems as I write a couple of new books. The same organizational system will not work for all types of writing.

I can tell you how I created my first book, Raising a Gifted Child: A Parenting Success Handbook. I took the content from the first three years of “Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog,” reorganized it according to chapter topics, and wove it together with narrative. I found it very difficult to organize all this material on the computer. Sometimes I printed out sections so that I could “see” it better.

A fellow writer friend gave me a helpful tip. She told me to create a separate document for each chapter. Doing that made the manuscript easier to manage.

When handling a document as large as a book, it is terrifying to think that it could all be swept away very quickly with the crash of one’s hard drive. I finally took my son’s suggestion to get an automatic backup system for my computer. The system I am using is mozy.com. Now my documents backup automatically on the cloud twice a day. It provides me with emotional security.

I have much larger quantities of content to organize for my current and future projects and will keep you updated as I figure out how to manage it all.