19: The Step Most Writers Skip (That Makes Everything Harder)

Let’s talk about something most writers completely miss.

You start researching how to write a book and suddenly you’re flooded with advice on writing, publishing, marketing.

But there’s a step that quietly gets skipped.

And it’s usually the reason you feel stuck.

In this episode, I’m walking you through why outlining isn’t optional, and why trying to “figure it out while you write” is what creates so much frustration in the first place.

Here’s the truth: Good writing is clear thinking.

And if the thinking isn’t done first, the writing will feel heavy, scattered, and hard to finish.

We’ll walk through:

• Why writing without an outline feels like a constant restart
• The difference between thinking and writing (and why mixing them slows you down)
• What a real outline actually includes (not the high school version)
• The three decisions you need before you write a single chapter

Then come join me for a clarity workshop here! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to For Women Who Write Podcast. I'm Michaela, a certified writing coach, editor, and self-publishing expert with over a decade of experience, helping women turn their ideas into powerful, best-selling books. If you felt the call to write, share your story, share your experiences, how you can help other people, then you are in the right place. Here we talk about the real concepts of writing and publishing, from finding your voice to structuring a book, from overcoming resistance and imposter syndrome to launching it into the world with confidence. My mission is to show you that becoming a published and best-selling author, if it is possible, absolutely. Your story matters, and chances are you're closer to holding your finished book in your hands than you did. Hello, welcome to another episode of Four Women Who Write. Okay, you guys. I am so excited to talk to you guys today about this topic because we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it. There needs to be more conversations about this when we talk about writing and publishing a book. Because when you start researching, looking into what would it be for me to like write a book, you will get a ton of information on writing a book. And you will have a ton of information on publishing a book. You will probably get more information, honestly, on publishing and marketing a book. Because all of those things are honestly a little flashy. They're a little exciting. Writing the book is exciting. And then, of course, publishing and marketing the book are also incredibly exciting. But in order for those to be successful, a lot of people skip a very, very important first step. And I think they miss it because they don't know that it's a step. And I think we don't talk about it very much because it's honestly kind of an unsexy step. It's not super glamorous. It is not exciting. It is not launching and reaching a bestseller list. I'm just gonna be really honest with you guys. It's not sexy. But when you do this one step, it will make all the other steps go so much more smoothly. It's like working out, it's like eating your broccoli. It's not super fun all the time, but the people who are consistently living healthy lives are the people who do that kind of work. And the writers who hit big time, the writers who have success both in the writing process and in the publishing process are also the ones doing this step. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And it's what I love to help my writers with. It is absolutely one of my favorite things to help writers with this step. And this step is called outlining. Yes, outlining your book. Some people might call it like planning, thinking through your idea, but I prefer the term outlining because outlining is going to give you a roadmap of where you need to go. It's going to lay everything out for you. In each of the three phases of writing and publishing a book, outlining, writing, and publishing, you have different skill sets and different thinking and parts of your brain that you will use. When you try to use all three skills and parts of your brain at once, you don't get a great result. And if you skip any of these three steps, you also do not get a great result. So many writers go into writing their book without doing any outlining beforehand. They haven't thought clearly through their book idea. So they're trying to find their book idea while they write. And that can be a really roundabout difficult way to do things. Because when you're writing, you are communicating an idea that you have already clearly thought through. So if you haven't clearly thought through an idea first, you're going to have a ton of problems in the writing process. And then of course you'll have tons of problems when you're publishing and selling it because you haven't thought things through clearly. When you create an outline and not just like a three-point intro conclusion kind of an outline, I'm talking like a real solid outline. When you've done that thinking ahead of time, that's when the rest of the process goes so much more smoothly. If you are listening to this right now and you are working on a nonfiction book and you have not done the hard work of thinking through your idea, of outlining it very robustly, and you are stuck, that is likely the reason why. You need to stop writing and go back to outlining and thinking through your idea. Good writing is simply clear thinking that transforms. It's clear thinking that transforms people. That's all that good writing is. So if you haven't done that hard work of clear thinking ahead of time, then you're going to have problems. And that's where an outline can give you the roadmap that you need to move forward. It's almost the summertime for us here. We have two little boys and we have lots of trips this summer that we're taking. I'm really excited. One of them, we are going to the beach, and it's going to be a 10-hour road trip to the beach. I have two little boys, six and three and a half, and they have lots and lots of energy. So before we go on these road trips, my husband and I, we've done a few of them in the past. So we're semi-veterans. I have an emphasis on semi. So we kind of know what this is like to be on long stretches with little kids. And we know that in order for a road trip to be successful, we have to have a plan in place. We need to know roughly how long we're going to be in the car. We need to know that we uh what snacks we're going to bring and actually bring those snacks, what toys, what books we're going to bring. We need to know the rules on screen time, how much screen time are we going to let them have? All of these types of things we all pull together and we know before we get into the car to go on our trip. If we just woke up one day and decided, hey, I think we should go on a 10-hour road trip with our two little kids. Let's go. And we just jumped into the car with no snacks, no screens, no books, no toys, no games, nothing like that. We just jumped into the car and went. I'm literally feeling my stress and anxiety increase with that idea. Just talking about it because that would be so incredibly stressful. It's a long road trip. And if we don't have a plan in place, we are going to go crazy and we likely will just turn around and go home. And that is what a lot of people do when they write their book, is they say, you know what, I think I'm going to write a book. And they just start writing it. It's like they just get into a car with a bunch of kids, with just a bunch of ideas bouncing around in their head, thinking that the ideas will just kind of get settled. The ideas will just figure it out and everything's going to be okay for those 10 hours that they're in the car. It's the same when you're trying to just sit down and just write a book, but you don't have a plan in place. It's like expecting your kids to just figure it out. You just expect your ideas to just figure it out. But your job as a writer is to find a place for those ideas. Your job as a writer is to invite people into your way of thinking and then clearly show people how they can get a transformation. And you cannot do that without an outline. You cannot do that without clear thinking written down on a page. So what does that plan actually look like? If you are to write down a plan, like have an outline in place, like what does that actually look like? Because a lot of you may have been resisting any kind of an outline because you're like, well, it's just three points intro, conclusion, boom, that's it. Like I'm done. I don't need that. I already have that in my brain. And that's not the outline that I'm talking about. That's not like what you did for your high school English research paper, that is absolutely not what we are trying to write. We are not trying to write high school academic papers. We are trying to write engaging pieces of work that are going to move people from one step to the next step. And in order to do that, you need to know lots of things before you can get them to the next step. You need to know how you are going to communicate. And so that outline needs to have all of that information in place. So what are some of those things? There's quite a few things, but the three biggest things that you need to plan is first of all, what is your publishing path? How are you going to publish? Are you going to self-publish or traditionally publish? And you need to know the answer to this earlier rather than later because the way that you approach the writing process is going to be different. If you choose to do traditional publishing, do not write a full manuscript and pitch it. Do not write a full manuscript. You need to have a proposal first that you will pitch to an agent or an editor. And if they accept it, then you write the book under their guidance and direction. I have way more on this in a previous episode on traditional and self-publishing, if you want to hear more about that. But do not write a full manuscript. If you choose to go the self-publishing route, which I think is an incredible route to go, if I may say so myself, then you can write your manuscript first. You don't need any kind of proposal. But here's what traditional publishing does really well is traditional publishing forces you to write a proposal. And this proposal forces you to think clearly. You have to answer really important questions about your book and get your idea super crystal, solid, clear before you actually start writing it. And I think that's where a lot of self-published authors go wrong, is they don't do this work of thinking ahead of time. Because they can just write the manuscript and throw it up online, they don't do the hard work of thinking first. And that is what an outline in a plan does ahead of time. You don't have to do a full-on proposal like traditional publishing, even if you're self-publishing. You can just create this really solid outline. Get coaching on all of the pieces that you need to know to think clearly about your book. Then you can write it and have a really successful solid book. But you need to know where am I going? Am I traditionally publishing or am I self-publishing? Have a clear plan and clear idea on that because then you can move forward with whatever path makes the most sense for you. So that is one of the pieces that you need to have in place. A second piece that you need to have in place is knowing your reader. Know your reader, know your reader, know your reader. The way that you communicate a message is going to be different depending on who you are talking to. When I talk to my husband about whatever I want to eat for dinner that night, it's going to be really different about having a conversation with my three-year-old and trying to negotiate him eating a couple of vegetables instead of all the chicken nuggets, right? That conversation at dinner is going to be very different because I'm talking to two different people. When I know who I'm talking to, I can tailor my message accordingly. A lot of questions are going to come up for you while you're working on your book. Should I tell this story? Should I talk about this topic? Should I not talk about that topic? All of those questions are going to come up and you will always, always, always filter them through your reader. What does your reader need to hear and not hear? So if you aren't clear on who your reader is, you're going to have a hard time writing the book and being clear on the transformation you want to bring to them. So know your reader. The third piece, or a third piece, is transformation, just like we I just talked about and have mentioned a couple of times in this episode is that a good book is one that brings transformation. And transformation comes from clear thinking. If you want to bring somebody from point A to point B, you need to know how you're going to clearly get them to that point. But what brings people to purchase books is knowing that they will learn something new or they will be someone new. Right now, I have kind of a funny stack of books. My husband laughed. I got a bunch of books from the library the other day, and he was like, wow, I definitely see a theme in your life right now. And it's really all about kind of uh one of them is buy back your time and slow productivity and who not how. All of these books are about how to manage your time well so that you can do more, really so that you can accomplish more without doing as much. And it's a theme in my life. It's a problem that I'm currently having is how do I manage my time? How do I add people onto my team? How do I scale while still maintaining my sanity? It's a really big issue in my life that I'm trying to solve right now. And these books are helping me get to that solution. They are helping me see how I can grow in this, what I need to change, how I need to think differently, some practical solutions, some mindset solutions to get me an overall solution that's going to make my life better. As a result of these books, I can see my thinking has been transformed. It's not like my whole life has been radically changed and all of a sudden I'm waking up a completely different person. That's not the goal of books. The goal of books is to take one idea that people are not thinking about correctly and change it. Just change it. Make them think about something a little bit differently. Give them practical next steps of how they can change their lives. If they need help with their careers, if they need help in their relationships, if they need help in parenting, all of these topics, you are taking one idea and helping them think differently about it so that their lives would be different and better. You ultimately want to create this transformation in their lives. And that's what has people picking up books. That's what sells books, especially nonfiction books, is when people have a different view on something that they have a problem that gets solved so that they can move forward. And again, if you don't know what that is, if you haven't done clear thinking on what that is, you're going to have issues when you write. Now you may have a transformation in mind, but is it a good transformation? Is it a transformation that you can fully cover in a book? Or is it too broad? Is it too small? Is it something that really is a problem for people? Lots of different types of transformations you can bring people. And so that's really where coaching comes in is figuring out is this a good transformation? Is this the right transformation that I really want to help people through? But those are just a three of a few of the pieces that you really need to know. What is your publishing path? Who is your reader? And what transformation are you bringing to them? So for some of you who are listening to this, this may be really exciting for you because it gives you a couple of handles. But for some of you, it may also be a little bit discouraging because you're not entirely sure. Like you are a therapist and you've always wanted to write a book on helping families grow closer together. That's a great topic, but you may not know exactly what transformation you want to bring people. And you may not know exactly who in the family you are talking to. Are you talking to both married couples? Are you just talking to the woman? Are you just talking to the man in the relationship? Who are you really talking to? And what specific transformation do you want to get to them? If you're not really sure quite yet, then I would really encourage you to start writing on the topic publicly. Start getting some reps in. Open up a Substack, start an email list and start writing publicly so you can get some really solid feedback from the people that you want to serve. If you're a coach or you're a therapist and you're meeting regularly with people in sessions, you can also start asking yourself who is really resonating with this? What exactly is causing them to really move forward? And how do I want to like, you know, encapsulate that into a book so that this can go a little bit wider to a greater audience of people? Really get into it and start to get a lot of feedback. Once you have some of those reps in place, you've been giving speeches, or you have people that you've been working with, or you've just been writing publicly for a little bit on this topic and you're starting to see a ton of traction, that's when you may be ready to start outlining your book. The outlining process can expose a lot of weaknesses. And I mean that in a really good way. I mean that it can show where we can shore up the idea a lot more and make it even stronger so that it can sustain the whole process of writing and publishing a really excellent book. When you outline is when you get to see the roadmap. You get to see the problems on the trip. Wait a second, we don't have enough snacks. We need to get more snacks. It shows you some of the issues that you may have later on. But when you've done the hard work of clear thinking ahead of time, you can now essentially almost plug and play. I'm not guaranteeing that the writing process is gonna go super smooth and easy for you. It is still tricky and difficult at times. So I'm not gonna paint some picture that it's, you know, roses and rainbows all the time, but it absolutely can make the process go a lot more smoothly for you because you're not thinking and writing at the same time. You're not critically trying to organize ideas and frameworks and what am I even trying to say? You're just communicating what you've already been thinking. And when you can just focus on communicating and writing instead of deep thinking, you're going to make the process go so much more smoothly. A lot of times people are trying to do both. They're trying to write and edit and think at the same time. And that's when second guessing comes in. That's when they start to doubt their idea. That's when they're like, I don't know if this, but what if I did this right here? Or maybe this doesn't make sense, or this is a kind of a weird idea. Does this make sense to do it right here? Would they be interested in this? And all of these questions start coming up ahead of time because you haven't done the work of critically thinking ahead of time. And I say this with all the love of my heart because I have been prone to that and I have seen my clients as well do it as well. And it's just something you just don't know. You just need to see that there are three phases really of writing and publishing a book. It's outlining and clear thinking, it's writing and then it's publishing. And this is one of the things I love helping my clients do is thinking ahead of time before they even write the book, before they've gotten too deep into it, to stop and to think very clearly. And this is what we do in my outline intensives. These intensives are two days where we sit down and we get in deep into your book idea and we really make sure it's a strong book idea. We go through speeches you've done, podcast episodes, emails, challenges, webinars, subsec articles, anything that you've got on the topic, we pull all of it together, we find the common themes throughout it that make sense to include, and then we outline the whole thing. And we don't just outline the book, we outline the chapters too. Because I have found a lot of people, if they create like an overall book outline, that will get them kind of far, but they haven't done the hard work of thinking through each chapter. And so they sit down to write the chapter and they're like, well, wait, what am I supposed to write about in this one again? I think I'm supposed to write about beauty in this chapter. But that's such an abstract idea. How do you even how can you even break down such an abstract idea? That is what the chapter outlines do is we break down these abstract ideas into write this story that we talked about, and that's how this story leads into this idea, and this idea leads into this next one. And make sure you include this statistic here, these, and just break it all down for you. So then when you sit down to write, it's just pulling it all together. You've done the hard work of thinking. Now it's time to pull it all together when you sit down to write. So that writer's block starts to go away. All of that frustration of second guessing starts to go away. I actually just got a message from a client last week and she was saying how she keeps going back to our notes from our outline intensive when she is writing. And it has just been going so much more smoothly for her because she's done all that hard work on the front end. She has four kids and is running a business and is writing a book at the same time. And it's really inspiring to see because she's done the hard work ahead of time. She knows what she needs to write. It's just a matter of sitting down and actually doing the writing. And she's making it happen. And we've got potentially a future launch date for her as well, which is really, really exciting. And that can be you two. It is absolutely possible and within reach for you to have a book written and published either by the end of this year or beginning of next year. But it all starts, all starts with clear thinking, because that's what good writing is. Good writing is clear thinking that transforms. So if this is something that you are interested in, you want to talk a little bit more about that, then come and join me for a workshop. These workshops are where we take your book idea and we run it through a four-part assessment and we think through, hey, do you know your reader? Like really know your reader. Do you know the transformation is to good transformation? And many more of those different ideas that we run your idea through, filter it through to make sure that it's really solid and if you would be ready for an outline intensive. So if you're interested in that, you can click on the link in the show notes, or you can go to MichaelaMathhews.com M-I-K-A-E-L-A-M-A-T-H-E-W S dot com backslash workshop. So I hope this is really helpful for you. Make sure you are thinking first, then writing. That is going to be what ultimately gets you to a book that you are incredibly proud of. I hope this is helpful for you, and I can't wait to see you in a workshop.