I like to write. This is one of the reasons I put out my book. But it’s not just that I like to write, but that I found I can easily and with pleasure write at length. Sometimes I write at great length. In the previous years to writing my book, I found I had written a number of pieces anywhere between 3 and 30 pages. These could be biblical responses in debates I was having, or it could be an essay for my website or a sermon for the church I attended. It started getting to me that it was pretty easy to knock out 5-10 pages, and with more research and organization 20-30 wasn’t too hard either. So why not write a book sometime soon?

Of course the writing of a book is different in more elements than its length. The length isn’t really a problem for me. I wrote 260 pages of Get married and Save the World, and I could easily have written more. I just wanted to stay focused, and not spend too much time on details. The difficulty in writing a book is not the length, but the organization. How does it all fit together? With a smaller piece, it is easier to write an outline, and the stick to that outline straight through. However, in a piece 5 to 10 times as long as that, you find the outline is often insufficient, and both outline and manuscript must grow together.

This worked out for me in the long run, albeit not perfectly. I think there are a few flaws in the book, and some unsmoothed out edges. What I discovered to do, was write a preliminary outline first, and then begin writing the book. It must be noted when I say this, that I had already begun “writing” it in my head many times, so I would be writing down what I had already partially formed. This preliminary outline contained major sections, minor sections and various passing small observations. As I wrote and followed the outline, I exceeded the outline greatly, even though I added some things to the outline as I went.

Once I had a more or less book-length form, I went back to the outline idea, except this time I wrote a second outline according to the manuscript itself, in great detail, and added a few extra points I felt it needed along the way. THIS outline turned out to be over 20 pages, and what I thought might be two hours of work ended up taking me most of the day. Yet once I had this second outline, it allowed me to easily see the book’s form, and jump through the book’s form to see what might be needed where, and what might be lacking where. Once I adjusted my manuscript to this second outline, and filled it in further, I found the book was complete, but for what would be minor touching up and small additions. I could drop the outline at this point, but for giving it a quick check through.

From then on I worked with the full book, read it over and over I don’t know HOW many times, did minor grammar corrections, and as I said, added a few small sections and extra endnotes. So it took scaling up to full book length in several steps. I cannot imagine doing it any other way. It helps that I like to write. And it helps that I can churn out many pages easily, but as far as organization, it was most instrumental to have multiple outlines to help as it grew. I would recommend this process for longer writing you do, although perhaps there are other methods that also work to keep the structure at a larger scale.