Are you interested in writing a book but have not found the time, opportunity or most helpful mechanism to help get you started? Or maybe you have already started but have not made as much progress as you had expected or hoped? Well, if you indeed wish to complete a book, whether it is fictional or non-fictional in nature, Associated Content may be the answer you’ve been looking for. As it turns out, the best way to write a full-length book (i.e., 50,000 words or more-200,000 being the average) is by using what I have called the “Patch-quilt Writing Method.” Simply put, this involves chopping the project into manageable small bites or “patches.”
Sewing the Pieces Together
The very first thing to do is to come up with a good title. If you have already come up with one, the next thing is to write an outline or a page of contents. These things should provide the map which you can use to trace your way to a publishable manuscript. Now comes the best part: creating the individual pieces, one at a time. This is where Associated Content can come in. As you write individual parts (whether in terms of narrative patches or non-fictional short extrapolations), they can, in time provide the pieces that you can later connect or sew together.
A case in point: I have been meaning to write a book on nonprofit organizational development, an area about which I am very knowledgeable, having devoted a great deal of my time to working with nonprofits in the last 8 years. To that end, I have been writing a set of articles which I then started submitting to Associated Content. Although I only started working on this project toward the end of 2017, I have already written a good number of articles and I have a long list of other articles to work on in the next few months. If I keep being as prolific as I have been lately, I have no doubt that my book will be completed by the end of 2018.
Although I have written articles on a variety of subjects, people may notice, if they check out my profile at Associated Content, that many of my articles are on nonprofits-how to start them, how to put together a Board of Directors, what myths and misconceptions about nonprofits are worth addressing, etc. Later on, as I continue to work on the “page of contents,” I can go about finding the best ways to connect the individual sections. I already know what topics I want to cover – I now need to make sure that I have enough material to cover each of those main topics.
As for determining how many articles I will need to have approximately one full manuscript’s worth, I simply count words and articles as I go along. For example, I know that each of my articles is about 1500 words. If I shoot to write a 200,000 word book (which, as I said, is the average length of most books published today, with the exception perhaps of textbooks), then I can just divide that number by my average-length article, i.e., 200,000 words divided by 1500 words equals 133 articles.
Naturally I may have to write connective sections in order to neatly weave the articles together, but I can testify to the fact that writing so-called “connective sections” is rather simple, compared to how long writing the main sections can take.
What about A Novel?
If your inclination or desire is to write a novel, then the same process may be used. Simply work on a series of short stories you can later weave together either into a novel or into a collection of stories. If a novel is definitely what you are aiming for, just stick to the same characters and approximately the same setting and, even though you will be submitting independent stories to Associated Content, they will be related enough to be turned into that all-illusive Great American Novel everyone wants to write.
Now, you can also work on the novel or the collection on your own, but the beauty of Associated Content, if you decide to use it as your literary “mechanism,” is that you will get some compensation for your work as you move along, and, possibly, some feedback from hopefully interested readers. Maybe this will give you an idea as to what characters are the most colourful and interesting, or which are too boring to spend more time on-and you can tell all this by the number of “views” each separate story gets. Even more important than all this is the fact that Associated Content will motivate you to have steady progress, once you establish weekly publishing goals and objectives.
Ready, Set, Go!
All in all, Associated Content presents a very unique opportunity to work on not only small projects but on big ones as well. Once you decide on what type of full-length book or writing project you want to work on, all you need to do next is to start the process. Most people get intimidated by the immensity of a full-length book-it certainly seems much bigger and much more intimidating than an article or a short story. But, as one writing professor once told me, a novel is just one very long short story-by the same token, a full-length non-fictional book is just one very long article. It is no wonder that many great novelists first started writing short stories.
The main point to dwell on here, though, is that the best way to complete a large project is one cohesive unit at a time. That is, coincidentally, what Associated Content can help anyone achieve.
What is the best way to start? Once you have decided what type of full-length manuscript you want to complete (whether it is a movie script, a play, a collection of poems, a biography, etc.), you need only start submitting sections thereof to Associated Content. Immediately, designate a realistic number of individual pieces you will write and submit every week. If one section a day sounds too ambitious, you might perhaps settle on 3 sections every week; then, maybe you can increase the numbers as time goes by.
The important thing, though, is to be consistent, to establish deadlines and writing goals, and to abide by whatever goals you decide upon. In the end, if you play your cards right, you will have a significant number of well-written and well-researched literary masterpieces published on Associated Content-by that time maybe having thousands of enthusiastic fans (many of whom may just buy or recommend your book?). You can then go about weaving the best of those literary masterpieces into that book you always wanted to write.
As any published author will confirm, that first book can be the defining rod for one’s writing career. Whether it sells millions or just a few hundreds, it will be the book that you will remember the most (because it will be your very first). If all goes well, now that you have the knack for it, writing more books will, hopefully, come easier and with more success-unless, of course, your first book, by some miracle, or sheer strike of intellectual genius, becomes a best seller. If that is the case, then every book after that will only be icing on the cake!
All thanks to Associated Content . . .
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