Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve signed a contract to write a book. I’m excited but also a bit daunted. It will be my third book and it is one I have wanted to write for most of my career. As I wrote recently, I started working in law firms when I was 15 and was quickly engulfed with law practice management. I have wanted for a long time to distill some of that experience, gained over the last couple of decades, into a book that helps law students and new lawyers to understand the current and potential role for law practice technology. Now I have to figure out how to start.
This is less a content issue than a process one. I wrote a simple ebook in 2015 that was both genesis for this new book and an effort at fleshing out the possible scope. I have meant to return to it over the years but time and tide wait for no one. I had some other challenges occupy my time and, like most law librarians outside academia, there was no time during the work day that I could allot to this sort of project.
As part of the book proposal, I was forced to put some sinew on the skeleton. This was helpful because it got me to start taking that next iteration and teasing it apart. I have a pretty good outline now and, in some cases, very definitive topics that I want to cover.
If anyone ever wants to talk about book pitches, happy to do so, just email me. But there’s nothing arcane in my approach. I scouted a couple of publishers and looked at their writing requirements and chose one. Since my topic was non-traditional (not ‘doctrinal’) I was perhaps more narrowly focused than other topics. Once I had one I felt good about—and where I had seen the insides of some of their publications—I found their online proposal form and sent it in. Just as with my first books, the first publisher I pitched accepted the proposal. I tailored my proposal for them, which may not always be possible depending on what outcomes you’re hoping for.
I have two other advantages. First, because of how my current employment appointment works, I have time during my work week that I can do some of this writing. Both of my previous books—Finding and Managing Legal Information and Practicing Law in the Cloud—and the second edition of one were done on my time outside of work. That was the deal that allowed me to write them: no work time, no work resources (computer, internet, etc.). I used my hour long train commute to do some of the writing and, when the galleys came back, I used my tablet and a PDF app to do some editing.
The second is that I am teaching a course on law practice technology in the fall semester. As I spend the next 6 months or so writing, I will be able to integrate that with my course planning. It will mean I can plan in course activities as part of my text, and draw from my text for class content.
Realize That Genre Matters
The challenge is really the process. I have committed to X number of words in Y amount of time. From there, it’s a relatively easy calculation to figure out how many words I need to complete each month, week, day. It’s like NaNoWriMo but on steroids.
That’s a lot of planning for someone who mostly writes blogs. To put it in context, I write about 2,000 words a week for the blog. In the last 3 years, I’ve cleared 100,000 words each year. I think it’s fair to say I have a book in me, whether anyone wants it or not!
A blog post is a genre, though. I do not plan my blog posts beyond the general topic that I want to cover. I keep a Google Keep document full of prompts, sometimes a single question that I want to answer, sometimes a handful of data points or items that I think go together. I frequently skip my list, writing what’s at the top of my head (like this post) rather than getting to some of the items that have been nagging at my brain for a longer time. When I want to write one of my list ideas, it has the advantage of having an accumulation of thought behind it as I have edited or re-framed my note. Also, I get to check the note off my list.
Over time, I suppose these blog posts have lost some of their stream of consciousness feel just because I’m better at writing them than I used to be. If a blog post isn’t going well, I dump it in the trash quickly. I tend to write my posts in one sitting, often taking only an hour or two to knock out the first draft. I will then schedule it and come back to it later. Sometimes I trash it but most times I just tweak it a bit, make some edits, tinker.
This sort of seat-of-the-pants approach doesn’t work with a book, though. I have been trying to figure out which of two approaches would make more sense. In part, I’m driven by my recollection of the Star Wars Encyclopedia.
Bricks or Paint
We bought the Star Wars Encyclopedia for our kids. There seems to be a period where every kid enjoys reference material: data, dates, sizes, shapes. One thing that I noticed relatively soon is that there are lots of entries in the As, Bs, Cs, and Ds. As you move through the alphabet, the entries get either fewer or shorter. Interestingly, on the encyclopedia’s wiki page, you can see this a bit if you look at different letters particularly the ones at the end of the alphabet.
For sure, there will be fewer Z entries than S entries in any English language encyclopedia. But there’s still noticeable front loading in that encyclopedia. It made me wonder if the author had worked on each letter in order and, over time, and with a deadline approaching, found that they had to cut back later chapters or sections.
I am pretty sure that, in my first book, this was also the approach I took. I started with the first section of the outline and wrote that chapter. Then the next section. Then the next and so on until I reached the end. I then returned to each chapter and edited, or moved things from one place to another, and brought it to an end.
This is also how I am approaching a three-part journal article I’m working on. I will create each segment and then ensure there is mortar to connect them. I don’t write novels so there isn’t necessarily a character or story arc, although there remains a theme or thesis that does need to permeate the text.
This is what I think of as a brick approach. You create a brick and then you create another and you place them one on top of another until you’ve built your structure. But I’m not sure it always makes sense to follow this path.
The other approach I’m contemplating is the one I used for my second book. It’s what I think of as a paint approach. I think it will work better with technology because it’s not always clear where the best place to cover something is at the start. Especially given my outline and some questions about where to put emerging topics like artificial intelligence, it may make sense not to write too much and then have to toss it if it ends up in the wrong place.
AI is really a great example. I’ve seen a number of books that have a chapter on AI. But I don’t think that makes sense unless your assumption is that AI is something that we will work with directly, like we do a word processor. If we aren’t, if we are using a word processor infused with AI or a research search tool infused with AI, then it makes more sense to me to leave AI to appear only when it needs to, as a supporting character. For the same reason I wouldn’t write about electricity but almost all of the technology I will cover requires it.
The genre I’ll be writing is a course book geared towards second and third year law students. One thing I’ve noticed is that these books seem not to always have an index, perhaps because publishers don’t provide indexing support in every case. It makes me wonder whether that’s the reason there are dedicated chapters on topics like AI or cloud computing. If you have no index, the only enhancement you may have to show what your book content is will be the table of contents. It may not make sense from an organizational standpoint but it may make sense from a sales one.
The paint approach would be to do one coat, writing from the start to the finish in one go. This would be much shorter than the final book but would allow me to place things as I go. Then I would do a second coat (if you prefer cooking, perhaps this is more like putting on layers of icing, although maybe I’m telling on myself that I don’t cook but I love frosting) in which more words spread the length out and more gaps are filled. Then a third layer, and a fourth. At this point, I would also plan to start to focus on particular sections to build them out or polish them. But I think it would help me to avoid having to chop up a text later, where I’ve built a brick that no longer fits where I placed it.
I am leaning this way because I think my outline is pretty solid. I have a very specific framework for the book text to hang from and a confidence in the topics that I’ll be covering. I am less confident about what resources I’ll be relying on—data sets, other resources like books and articles—as I work through the content. I’ve been buying books that I know I want to name check as well as using Zotero to organize and capture online documents and surveys that I think will be important. I think that, as I go, it will be easier to see where the gaps are. And, again because of the topic, some of those resources will plug in multiple places.
Either way, time is of the essence. I am fortunate that next week is spring break here and I should be able to dig in. Also, for the book proposal (which itself is 4500 words) I had to write the first chapter of the book (which is also about 4500 words). This gives me a the first brick from which to build or the first clump of paint to spread out across the canvas. It will be fun to get this 20+ year set of thinking out of my head and onto a fixed medium that perhaps someone else can benefit from.