The "How to Write Your Book" Series was published in its original form in Writer’s Digest Magazine in 1997 and 1998 as “The Evolution of a Book,” and later reprinted as a long special section in the 1999 Writer’s Yearbook Extra titled “How to Write Your Book.” I significantly revised the articles for online publication.

Part Two

From Outline to Complete Manuscript

How to start, continue & finish your rough draft

© 1997-2000, Paul D. McCarthy All rights reserved.

In my opening article in this series, From Concept to Outline, I described the basic process for producing an outline, which is a good starting point for writing a manuscript.

In this section of the series we will cover:

Once the outline is done, you’re ready to begin writing the manuscript, and in this article, I describe how you can prepare and plan for that writing, the forms of writing, representative stages of the book’s development, and various goals.  There are many ways to achieve a complete manuscript and with accumulating experience you’ll figure out what works best for you but the process of writing I describe should clarify and deepen your understanding of what’s fundamentally involved in attaining that goal.

Planning for the Writing

At this point, you’re eager to get the book started.  But if you go charging off before you’re fully ready, you’re probably going to waste a lot of time and creative energy.  Be patient.  It’s important, useful and efficient to plan your work and writing before you begin the manuscript.

Start by thinking ahead to the kind of preparation you may need to do before you begin the actual writing—including additional research, time for reflection, a review of the outline and so on.  Make a list of those things, as the first part of your plan.

It can be confusing and intimidating to think of writing the entire manuscript as a single difficult and lengthy process.  So, think next about how you can divide the writing into various stages of work.  This division allows you to consider the work in smaller, more manageable chunks.  It also makes it easier for you to plan the specifics of what you should do at each stage.

The number of stages will vary with the length and nature of the book, your experience and your working methods.  You may be writing a series of golf novels, and as you plan your work on the fifth novel, you divide the writing into only two stages because of your extensive experience with the series and the rather uncomplicated plotting of the books.

However, if you’re writing your first book and it’s a monumental work on genealogy, requiring several years of research, and outlined to run 60 chapters, you’d probably consider ten or more stages, with 4-6 chapters in each one, and plan a much more complex building process.

Whether it’s two stages or a dozen, figure out the number of stages that you believe will work best for you and the book you’re writing.  Make this the next part of your plan.

Three Writing Stages

In this article I wanted to show a representative process.  For this hypothetical project, I decided to divide the writing into three stages, each of which encompasses about a third of the manuscript.  Each stage is broad and inclusive enough to cover the three forms of writing that you’ll engage in as you complete your manuscript:  development of the ideas, writing the actual manuscript and revision of the manuscript.

Here are the stages:

1. The Starting Stage begins with the first page and continues through the partial manuscript.
2. The Middle Stage is the progression from the partial to the nearly complete manuscript.
3. The Concluding Stage proceeds from the nearly complete manuscript and ends with the full draft.

The nature of the work at each stage determines the form or forms of writing that will be emphasized.  For example, when you’re starting the manuscript, you’ve already done a lot of development in the outline and it’s too early for revision, so you concentrate on the writing.

However, when you’re in the middle of the book, you’re revising what you’ve already written, continuing the writing of new material, and looking ahead to refine your thinking about the book’s direction.

In contrast, when you’re finishing the book, you just want to get to the end.  So you write and write, but you also keep looking back at the nearly complete manuscript to make sure the conclusion you’re developing fits perfectly.

If you can anticipate how your emphasis will vary as you move through whatever number of stages you’ve worked out, you can plan your work at each stage more precisely, and better anticipate the amount of time it will take.

Also, include in your plan, approximate, motivating deadlines.  Deciding to draft the partial manuscript in three months and the rest of the manuscript in another seven months, gives you some sense of how much you need to push yourself.

Set rough limits ahead of time on the amount of developing and revising you plan to do at each stage.  You could spend many months revising draft material or doing additional research.  In the meantime, the book remains incomplete.

Keep your planning and scheduling rough.  Don’t try to work out all the details and dates ahead of time; they’ll keep changing as you continue writing.  Organize and plan enough to give yourself a basic sense of deadlines and directions, and then adjust as you go.

Use these limits and deadlines only as a guide.  Don’t stop revising Chapters 9 and 10 just because you’ve been working on them for seven weeks and your schedule says it’s time to move on.  Ultimately, what matters is how productive the work is.  If you’re making real progress on any part of the book— whether writing, developing or revising, separately or in combination—  then just keep working.  Forget the schedule.  Concentrate on the work.  However, once that part of the work is done, or if you find that whatever you’re doing is resulting in only insignificant improvement or progress, move on.

Your ultimate goal is finishing the manuscript.  It’s OK to take a long time to achieve that goal but you must always keep moving toward it.  It’s vital to maintain your momentum and motivation by working steadily and making visible, solid progress.

Pace yourself too.  Just as you don’t want to dally, don’t be so compulsive that you burn out and can’t finish.  Whatever stages you’ve divided the work into, take breaks as necessary.  Sometimes an hour will be enough, or a day or a week.  But as soon as you’ve recharged, back to work.  You’re a writer, and you need to be writing.

Preparing to Write 

Now that you’ve got your plan set, you’re ready to start the creative preparation that leads to the best writing.  If your plan calls for research, do that now, along with whatever else is on your list of preliminaries.

Next, review your outline.  This re-immersion in the material makes the book more clear in your mind, which will help you start writing.  It also allows you to identify, and then solve or answer, any significant problems or questions you may not have noticed before.

Perhaps you’re studying the outline of your third novel, a bitter narrative about a family in crisis because of the oldest son’s addictions, and realize that the son’s motivations are confusing and contradictory.  Or you may tentatively decide that your book about obsessive/compulsive disorders should focus on representative behavioral problems rather than trying to be comprehensive.

In either case, before going any further, analyze and resolve the problems or confirm the decision.  Don’t begin writing the book while there are unresolved issues.  That leads to further problems and to material that’s going in the wrong direction—and you don’t want that.

After your review is finished, and you’ve internalized the book’s elements and dealt with any issues and problems, your preparation is complete—at last.  You’re ready to write and you know how you’re going to start and continue.

Starting the Writing

At this starting stage, your two goals are:

1.  Complete a rough draft of the first third of the manuscript by your scheduled deadline.

2.  Establish a solid foundation for the book that you can build on as you go forward.

When you begin, write thoughtfully and carefully but keep the writing moving forward.  You'll have a much better perspective on the book's strengths and weaknesses after 100 or 150 pages than after 15 or 20 pages.  Also, this steady continuing helps you maintain that vital creative momentum, which you might lose with too frequent pauses.

However, solve significant problems as you get to them.  This does not contradict the last paragraph's advice:  The resolution of significant problems will have considerable impact on your writing as you go forward.

You may, for example, be writing a biography of a French king, beginning with his birth and following his life chronologically from there.  You soon realize that in spite of all your research and your own interest in his early years, you can't make that portion of the narrative dramatic or illuminating.

Don't stubbornly keep writing.  Simply continuing will result in a book with a long, boring opening that significantly affects the tone and style of the rest of the book.  Instead, analyze the problem.  Perhaps you should begin at some dramatic juncture in the king's life, focusing on a critical decision he made while on the throne that exemplifies his character and the volatile French issues of the period.  That powerful opening could set up the rest of the book strongly, providing you a fresh viewpoint from which to write about his early years.

Perhaps you realize three chapters into a novel that the first-person narration is too limiting.  In response you may choose to redefine the narrator's occupation so she's able to see and describe more of the story's events.  Or you may decide to start over and write the novel in the third person.  Either way, the decision will affect the entire book and shouldn't be left for later.

While you write, refer regularly to your outline, which serves as a convenient and concise map of the book, and an easy way to remind yourself of the important elements.