Category: Writing Books

When I was young, my father forbade my mother from teaching me cooking.

He didn’t want me to get sucked into housework and become what every girl in my time was expected to become— a housewife.

My mother respected his wishes and toiled alone in the kitchen while I concentrated on my studies. I was a bright student. I went through my teen years and early twenties without knowing how to cook.

When I finished my master’s degree and had a few free months before starting my Ph.D. degree, my mother, in her infinite wisdom, decided that I should join a cooking course. It was every mother’s duty to prepare her daughter for married life.

Word was sent around to my mother’s school (she was a teacher) and one of her colleagues suggested Mrs. Singh, who ran cooking classes from her home. So I was enrolled in the course without my knowledge.

Mrs. Singh was a celebrity chef in my town. An elegant woman, living in a modish home, in a posh colony. When I was dropped on her doorstep, I was shaking in my boots. Distressed because I didn’t know anything about cooking, and worried about the possibility of being thrown in with experienced ladies who have been cooking for years.

I was right. Most of the other participants were experienced cooks and high-class ladies who threw dinner parties and wanted to learn new recipes to impress their guests. I tried to hide behind books, spending most of my time copying recipes while they chatted, exchanged tips, and did the actual cooking.

At the end of the course, they enhanced their skills while I filled in an old notebook with recipes that I was never going to try.

Eight months later, I got married (of course arranged marriage). My husband lived in Australia and came on a four-week vacation to get married. His parents had done the homework for him and shortlisted three potential brides. He didn’t get the chance to meet the other two because my father decided to arrive first so that if in case the boy and the girl agree, there is at least some time to do the wedding preparation.

The boy and the girl did agree. A marriage was set in two weeks’ time, and a week after, my husband flew back to Australia, leaving me with his parents while waiting for the visa.

Lo-and-behold! My mother-in-law fell sick on the way back from the airport (5 hours’ journey). On my first day in my in-law’s home and it was assumed that I would cook lunch for the family. We were five in the household: my mother-in-law, father-in-law, my husband’s younger brother, and his youngest sister. The brother went to his work, the sister to the university, and I towards the kitchen.

I did the dishes and checked the fridge. All I could find were two eggplants. My luck! Eggplants are the hardest to cook. According to Indian cuisine, there is only one way to cook them, which is to make Bhurtha.

I didn’t know how to cook eggplants. Checking the notebook where I had copied Mrs. Singh’s recipes was futile because I knew it didn’t have the recipe. I was in tears. I sat down and wrote a letter to my mother, telling her about my predicament and blaming her for not teaching me how to cook basic dishes.

After venting out, I calmed down and got on with the job. Turning the gas stove on, I roasted them till the skin was thoroughly charred. I then started peeling the skin. Eggplants were too hot. I remembered my mother doing it under running water. So I did the same. Images of my mother cooking the dish over the years started coming to me. One by one, the next step became apparent.

I remembered her saying you need lots of onions and tomatoes to cook eggplant because after roasting eggplant dries down and reduces in size. Besides, onions and tomatoes give the dish its taste. So I chopped the onions and fried them till they turned brown and then added the meshed eggplants and spices and fried them together. The last step was to add chopped tomatoes, cover them with a lid, and steam cook them.

My father-in-law loved it. To date, I am not sure whether he really liked it or just said it to make me feel good.

Five months later, when I joined my husband in Australia. I was no better than before. My husband was a better cook than me because he lived by himself and I had no choice but to learn to cook.

So cooking became my challenge. I borrowed as many cookbooks on Indian cooking as I could find in the local library and started trying them. I learned to make veggie curries, meat curries, kababs, and even Indian sweets.

Each time I perfected one, my husband threw another challenge my way. I learned to make Gulab Jamun and did a decent job with them and my husband said I bet you can’t make Jalebi. So off I went to learn to make jalebis. After multiple failed attempts, I perfected the recipe, and my husband said I bet you can’t make Rasmalai. So off I went, trying making Rasmalai.

You get the picture.

But cooking is not my forte. Cooking was a challenge for me, something to excel at but not a passion.

Then why the hell do I want to write a cookbook?
Because my daughters want me to.

Like me, they were never into cooking. But now that they are both married and running their household, suddenly they want to inherit my knowledge. And I don’t want to repeat my mother’s mistake.

They want me to write down their favorite recipes in book form. And I want to embellish that book with stories associated with them and my own childhood memories.

So this book is virsa (inheritance) from a mother to her daughters. For a moment, I thought I might take this project into a bigger sense and write a book for all Punjabi daughters. But then I chicken out. I am keeping the project small at this stage. I have no experience in writing cookbooks, and hell, I am not even a passionate cook. But I love to write. And I love to tell stories.

More than the recipes I want to pass down stories to my daughters. They can get recipes from the internet. And they will make their own recipes, I am sure, just like I did. But only I can tell them the stories associated with the food they ate while growing up.

So here I am, starting another book, but this time for a specific audience.

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Photo by Yubraj Timsina on Unsplash

“I have no time to write a book.”

“Writing a book takes years.”

“I can’t write a book. I am just a blogger.”

I hear this all the time.

For a long time, I also believed in the same. The only trouble was I desperately wanted to write a book.

I had written hundreds of articles, but they meant nothing.

Then one day, I heard a tiny voice in the wee hours of the morning. It said, “Write the damn book. Start today, and do it fast.”

If there is one thing that I have learned in my creative life, it is to act on the tiny voice when you hear it. I opened my laptop and got to work. I was going to write a book, and I was going to start the same day.

I needed an idea.

Something I was good at so that I could write it fast.

Something that people would want to read.
Something that solved a problem.
Something people were willing to pay for?

I couldn’t think of anything, so I turned those questions to myself.

What would I want to read?
What problem of mine would I like to solve?
What am I willing to pay money for?

The problem I wanted to solve at that moment was — how to write a book and that too fast. Suppose there was a book which told me that I would have paid money for it.

I was sure there were many books available on the topic. Perhaps the information existed on the internet as well. But I thought, “If I could give it a bit of a twist, perhaps I could write a useful book and learn a lot in the process.”

So I told myself, what if I write and publish the book in a week document the process, thereby proving that it can be done?

That was it. I had my topic and a unique angle.

My next question was. Who was the book for? Who was the niche audience I was serving?

The answer — writers like me.

Writers who want to write a book but were intimidated by the process.
Writers whose inner critics stopped them each time they tried.
Writers who wanted to write books quickly.

If I could explain the process and prove that it is repeatable, there might be a market for the book.

I got to work. By the end of the week, I published the book.

Within a week transitioned from a wannabe author to a published author.

Do you want to write a book too but to intimidated by the process?

Chances are you might already have written a book.

If you have been writing articles on Medium, your blog, or any other platform, you might have enough material for a book.

Your book is already in those articles, and all you need to do is to curate them in the form of a book.

My next book is on productivity. While writing it, I found I have already written more than twenty articles on productivity. I already have plenty of material for the book in those articles.

All I need to do is curate it and turn it into a book.

J.R. Heimbigner, another Medium writer, wrote his first book as medium articles. He started as a listicle of 21 productivity tips. He then broke down each tip into a post. 21 Medium stories later, he had enough content for a book, which he self-published in 2019.

You will be surprised to know how many writers write their books this way. They write a sequence of articles on a topic to tease out their ideas. When they have enough material, they write a book from it.

You can write fiction using this strategy.

Fredrik Backman wrote A Man Called Ove in the form of blog posts under the heading, “I am a Man Called Ove,” where he wrote about his pet peeves and annoyances.

Soon he realized that his writing had the potential for the creation of an interesting fictional character. So he turned it into a novel. His novel has more than two million copies sold and adapted into a film of the same name.

Your book doesn’t have to be 50,000 words long.

If you have written 5,000 words or more on a single topic, you have enough content for a short read.

Because books don’t have to be 50,000 words anymore. Most of the non-fiction books had one or two ideas that are explained in the first two chapters. The rest of the book is usually padding around those ideas in the form of examples and let’s say fluff.

People don’t have time for the fluff. Instead, they want useful information given to them in a straight manner.

Several bestselling books are less than 100 pages these days. Here are some examples:

Living off the Grid with Organic Gardening by Anik Biswas (20 pages)

The Canning and Preserving by Maritza Parker (23 pages)

7 Steps to Flawless Communication by Thomas Kass (90 pages)

The Art of War by Tzu Sun (26 pages)

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant(56 pages)

As long as you have a solution to a problem or an interesting story to tell, you can turn it into a short read.

Kamal Ravikant turned his self-healing story into a book and sold millions of copies.

In his book, Choose Yourself, James Altucher tells the story of Kamal Ravikant, who was one of his followers. They would correspond regularly until one day, Kamal Ravikant went missing.

James found out that Kamal was very sick and getting worse. He had been ill for months. Some days he couldn’t move or wake up. Other days he had enough energy to go outside but only for a few minutes, and then he had to go back inside. Kamal’s sickness was a mystery. The doctors couldn’t help him; he was infinitely tired, feverish, in pain, and it was getting worse.

Months went by without any word from Kamal, and James started fearing the worst.

Then one day, Kamal commented on the James blog again. He started interacting with the community. James was delighted to know that he was alive. He asked Kamal, “What happened?” “How’d you get better?”

Kamal’s response was the incredible:

“I’ll tell you the secret,” he said, “I thought I was going to die. I was just lying in bed and couldn’t move, I had a high fever, and was in too much pain. I really thought I was going to die. Finally, I just started saying over and over again, ‘I love myself.’”

Kamal then wrote about his experience in Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.

And I got better. My body started healing faster. My state of mind grew lighter. But the thing I never expected or imagined, life got better. But not just better, things happened that were fantastically out of my reach. This I couldn’t have dreamed of […] I found myself using the word ‘magic’ to describe what was happening. And through it all I kept repeating to myself, ‘I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.’

But his book was just 40 pages long. No publisher was ready to publish it. So he self-published it. The book became a phenomenon. It went on the bestseller list on Amazon and stayed there for months.

Here is the book summary by none other than James Clear on his website.

Don’t think you have to write a 200-page book.

Don’t think that you need a year to write a book.

Don’t think you are just a blogger and can’t write a book yet.

Just go through what you have already written and see if there is something you can turn into a book.

Leave me a comment if you need any help to proceed.

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1) You can’t write a book without a deadline.

This is primarily true with all projects, but with books, it is gospel. A book tends to get out of your hands and become a monster. Expect your brain to rebel too. It would want to do everything else but work on the book. The only way to finish a book is to hire an editor who has pre-charged you for editing and has blocked his time. The late you get with delivering your book, the less time he has to edit it, which means poor quality editing. And in case you don’t finish in time, you lose your money and your editor too. Most professional editors want to work with professional authors. So if you expect professionalism from them, you got to be professional too.

2) You are bound to struggle with your first few books.

I wrote my first book like I had my first baby. I didn’t know what to expect and just went with the flow. I made several mistakes, but it didn’t matter. But with the second one, I learned many pitfalls and still fell into them. Despite making several lists, I still wasted time and effort. Now, taking a step back, I am more accepting that I will struggle with my first few books, which is fine. Just two years ago, I struggled with writing a 1000 word article. Today I am writing a 20,000-word book a month. If I can come that far in two years, I will get better in the next two.

3) Building a backlist is of utmost importance.

Nothing sells your book like your next book. So, early in your career, you will be spending time building a backlist and learning the ins and outs of the industry. Even if nobody buys your earlier books, having a backlist establishes you as an author in the industry and prepares the ground for the sale of your future work.

4) Amazon Ads could be your friend.

When you are relatively new in the industry and don’t have a mailing list, Amazon advertisements could bring much-needed visibility to your books. Without the promotions, no one knows about your book.

You don’t have to abandon your earlier books after putting all the work into writing, editing, formatting, publishing, and launching them. Set up Amazon ads and get the visibility your book deserves. Although Amazon ads don’t chew up your advertising dollars as Facebook or Google does, they do chew up your time. There is a lot to learn in this area.

5) Book-A-Month could be a real strategy.

What writing an ‘article-a-day’ is for Medium writers; writing a ‘book-a-month’ is for Amazon writers. The rapid-releases strategy not only gives momentum to your writing practice but to the marketing of your book as well. ‘Nothing sells a book better than the next book’ is the industry cliché.

It might come as a surprise to some but it is easier to write an article a day than it is to write an article once a week. The same is true for writing books. Speed brings focus and fluency.

6) Block out a week a month to write the book.

There are only four weeks in a month. So if you want to write a book in a month, you need to block out at least a week. You need to write 3000 words a day for a 21,000 words book. You will then need another week to edit it.

I wrote my first book in one week. I decided to take the weekend off with the second one and wrote it in 10 days instead. It turned out to be a better strategy as I didn’t have to postpone any weekend plans. I wrote 2000 words a day (a more manageable target) and edited the previous day’s work as I went.

7) You got to love the process.

A career as an author is not for those who want to succeed quickly. Even with rapid releases and advertising, building a backlist and readership takes a long time. You got to love the process (and writing) enough to be able to sustain for that long. Most authors who are doing well today have been writing for decades. They can do that because they love writing and the process of generating books.

8) Initially, you might have to concentrate all your energy on the task at hand.

When I got serious about writing on Medium, I stopped everything else and wrote 100 articles in 100 days to get into the rhythm of writing for the platform. I did the same for writing books. For two months, I entirely concentrated on books. I didn’t check social media, and I didn’t write on Medium. Once I established the system, and I began to get a bit more time, I started going back to the platforms I used to be active before.

9) Treat everything as an experiment.

Writing 100 articles in 100 days was an experiment. So was publishing something on three social media platforms for 100 consecutive days was an experiment. My first book was an experiment too. An experiment to see if I could write a book in a week. Writing a book a month is an experiment too, if I succeed, well and good. If I fail, no big deal. I will learn a lot during the process.

Speaking of failure, I could pull through 90 Days of Focus on Fiction back in August, neither could I keep the promise I made last week to write an article a day for December. They were just experiments. Some I was able to pull through, others I couldn’t.

Both these goals have gone to my future To-Do lists, and hopefully, I will do justice to them one day.

10) Writing a book is just one-third of the battle.

Two-third is marketing. According to The State of Indie Authorship in 2021, 79% of independent authors list marketing as the most challenging part of the publishing process. Writing the book came in second at 14%. I am finding the same. It could be that marketing is taking me away from my passion, i.e. writing, or that my marketing channels are not set as my writing process has. I will be spending more time on it in the next year.

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Writing a book is a mammoth task. There are several components to the successful writer path:

1. Managing to find the time and discipline to write amid a busy life and practice.
2. Finding your writing style and voice.
3. Finding the intersection for your expertise, your passion, and the needs of the marketplace
4. Learning about and handling the business and marketing aspects of publishing in order to ensure that your book finds its intended readers.

Last week I came across an interesting concept from Bill O’Hanlon’s book, Becoming A Published Therapist. Bill O’ Hanlon is a psychotherapist who has written 30 books. 

Being a psychologist, it was automatic that he would try to get to the bottom of why it is hard to write books and how to conquer that.

He concluded that it takes a particular kind of energy to get through the process of writing a book, getting it published, and then getting into the hands of the readers. 

Passion for a book is like an electrical impulse traveling down a wire, and that electrical impulse has to be strong enough to affect a lot of people, from the writer to the agent to the editor. Then from the editor to the publicist who needs to get the book reviewed, the art director who is responsible for coming up with the right cover, the sales reps who sell the book to the store buyers. Then from the store’s main buyer to the individual booksellers and, eventually, to the customer. — Lee Boudreaux, Senior Editor, Random House

O’Hanlon reckons ideas aren’t enough. The book must have some driving force that turns it from an idea into action. The essayist Annie Dillard has the same view.

“Writing a book is like rearing children — willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don’t have to scourge yourself with a cat-o’-nine-tails to go to the baby. That’s the same way you go to your desk. There’s nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do” — Annie Dillard, “To Fashion a Text”

The Four Kinds of Energies 

In O’Hanlon’s view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. 

• Blissed Energy 
• Blessed Energy
• Pissed Energy 
• Dissed Energy

Your primary writing energy maybe just one of the above or a combination of more than one.

These energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you.” 

The first two represent the “positive energies”, and they arise from what you love; the last two, are the “negative energies,” and they come from what upsets you.

Let’s have a look at what they are.

Blissed Energy 

Blissed is the excited, deeply joyful energy that some people get when they think of or pursue specific endeavors in life. 

If you love music and it brings you joy to the point of taking you to the state of ecstasy, music may be your bliss. Or it might be sports that do it for you. 

Anything that you find profoundly soul-satisfying or fulfilling gives you blissed energy. You can tell what blisses you out by what kinds of things you can’t keep yourself from doing, thinking about, or sharing with others. 

I get into a state of trance when I sketching. For George Lucas, it is movies.

“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles, and breakthrough the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don’t have that kind of feeling for what it is you’re doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.” — George Lucas

There is a Hasidic saying that, everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him and then choose that way with all his strength. 

The way of following your bliss into writing is to observe what you are drawn to and then follow that passion. 

Bill O’Handon was drawn to Solution-Oriented Therapy, a form of Solution-focused brief therapy, and has written over 30 books on the subject. 

I wrote my first books because I had to. Something inside me insisted, and while I could have resisted the call, I knew that I would be letting myself down as well as shirking an important contribution I could be making. So, I guess that is the first reason to write: because you feel you have to write. — Bill O’Hanlon.

Blessed Energy

Blessed energy involves people or situations that have bestowed grace or encouragement on you in life. 

Perhaps you had a friend who believed in or encouraged you. Or a parent or grandparent told you that you could do anything that you set your mind to or that you were smart or talented. Or a colleague has always encouraged you to follow your dreams. 

The paranormal mystery writer Charlaine Harris has a husband who believed in her even more than she believed in herself. He gave her an electric typewriter on their wedding day and suggested that she quit her job and start. She still couldn’t bring herself to do so. But her husband’s continued to nudge her. Today she is a writer of many successful novels. One of her series, The Southern Vampire Mysteries, has been made into a popular television show, True Blood.

Pissed

Pissed (meaning “pissed off” in this context) refers to the stuff in life that upsets you, gets you angry, or makes you righteously indignant. 

The best-selling business author Tom Peters was asked whether his book, In Search of Excellence, which caused a shift in business practices worldwide, was written for that purpose. His response was: 

“When I wrote [it] . . . I wasn’t trying to fire a shot to signal a revolution. But I did have an agenda. My agenda was this: I was genuinely, deeply, sincerely, and passionately pissed off! 

Another writer who used angry energy to write was the author J. A. Jance. When she tried to enter a creative writing class in the 1960s, the professor told her that “girls don’t become writers” and that she should become a teacher or nurse instead. Jance’s then-husband was also an aspiring writer and he declared, “There will only be one writer in this family, and it’s me.” 

Some years later, after divorcing and becoming a single parent, Jance got up at 4:30 a.m. daily to write for several hours before her kids awakened, and she had to get them to school before going to her job. 

What gave her the energy to get up so early and persist in her writing until she got published? 

She was pissed. 

She got her revenge in print. She made one character in the book a husband who drank too much and declared himself the only writer in the family and never published anything, and she made the crazed killer a creative writing teacher. 

The best-selling mystery writer Sue Grafton did something similar after she went through a terrible divorce in which she got legally trounced in a very unfair way. After spending time fantasizing about the perfect undetectable way of killing her ex, she decided to do it in print, leading to her first best-seller, A Is for Alibi. 

Dissed

Dissed means two things: dissatisfied or disrespected. Dissed refers to the areas of life you were, or someone you care about was disrespected or mistreated. It also refers to those areas in which you are dissatisfied with the status quo, including when you were wounded, hurt, or traumatized. 

Being wounded in a certain area can help you be more sensitive to others who have suffered similar hurts. Martin Luther King was moved to social action by being disrespected and by seeing people he cared about disrespected too. 

Billy Connolly’s grew up in Scotland and was a very poor student, in part due to some unrecognized learning problems. His teachers beat him and generally humiliated him in front of the other students. When he became a successful film star and internationally renowned comedian, he used to drive by those former teachers’ houses and feel a smug satisfaction that he had proven them wrong in their prediction that he would grow up to be a failure and worthless. Disrespect and humiliation made Billy Connolly the person he is today.

A variation on this dissed energy is being wounded. The novelist Anne Rice’s 5-year-old daughter died of leukemia. She grieved mightily, of course, but when the time came to go back to her work as a legal assistant, she found she just couldn’t do it, even though her family needed the income.

Her husband suggested that delay going back to the office and work on that novel she had always wanted to write. The novel that emerged from that period was a compelling dark novel about vampires called Interview With the Vampire. It featured a 5-year-old character who became a vampire (and therefore could never die). Rice imbued this character with all the qualities and features of her dead daughter, in the hopes of never forgetting those aspects of her as time marched on.

Takeaway

O’Hanlon suggests not starting on your writing project unless you have enough energy to pull you through the rough bits, the dips, the discouraging moments, and just the sheer amount of time it takes to see your book through to publication and get it successfully out into the world.

My first book was written from a combination of “Pissed” and “Blissed” energy. I was “pissed” at my inner critic for constantly telling me that my work was not good enough. But I was equally driven by my passion for writing.

But my future work will come from “Dissed” and “Pissed” energies. Dissatisfaction in me leads to curiosity to find out if there is a solution and a kind of stubbornness to get it done against all odds.

I have several books in the draft mode. I would start a book as soon as I get the idea. I get energized about a topic or a story. Every idea has an energy associated with it. If you don’t tap into it, the energy subsides and the idea disappears. I work on the book and take it as far as I could with that energy. 

But as Bill O’Hanlon discovered ideas aren’t enough. The book must have some driving force, some special kind of energy to take it from idea into action.

What energy you can tap into to write your book?

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

Credit: Credit to concept of four types of energies goes to Bill O’Hanlon and many examples came from his book Becoming a Published Therapist.

I was doing some research for the novel I want to write in the month of November (NaNoWriMo) is around the corners Writers! October is for plotting if you want to participate), and I first came across a book, then its writer, and then a quote that intrigued me enough to share them with you all.

I will explain all those in the same order.

The Research

I watched the movie Edie, on TV the night before and loved it. 

The movie was about an 83-years-old bitter and gruff woman who had spent the previous 30 years of her life looking after her husband, who had a stroke. After his death, and when her relationship with her daughter begins to worsen (she is persuading her to move into a retirement home). Edith runs away from home. All her life, she has been doing things for others. She didn’t want to die with a bundle of regrets. So, while still in good health, she attempts to address at least one of them — to climb a mountain in the Scottish Highlands. 

The movie was so refreshing that I wonder if there is a market for books with middle-aged protagonists. 

My research led me to a book called Fleishman Is in Trouble. 

The Book 

Fleishman Is In Trouble is about a middle-aged man who is finally free from his nightmare marriage and is ready for a life of online dating. 

The book came about from an unusual incident when its author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, went for lunch with a friend.

Her friend, a male, dropped a bombshell at lunch, “ I’m getting a divorce. I have already moved out. The alimony has worked out. The child support worked out too.” Then he took out his phone and showed Taffy how difficult it is for somebody of their age to be on dating apps. 

Taffy’s mind was blown. Not because she didn’t think she was “that’ old, she was going through her struggles of being in the ‘invisible’ age group. She was stupefied because she had never seen anything like this. 

She thought, if I had never seen anything like it, other people may not too. So it might be a good story.

So she left the luncheon and called her editor at GQ and said, “I have to do a story about dating apps.” 

“You know, you don’t usually sound like a clueless New Jersey housewife in her middle age, but right now, you do.” Her editor explained to her that the GQ readers know all about dating apps, and they’re not going to risk their reputation as a hip magazine on a 40-year-old woman writing about dating apps.

That pissed Taffy off.

The Author

Taffy Brodesser-Akner didn’t intend to become a journalist. She went to film school. While working her way through the curriculum, she showed a couple of things to her professors, who said, “This isn’t good.” She figured she was not going to make it into screenwriting.

So, right after college, she got a job in journalism because that was a thriving industry (You are meant to laugh here!).

She kept telling herself; I am not a good creative writer, I am not a good screenwriter, nor a good journalist, but I should be happy that I am having a go at it. 

Eventually, journalism made her a good storyteller.

And she knew when she found a good story. A middle-aged man finding his way through dating apps was a good story. 

Straight after the call with her editor, Tassy pulled over into a restaurant. She sat down and wrote the first ten pages of her first novel.

Now the question was how to write the rest of the novel.

The Quote 

While still grappling with the idea, Taffy Brodesser-Akner saw something on Twitter by the magazine writer Chris Jones that blew her mind:

If you write 500 words four days a week, on the fifth day you revise those 2,000 words, and on Monday you start over again, in a year you will have finished a book. 

She wrote the first 30 pages in one month. In six months, she finished her novel. 

It was published in June 2019 and instantly became a Sunday Times and The New York Times bestseller.

She said she wrote the first 30 pages in one month.

Takeaway

The middle-aged demographic is on the rise. According to 2005 statistics, the average age in Western World is predominantly 40+. Just in last night’s news, it was mentioned that according to recent statistics, 50% of the Australian population is more than 50 years old. 

Books with middle-aged protagonists are doing well. Apart from Fleishman Is In Trouble, there are many more which are doing well.

Four days of writing and one day of editing is a brilliant strategy. You can change the number of words to your capacity. It can be applied to NaNoWriMo. Write 2000 words a day for 3 days, edit on the 4th day, then start again.

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