I’ll group my advice into three main categories: general philosophy, tools, and journey.
But first, and most important: Make sure you have the time to write a book. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been able to secure jobs at think tanks and research organizations where writing is my job, and working on a book is considered a contribution, not a distraction. Not everybody is so lucky. Ideally, get a fellowship or a job or a benefactor or a sabbatical where you can write, for months, uninterrupted. But if this is not possible, and you still want to write a book, make sure you can carve out extended periods on a very regular basis.
Writing a book is exhausting, draining work, and it takes time to do it well. There’s no substitute for just putting in the time. If it comes too easily, and you write it too fast, you’re doing something wrong (probably just writing things that are too obvious or repetitive).
I should add that this advice is more focused on writing research-oriented, non-fiction books, particularly the tools and journey part. But I hope anybody thinking about writing a book will get something out of this.
Philosophy
Here are my principles to guide your journey.
Have something important you really want to figure out.
Writing a book is a long, arduous, and mostly lonely journey. If you’re not super-motivated by an intense curiosity to know everything about your subject, your energy will flag. And if you’re not convinced that what you’re doing is important, your energy will flag. So make sure you’re passionate about your subject at the start. Otherwise, the days will get really, really long, really, really fast.
Acknowledge that writing a book is a meandering, circular journey that progresses too slowly.
I think of writing a book as climbing a mountain by following a meandering path that circles the mountain, slowly elevating its traveler until it eventually reaches the top. The journey feels circular, because you see the same views over and over. But each time, you see more and more. At the top, you finally see it all, and how it all connects. It might seem more direct to climb straight to the top. But that is not the path. If you try, you will fall to the ground.
Just write. Don’t worry about getting it perfect. All writing is re-writing.
Here’s a secret for avoiding writer’s block: Just write. Sometimes, what you write will be terrible, but writing it down helps you get it out of your system. I write to figure out what I think. Once I know what I think, I know what I want to write. And once I have something to work with, I can revise and revise. All writing is re-writing anyway. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can just get something down on the page and not be a perfectionist. Save perfectionism for the final stages of editing.
Know what to leave out. You’re not writing a book about everything. Know your contribution.
Writing a book demands passion for your subject. But passion for your subject creates a loss of perspective. If you’re doing it right, everything seems interesting and important! And once you’ve dug into a subject and done the research, there’s a strong tendency to want to put it all in (look at me, I’ve done all this work!). But remember you’re the passionate one. If you put too much in, readers will lose interest. Keep the book focused, and moving forward, and you’ll keep your readers. Know what you want your contribution to be, and it’ll be far easier to make it. And if you want to show off all the research you’ve done, put that in the endnotes, or some online appendix.
When you get stuck, that’s part of the process. If it’s too easy, you’re doing it wrong.
When I write a book, I’m constantly getting stuck. I feel intense frustration and annoyance in these moments. I have to constantly remind that this is actually good. If everything came too smoothly, it would mean that everything I was writing was totally obvious. Stuck means I’ve hit on something that’s not obvious, that demands more thought. It means maybe my first instinct wasn’t right, and I need to find a new approach. This is how a book goes from obvious to original: By getting stuck repeatedly.
Don’t be afraid to seek feedback. Better to get criticism when you can still fix your mistakes.
Every author is sensitive to criticism. After all, when you’ve put so much of yourself into your writing, it’s hard not to take any shortcomings personally. But if something’s off with your book (and hey, nothing’s perfect), you want to know before you publish it. So, subject yourself to feedback by getting people you trust and respect to read your work. You want to get feedback from two types of people: general readers, and experts. General readers will tell you whether they can relate to and follow the writing. Experts will tell you what you got wrong. Both types of feedback are crucial. Timing of feedback also matters. Too early, and the feedback is useless, because you’ll be revising so many more times. Too late in the process, and it’s, well, too late.
Accept imperfections. But not too many.
The most frustrating stage of the writing process is towards the end, when the ticking deadline clock forces you to confront the limitations of your book. This is the moment when all your focus turns to the pieces that you haven’t nailed down, the questions you haven’t been able to answer. Do the best you can, but don’t be too harsh with yourself. No book is perfect. If your book is interesting, it will say something new and different. If it says something new and different, it will go against what somebody else thinks. If your book is at all successful, you will attract scrutiny, and critics who find the holes in your arguments. If what you wrote was obvious and indisputable, nobody (including you) would find it interesting in the first place. Somebody would have already written it long ago. And if everything in your subject area were obvious and clear, nobody would be studying it.
Tools
The right tool for the right job. It’s a cliche for a good reason I found three tools essential, and a fourth valuable.
Zotero
Since I’m primarily relying on academic sources, I need a place where I can store all the academic journal articles I read, reports, books (to the extent I have them in electronic form), and most importantly, all my notes on all of them. Zotero is amazing for this. It interfaces with all the academic journals and JSTOR through a web plugin, and so you can download and store journal articles and all their relevant bibliographic details with one click (which can usually download the pdf, if you’re logged in). You can also store book bibliographic information in the same way. This all comes in super-handy later when you’re putting together a bibliography (Zotero as a great plug-in for MS Word and Libre Office, which is the only thing I would use those writing programs for). But most essential with Zotero is you can instantly access all my notes on books and articles, and make them searchable in a wide variety of customizable ways, including using subject-matter tags. You can also store interviews and images, and as long as you tag and label them, they’ll be easy to find and search. In short, Zotero serves as an incredible gathering tool for meatier stuff (academic articles, reports, books, etc.), and a great way to keep and organize notes for later.
Pinboard
Pinboard is a web bookmarking service. It’s great for saving news articles, tweets, and other web-based stuff, and has a very useful tagging function. It’s super-useful for when you are reading the news, and come across something relevant to what your book. You can save a small description of the piece, or a few key quotes for later, and you can also search your notes later, too. It’s also helpful when you are doing research, and want to keep what you come across for later. Pinboard doesn’t have as many advanced features as Zotero, which is much better for keeping detailed notes and storing pdfs and other documents. But Pinboard is much better for casual finds while you are doing other stuff, and you can get an app to save articles to pinboard on your phone, which is super-handy (Zotero is a bit clunkier on mobile). In short, Pinboard is a great light-weight collector of things you find on the web that you want to keep for later.
Scrivener
Scrivener is an absolute must for writing a book. I don’t know how I ever wrote a book in Microsoft Word (I once did, it’s true), or how anybody does now that Scrivener exists in the world. What I love about Scrivener is that allows you to break your writing into labelled sections, and then move those sections around. This also makes it super-easy to move back and forth among different pieces of your document, and compare different passages, and have a working map of your entire manuscript available at all times. And when you are writing a book, you absolutely need to be able to do this. The other thing I love about Scrivener is the ability to keep sections I temporarily cut, and store multiple drafts in one document, along with any other relevant notes or research. It is also amazing for outlining, again because you can move all the pieces around, and it has a bunch of ways to view your constituent pieces, and organize them, depending on how you work best. I now write everything in Scrivener. I’m writing this article in Scrivener.
ProWritingAid
At some point, it becomes really hard to edit your own writing. Or at the very least, it’s helpful to have a little guidance in doing so. When it comes to the polishing stage, you want to make sure you cut all the flab out of the writing, and make sure everything is tight. I found ProWritingAid to be really helpful. It’s basically a smart editor that helps you take useless words out of your writing, suggests more concise alternatives, and helps you identify places where the writing drags — in addition to being a very good grammar checker. It also helps you avoid cliches, and too much repetition of the same word. Some of the suggestions make no sense (it’s AI, after all, not real intelligence, and doesn’t take into account your style). But I found it super-helpful a polishing tool — especially when I lost the ability to see my writing afresh.
The Journey (a roadmap)
The journey is long, but it’s helpful to think of it as having phases. These phases bleed into one another and overlap. But it’s good to know what to expect, and know the ups and downs if this is the first time you are writing a book.
Phase 1: Gathering
The first stage is the gathering stage. This is your excuse for reading widely. You want to have a sense of what is out there, so you know where your contribution potentially lies, and what you can build on, respond to, etc. But this is not just exploration. What you gather and harvest now will determine the quality of the book you write, because it will shape how you think about your subject and what notes you have handy when you’re in the thick of the writing (and don’t want to slow down to research something). And do take notes. You may think you’ll remember everything. You won’t. So take good notes, and be sure to make them searchable electronically and ideally tagged. (See the above discussion on tools)
Phase 1 is the most fun stage. Everything is new and exciting, and deadlines are far away.
Phase 2: Write, organize, write, gather some more
At a certain point, it’s time to just take the plunge and start writing. Don’t let the blank page intimidate you. Write freely and wildly, just getting your thoughts down into pixels and megabytes. Writing is the best way to figure out what you think. And once you get into the flow, you’ll start seeing connections across your notes. At this point, it’s really helpful to outline and re-outline constantly, then write some more (without worrying about the quality or clarity of your prose). The shape and structure of your book will probably change a lot at this point, as the individual pieces begin to come into focus. And as you do this, you’ll begin to see what’s missing, and what else you need to gather. It’s a highly iterative process. This is where Scrivener really shines as a tool, I’ve found.
At this point, it’s often helpful to develop one or two key ideas into essays that you can publish somewhere. One, you want to put ideas out there so you can start getting feedback on the; Two, you want to put a marker down that these are your ideas (so somebody else doesn’t come up with them first, and claim them); and three, a book publisher might notice your essay and see it as a potential book. At the very least, it will be helpful when you send out your book proposal
Phase 2 is a little less fun. Here it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and hard to pull things into focus. Now things feel like more work.
Phase 3: Think, refine, and sell your proposal
Now it’s time to figure out what your book is really about. It’s also a good time to sell your book to a publisher. Some people like to wait until the book’s closer to being done. But one good thing about signing a contract at this point is it gives you a deadline, which is really, really helpful in just getting the book done.
At this point, you want want to have your elevator pitch, your two-sentence description that tells the world what your big idea is and why it matters. It may change over time, as you write. But you need to be able to boil the takeaway down to a title and a few sentences, or else no reputable publisher will want to buy your book. You need to figure out what your unique contribution is, and what your audience is, or else no reputable publisher will want to buy your book. And most importantly, you need to put some constraints on your future self, so you know the book you’re writing and stay on focus.
Phase 3 is really hard, because now you have to make some serious choices. If you’re going to do this, you need to know what you’re doing, and commit yourself to it. This is the stage where you truly take the plunge.
Phase 4: Write. Then Re-Write. Then Re-Write again
Celebrate. Now you’ve got the contract, and you’ve got your work cut out for you, even if the deadline is haunting you like a hovering in-law. Now comes the fun part again. You can start writing again expansively, and even do some more gather
My process is to start writing chapters expansively, on one chapter at a time. Give it a few good revisions, and then move onto the next one. By the time you’re back to the first chapter, you’ve got enough distance from it to see it fresh again, and what pieces belong in it from elsewhere in the book.
Ideally, you’ll work through all the chapters from start to end five or six times, doing three or four revisions of each chapter at each go around. And yes, it should take you 15-20 revisions of each chapter before you’re satisfied. Yes, 15-20. In the process you’ll move stuff around, cut pieces out, probably even write whole chapters that wind up on the cutting room floor. Remember, just because you researched it and find it interesting, doesn’t mean it fits in the book. Everything has to work together.
Towards the end of this stage (ideally about 3-4 months away from your deadline) is when you should get feedback — again, you want enough time to be able to incorporate that feedback, and remember, sometimes people take a few weeks to get you feedback.
Phase 5: The final push
The final month is when you will go insane. you’ll struggle with the sense that your book is not that good, even after all that work. First, what was new and exciting to you now seems obvious. You’ve been marinating in it for too long. What once seemed fresh is now stale.
Worse, you’re spending all your time on the weak parts of your book -- the things you haven’t nailed down, the questions that you can’t really answer.
Leave yourself a month at the end to rally hone the prose. Here is where you can take the luxury of really making the prose sharp. Unless you are an exceptionally tight writer, you can probably cut the verbiage by 15%. Keep your reader in mind. If you can deliver the same information with 85% of the words, your reader will be grateful. Also: Slow writing loses readers. Fast writing keeps them. This is where ProWritingAid came in handy for me. It helped to serve as an external editor.
One good trick for seeing your prose fresh is viewing it out in different fonts, or viewing it in different editing programs. Anything to give you a fresh look at something that has become way too familiar to your mind.
Then, make peace with the deadline. You can revise forever, and no book is perfect. But it’s the best you can do.
A few other pieces of advice regarding productivity
I also thought tons about my own personal productivity while writing. Here’s what I learned.
You can only do so much in a day.
Unless you are a machine, you probably have at most five hours per day of genuine writing in you. So make sure those five hours are as productive as they can be.
Some days are better than others, and that’s okay.
Like many folks, I find that when I haven’t had a productive day, my instinct is to keep pushing harder that day. But generally, I’ve found that when I’m not having a great writing day, I’m just not having a great writing day, and it’s better to just cut my losses and rest for the next day. Not all days are
Take lots of breaks.
I recommend working for about an hour, then taking at least a 20 minute break — get some fresh air, meditate, do something fun, whatever. But don’t go on social media as a break! Especially in the final stretch, which is the hardest, take a break from social media. It will still be there when you get back. And if people miss you, they’ll be grateful for your return.
Take care of yourself.
The usual bromides are exercise, eat well, get enough sleep. Don’t skimp on these things. You want to be at your peak performance when you are in writing mode. Writing is hard work. You wouldn’t wear yourself down if you were about to run a marathon. Writing is like running a marathon, day after day.
Avoid social media.
This should be obvious, but social media is very distracting. When I was in the final three-month stretch of writing my book, I turned off all social media, and went into my zen writing space. It helped that I publicly announced I was going off Twitter, as a form of commitment. Honestly, I kind of loved it as an excuse to be off of social media for a while.
Say no to (almost) everything else.
The invitations won’t stop even though you are writing a book. You might be tempted to accept most invitations (for interviews, coffees, conferences, etc.). But keep in mind the principle of essentialism here. If you’re taking the time to write a book, you want to make sure you are going to write the best book you possibly can. That means letting everything else go for a while, and only saying yes to the things that are either essential because they are restorative (like time with a good friend, or relaxing weekend getaway) or because they will help you with the book you are writing (like a conference where you can present your work and get valuable feedback from peers). Some opportunities may feel like they are special, but most will arise again. I also found this liberating — to be able to focus on one thing, and be able to say no with a good excuse.
Writing a book is a demanding, grueling, exhilarating journey. But it is totally worth it — if you have something new to contribute.
The world is full of books, and most spend most of their life on library shelves collecting dust. But a few books change the world, and many more change people’s lives. Writing a book is a demanding, grueling, exhilarating journey. I loved it, even though I sometimes hated it. I would do it again, and I’m sure I will. But only when I feel like I have something new to contribute.
At a personal level, I loved the challenge of writing a book, and the zen focus of having a giant, sprawling mess that I was slowly giving order to. It was a total “flow” experience. And having the right philosophy and tools certainly helped. Plus, I learned a ton. Nothing forces you to learn a subject like having to explain it to others, through writing.
At a societal level, I felt like I was making a contribution. Whenever I work on a project, I’m always thinking to myself: “how am I adding unique value to the world?” I admit, I have a unique luxury to be in a position to even think that, and I am totally grateful for it. If writing a book is a vanity project, it’s not worth doing. Just keep a journal. But if you genuinely feel like you have something to say, and you are ready for an unpredictable but ultimately rewarding ride, do it. You’ll be glad you did.
Lee Drutman is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015), winner of the American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award, given for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.”
