The most important advice I’ve ever ignored is that of book outlining. The idea is, before writing that book, build a solid outline of each chapter and the ultimate flow of your book. It’s  great idea in practice. But, in reality, my ideas for a book tend to percolate into raw writing and not macro overview material. With two of the four books I’m working on, I eschewed the outline completely, leaving me to write as a “pantser” or by “the seat of my pants.” Writing on-the-fly like that has it’s benefits, but it can kill your book’s flow if it’s not all in one session. The question, then, is should you make an outline for your book?

Yes, and yes. Even if you’re writing chapters and can’t help yourself, still keep building up an outline. It’s going to help you understand the overall plan of your book, while giving you prompts later (when the words aren’t flowing). The outline serves as the bones of your work (when it really does need bones). Without this skeleton, the writing tends to lack a cohesive narrative and structure. And, trust me, if you’re having to rearrange chapters after writing them, you make want to give up or you’ll be in the edit stage forever.

What does an outline look like? Here’s a very basic template you might use:

Title Ideas
Title 1
Title 2

a) Introduction
-> My authority
-> Why this book is important

1) Chapter 1
-> Guts

2) Chapter 2
-> More guts

b) Conclusion
-> In summary, this is what I've been talking about

Just put that into a text file and start building your book. There are better ways and better tools to do this, but that is enough. it doesn’t have to have fancy lines and 3D graphics. You’ll write more than two chapters, of course. The conclusion won’t be so dry and hokey (I hope). And, the title names will build on themselves. For one book idea I worked on, I had more than 10 titles by the time an outline took the shape of a book. So far, my book output looks like this.

So, please make an online. Try to make one at least. You’ll find that it helps.