{"id":13981,"date":"2014-02-07T02:00:48","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T09:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=13981"},"modified":"2014-01-09T16:10:51","modified_gmt":"2014-01-09T23:10:51","slug":"a-writers-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/a-writers-time\/","title":{"rendered":"A Writer&#8217;s Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There I was with a nice advance from a New York publisher to write a book, and there was only one tiny problem, which I did not discuss with the publisher. I&#8217;d never written a book and didn&#8217;t know how. I knew how to write, to edit, even to publish, but authoring? Help!<\/p>\n<p>Help came in the form of a little book (read it in an evening; read it again the next evening) that spelled out precisely the task at hand: how to write a book. I got innumerable good things from Atchity&#8217;s counsel, but the main three probably were these:<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Time is everything in the labor of writing. Organize your time, and the writing will have a chance to organize itself. I used most of Atchity&#8217;s tips except the taking of many mini-vacations (I didn&#8217;t have time).<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Use 5 x 8 cards! Salvation. Every idea, every separable quote, every item from the literature I was researching, each went onto its own card. Organizing the eventual 1,800 cards into piles was defining the chapters; subpiles defined the sections; sequence within the subpiles defined the sequence of the day&#8217;s writing. This was THE handle without which I would have floundered for months.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Define in a sentence what the book is about. Searching for that sentence organizes your thinking; using it organizes your writing. Revising consists of removing everything that isn&#8217;t in support of that sentence. <\/p>\n<p>If this review sounds like a burble of gratitude, that&#8217;s because it is.<\/p>\n<div class='ctx-module-container ctx_default_placement ctx-clearfix'><\/div><span class=\"ctx-article-root\"><!-- --><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to write a book<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13981"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13984,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions\/13984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}