Once in a while, you may get stuck—classic writer’s block.  I’ll act as your handler, like an athlete’s coach, and do whatever it takes to get you going again.  Sometimes, that means just forgetting about the project for a while—take the day, week or even month off.  Other times, we may have to speak briefly, every day for a week, and then take the day, week or even month off.  If you stay committed, we’ll pull you through whatever obstacle comes up. Your engaging me in the first place makes a strong statement to yourself about your commitment: my presence in the project symbolizes your original and abiding determination, doesn’t it? 

The reasons to write
And when commitment falters, I’ll help you remember all the reasons why you want to finish.  In no particular order these can include the following: money and fame, self-satisfaction, self-creation, making a social contribution, having your “say” at length, leaving something to the grandchildren or to future generations, proving to a friend that you could do it after all, and so forth. If your main reason for writing, however, is making a financial or celebrity killing, probably you should work with someone else.  You’ve got as much chance achieving those kinds of success in book writing as you do playing the lottery; it happens, but rarely.

Overcoming content blocks
Often writers find that they don’t know enough about their own subject, even when they know a lot. Even if you’ve spent decades on your subject, the discipline of giving book-length form to your ideas forces you to learn more about it. Perhaps you need only learn some amplifying details; or you may have to work up an entire sub-discipline or an allied discipline that’s new to you.

I’ll help you see where you need to read articles or books to fill gaps or thin places that need additional enrichment and substance. You may need to do some fairly original field research, perhaps, which may drive you to develop better interviewing skills. In writing my own books I got a great boost from learning to use the telephone the way reporters do, to tap the knowledge of experts, even famous ones. I find that interacting with intelligent, knowledgeable people also gives birth to my own original ideas and brings new energy. This may work for you, or perhaps we’ll come up with something else.

Learning better technique
For the first-time book writer (or even the experienced one), literary or verbal technique is never good enough.  No matter how good a writer one may have been before, there remains much to learn, first to achieve an acceptable product, and later to achieve a shining one.  Years ago, the greatest poet of the English Eighteenth Century, Alexander Pope, described excellent writing as:

Nature to advantage dress’d.

What oft was thought but ne’er so well-express’d. 

Whose Truth convinc’d at sight we find,

That gives us back the image of our Mind.

We’ve all heard that everything worth saying has been said. One has also heard that there are “only” ten big ideas or perhaps “a hundred.”  While the information in anyone’s book has by definition a certain novelty (we are all different persons, after all), much of what we have to say is not blindingly original.  As the saying goes, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” 

Accordingly, much of our creativity goes into saying or suggesting, pointing toward or surrounding the truth we have made our own.  And much more of our creativity goes into making our truth compellingly persuasive—first by making readers receptive and then by moving them to embrace what we have seen. The art of persuasion (rhetoric) is a lot of what we need to write a good book and none of us knows it well enough. 

It’s easier to see what we don’t know if someone else looks at our writing. I’ll help you fill in gaps in your writing techniques.  I’ll remind you of what you may have forgotten and teach new ways for dressing “Nature” to such advantage that readers will be moved to use your ideas in the world.

Back to grammar?
Sometimes, a new book writer has to be reminded of such a lowly subject as grammar.  I’ve coached successful Ph.D.’s from many fields whom I have had to remind about subjects and verbs needing to agree in number. A recent client, a high-powered business consultant with two master’s degrees and a doctorate, sent a draft book proposal that repeatedly said “the client needs to be sure of their subject.”  This is a smart person but one who’s professional and business writing has allowed the sort of sloppiness that an Author must avoid.  No new book-writer need be embarrassed about going back to school to refresh his understanding of the basics.

Vocabulary
Other new book writers, however successful in their professions, may need to increase their functional written vocabularies.  A few thousand words get us by in face-to-face contacts and great executives often distinguish themselves by the bare simplicity of their speaking style.  Professionals lean on their discipline’s particular jargon in their work.  But readers won’t read over-simple prose for very long. Style that’s good for a memo fails in a chapter.  And unless you’re writing a book just for specialists, jargon can infuriate, bore, or disgust readers.

Readers don’t want fancy talk; they want to know they’re in the company of someone literate, whose speech has the liveliness and precision that one naturally expects of Authors we take seriously. They want variety of word choice on the page but not what usage authority Fowler called “elegant variation”—one can’t say “spade” ten times in a paragraph without offending but substituting a distraction like “long-handled digging implement” displeases, too.

Often, I help previously non-literary writers sharpen their word choice (diction) by coming to understand the contrasting potencies of those English words derived from Romance language roots and those derived from Germanic language roots. The plain realities of everyday life and speech in English express themselves in Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) words:  “spade” is a good example, also “apple,” “desk,” “light,” and “dark.” There are plenty of good Latinate words too: “romance,” “marriage,” “parliament” and so on.  The particular greatness of English is this dual vocabulary—two linguistic traditions fused by the Norman Conquest.   Latinate words lend themselves to technical or scientific uses: many terms associated with computers are of this kind: “computer” itself, “program,” “menu,”  “suites,” and “processor.”  Many computer terms with more homey resonance, however, derive from Anglo-Saxon roots: “crash,” “download,” and the terrible but intriguing expression, “hacker.” 

While most of us get by with a small work-a-day vocabulary, Shakespeare used 60,000 words and both consolidated and developed our uniquely fertile, dual linguistic heritage. The effective writer has an enlarging vocabulary not because he uses it all in any given work, but because it gives him choices and sharpens his thought and his expression. It lets him say what he means with precision and force.

Tone
As your vocabulary enriches, you’ll refine your control over tone—the level and quality of your voice as it speaks on paper.  Those Latinate words can help you elevate your tone—giving your voice authority (Latinate word) and inviting your reader to join you on a disinterested intellectual plane (all Latinate words) from which you can judiciously survey the truth of propositions (more Latinate words).  You can vary your tone with Anglo-Saxon words, so the reader knows you’re someone like him, a regular person, a man or woman who can be trusted: “someone,” “like,” “him,” “man,” “woman,” “who,” can” and  “trust” are all Anglo-Saxon words.

To give your prose drive (Anglo-Saxon word) you’ll want to eliminate adjectives, often substituting verbs.  You’ll need to decide how colloquial to make your tone, at every moment. Do you say, “I want to see how much progress she is making?” or “I want to see how she’s doing?”  When and why?  You’ll become ever more conscious of technical devices to control reader response.  You’ll practice and I’ll help you master the use of telling details and words to express them: in this particular passage, do you need an image, metaphor, simile, or symbol? Have you been concrete enough or too concrete?

Sentence patterns
To get your message across, if you’re like most book-writers, you’ll have to become more sophisticated—not just about individual word choice but also sentence structure.  In professional correspondence or reports, a certain linguistic bleakness is standard, perhaps even useful. But if you’re going to hold a reader’s attention for hundreds of pages, you’d better learn how to vary your sentences: grammatically simple, compound, complex; short, long, fragmentary; discursive or periodic, and so forth. It’s back to the grammar and style books again, isn’t it?  Only this time you’re a grown-up and you have a great goal. In a particular passage, do you save your main point for the end of the sentence, as is usually most emphatic?  Are you overusing the Ciceronian triplet: “of the people, by the people, for the people?”  Many writers, assuming the mantle of Authorship for the first time, fall into making three parallel phrases when only two ideas are needed: “tall, strong, and mighty,” they say, when merely “tall and strong” will do.

Mastering narrative techniques
Perhaps the most useful new techniques you’ll need to get your message across are narrative ones: summary (he slept for twenty years), scene (and then woke up in an oak forest, the birds chattering all around him) and dialogue (“Yipes!” he said).  Particularly if you’re writing for an audience of general readers, as opposed to specialists, you’ll want to get some mastery of these devices. Among other things, that means tuning your ear to the point where you can write dialogue that sounds like real people speaking.  However, recording real speech onto paper will not do; your reader will not be entertained by lots of  “well’s” “mmm’s” and “ya know’s?”). 

Sticking together: co-herence
Book-writing forces you to be or seem “coherent” over the course of many chapters and pages.  Do the parts (words, sentences, sections, chapters) together (co) stick (here)?  Are they in the right order—logical, chronological, general to specific, specific to general, and how do you make the reader comfortable when you shift the way you order parts? When you go from expounding the logical implications of a general proposition to telling a story, are you smooth? 

Someone said the whole art lies in the single word “transitions.”  Transitions won’t give your prose color or force, but they create intelligibility and help your reader follow your words to whatever new subjects or arguments you want. I remember one client, a major scientist, who liked to list his points, number them, and just lay them out like that: l., 2., 3….  The technique worked with captive students or awed professional colleagues.  But when he set out to write his scientific biography for the general public, he soon saw he had to become Mr. Smooth, tying paragraphs and chapters together.