You’re writing a book and you’re excited about the idea you dreamed up. How do you get from idea to manuscript?

Writing Tip for Today: Let’s discuss the distance from your ideas to creating the actual manuscript.

Be Practicing

When I coach writers, I first want to know how much actual writing they’ve done on their idea. Let’s face it, some people like to talk about writing more than they like to write. Writing for publication is hard and takes a lot of practice.

That said, others are dedicated to the craft and practice writing all sorts of different genres or categories. If you’re one of these, try not to spread yourself too thin. Experiment but let your tastes in writing guide you to a category where you feel most passionate.

What do you love to read? Let your reading habits help you gravitate toward what you write. I love reading memoirs and coming of age stories. Those two categories fuel my writing too. Now and then I’ll write a poem, short story or nonfiction article. But these require different skills to be publishable. So I practice.

Be Prepared

Do you know whether your idea is book worthy? Writers often make the mistake of thinking that every topic or idea deserves book-length treatment. But sometimes, you aren’t prepared to write a book about a narrow topic and you’ll end up filling it with fluff to stretch the narrative.

I’ve written before about my Russian Nesting Dolls concept—that every idea has a kernel that can be stated in one sentence. That’s the innermost doll. As the dolls get bigger, you add more depth and word count. The outermost doll represents a book or series.

If you believe your idea has enough “meat” to fill a book, try writing shorter first. If you can write an article or essay and you’ve left a lot of detail out, go ahead and expand the idea to include more story or info. On the other hand, if your article, story or essay pretty much says it all, I wouldn’t keep trying to stretch it unless I was considered an expert in the field.

If you believe your idea has enough “meat” to fill a book, try writing shorter first.

Be Creating

Writers are creative types—if you’re like me, you have more writing ideas than time to write them. I keep an Idea File to help me remember these ideas. Some I’ll never actually flesh out into a manuscript. Others will niggle at me until I give in and write about it.

If you’re keeping a good schedule of BIC (butt in chair), you’ll be both practicing and refining what form the idea should take. This habit encourages creative ideas to keep coming. It’s only when we let our writing life go fallow that we get rusty and the ideas stop coming.

I try to write every day. If that’s impractical, set a doable schedule for yourself and show up. Keep practicing, try to determine what form your idea should take and experiment with different lengths and genres. A writer’s creativity is a precious thing—don’t let yours go to waste.