Say you’re writing a book titled How to Succeed with Body Language. To start chapter 1, you will probably want to convey the biggest problem most people face. But if you’re like most writers, you’ll find that your chosen problem statement comes with a lot of baggage you feel must go with it – not just an explanation but an example, definition, context, caveats, ramifications, a touch of color.

How do you convey not only your main point accurately but do so while engaging and orienting the reader with minor ancillary points?

To illustrate how you might include all this information without overloading paragraph one, let’s assume chapter 1 has the following message: Ignorance of your own body language can make you an easy victim for other people. Let’s also assume you feel it is imperative to include a definition of body language, the situations in which body language matters, suggestions on how much a person has at risk, and an example to make your point concrete.

Scale, scope, description, importance—you want all that right up front. So what do you do? If you try to put all of those things in one paragraph, you’ll get tangled in your burden of prose—not to mention get sideways with confused readers.

There are three ways I know of to tackle this challenge. All three require deferring some content to highlight other content. I call this the art (and craft) of deferral. Before you start drafting your lead, sort through all the apparently essential material and ask: What can I leave until later

Here are three ways I approach it:

1. Oversimplify your point and introduce caveats later. That is, start with a sweeping generalization and, in later paragraphs, reshape or hedge the distortions with qualifications.

Say you begin: “People who don’t pay attention to their body language get taken advantage of by others. Take the example of Betty Brown, a widow, who goes on a Monday morning to Joe Green’s used car lot. Her agreeable smile signals to Joe that he can quote her a premium price, and that she will surrender readily….”

The lead overstates. Agreeable smiles don’t always signal surrender during negotiation. But the oversimplification has the virtue of capturing the reader’s attention with its clarity. In a later paragraph, you can hedge: “To be sure, smiles don’t always convey meaning quite so clearly….” And then you explain the limitations of your assertion. (Journalists use this technique so often, they call it the “to be sure” paragraph.)

2. Choose just a piece of the message to start. After you’ve made your partial point, you can later explain that the subpoint is actually part of a larger message.

So you could begin another chapter. “Just by folding his arms as the neighborhood toughs approached, Jason Murdoch gave the wrong signal…”

The lead uses a specific instance of risky behavior in the face of aggressive adolescent men. After a couple of paragraphs of detailing the woe Jason brings on himself – which could make a riveting opening – you have given yourself breathing room to make your main point. “Jason’s use of his arms is just one example of how body language can put you at risk.”

3. Tell readers upfront you have a complicated or multi-part message. Then state one piece of the message at a time. Fill in the puzzle step by step.

“The ignorance of body language can, in four different ways, put you at a disadvantage to other people…”

The lead is not very enticing. It sounds like you’re going to take a dry approach to the topic. But its clarity and directness have a lot of appeal. And readers love clarity.

In any case, before you begin writing, think about how you break your package of must-have material into smaller, bite-size pieces. The goal is to guide your reader at a measured and enjoyable pace through your writing. You don’t have to cram all the content into a first paragraph, no matter how complicated it is. Defer some of the meal until later. The more you can defer, the sharper you can make your initial point.

In one of my interviews, I talked with Tom Niergarth, head of New Product Commercialization at Herman Miller, Inc., the subject of the book. I was curious about how new product development was managed. Tom told me that Herman Miller engineers mark development milestones with documents called “deliverables.” A series of must-do development tasks has been translated into a series of engineering documents. This is the key: Only the delivery of the specified documents constitute accomplishment. A lot of furious activity does not.

I realized the Herman Miller chair-development process provided a structure for running all kinds of creative processes, including the creative process of book development. The completion of deliverables requires finishing a discrete and important piece of a multi-step project. Each deliverable gives tangible evidence of progress. No document, no accomplishment, no pats on the back.

The deliverables approach is remarkably similar to the “paper trail” approach I recommend for books. Each piece in the paper trail marks a development milestone. A marketing positioning deliverable at Herman Miller, for example, is akin to the  “positioning journal” I recommend for book development. See my earlier post.

I have since realized something else. I once talked with authors about a book’s “creative process” as if the emphasis should be put on “creative,” not on “process.” I had it backwards. The emphasis should fall on “process.” Niergarth’s point: Clarity in process requires clarity in thinking.  Clarity in thinking yields clarity in product.  That’s just as true for nonfiction book development as for furniture development.

Are you a creative person or a process person? If you’re an author, you’re both. When people talk about writing being a “craft,” I believe they are referring to the repeatable process you use to deliver great results.  Creativity still remains key, although it remains not fully controllable. But process is something anyone can learn, can learn to master, and can learn to follow reliably and with control. That’s what we all need when facing the daunting task of writing a book.

What do you address in a journal? The answers to some big questions: What is my book’s position in the market? How is it different from other books? How will I approach my subject to appeal to my core readers? Who are my core readers, anyway?

In December 2008, I began journaling about the positioning of my upcoming book, Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company. Before going beyond the stage of clarifying a message and a table of contents, I wanted to take a shot at specifying where the book would stand on the bookstore shelf.

I knew from the start that I wanted to tell the story of how Herman Miller, Inc., became a role model for corporate sustainability. I intended to chronicle the ups and downs of people in the trenches. But I could go many ways with the story, and I needed to “think out loud” about the best direction.

As an example of what goes into a positioning journal, below I have pasted some actual text, in the hopes you get an idea of how to create a journal for yourself. You can use several tricks to get yourself started. One that I use is to imagine I’m writing the text for the book jacket. Here’s what I wrote:

 “Jacket-like copy: This is the true story of the battle by a band of managers at a century-old Midwest manufacturer to run a truly green company. In the late 1980s, in the wake of Exxon Valdez, public disclosure of toxic-release data, and the focus on all things green in the run-up to the 1992 Rio conference, these company insiders were galvanized by events around them to change business as usual. The unlikeliest character, a South Dakota chemical engineer, emerges as the driver/hero who asks why Herman Miller can’t do better. In the process, he and his band not only fulfill the promise of re-designing the company for sustainability; they fulfill their own potential to live up to higher values. [to essentially get people in the corporation to self-actualize per De Pree values]”

This is from a document unchanged since December 2008. (“De Pree” refers to DJ De Pree, the company founder.) The final book departed from what I first wrote. That’s normal. The journal is a starting point. It is an original bearing. It is also a place to write without the pressure of writing “real” text for the proposal. You’re taking practice shots at the basket.

In my journaling, one thing I try to do is flesh out themes on two levels. One theme applies to the topic at hand, which in this case is managing for corporate sustainability. The other, a more deeply buried theme, applies to life in general. Readers always want to learn about the topic they bought the book for. But they give you bonus credit when, in some indirect way, your story resonates in their private lives.

Here’s where I tried to specify the themes:

“This is a story in which expediency, indifference, short-termism, skepticism, and contempt threaten to erode the progress wrought by adherence to values and virtue…but people at the corporation defeat these antagonistic forces.

At a higher level, the story is about people being tested to live up to company values (which includes demonstrating stewardship). Practicing values (through stewardship) is a long-term, holistic process of involving/stewarding/growing human and natural resources. HM struggles to live up to its own founders’ definition, and increasingly a more demanding definition of values as defined by workers and society.

So Merchants of Virtue is more than an inside story of a battle by Herman Miller managers against expediency and indifference and short-term profit; it is a big-picture book about the past, present, and future potential of serious business people to achieve sustainable management – and the huge impact these mgt changes have on design, mfg, marketing, and consumer values. This is a view of the future of responsible business in America….”

You can see that I was struggling. I wanted to stretch myself, try some expansive thoughts. That’s one reason why I call writing in a journal “writing to think.” When you’re writing to think, you can write as if no one else will read your words. You can reach beyond your grasp. You can wing it. Writing with a relaxed and playful mind can lead to some great ideas. This is entirely different from what I call “writing to deliver,” or writing when you’re composing your book proposal or manuscript. At that point, you’re much more focused, and more serious.

Another thing I include in my journaling is an idea or two about how to start the book. What will capture the interest of my target audience at the get-go? Merchants of Virtue is a business story, not a concept or how-to book. Since a story often doesn’t start at the beginning—that is, it doesn’t flow chronologically from start to finish—I puzzled over the best place to have readers enter the action. Here were my thoughts:

“The story emerges from the challenges/trials of people at the bottom or the organization. The designers, both industrial design and organizational design, want to fulfill the ideal of stewardship (or fulfill ideal of designing a community to fulfill its potential). Question for proposal is: Who are the movers and shakers? Who are the “giants” and “roving leaders,” as Max De Pree calls them? Paul Murray? DfE designers responding to Murray?

Top managers may be a side show, or even the antagonists, in that they are challenging their people through ever-higher expectations to fulfill company values per De Pree philosophy (see p81, Tribal Storytelling).

Maybe story begins with Murray’s son getting anaphylactic shock. Murray was supervisor in production, and this was, for him, a personal inciting incident. Story then is about bottom-rung people pushing the sustainability agenda (agenda to “design” a sustainable co) – with blessings from a company culture that matched their own, the culture imbued with values of De Prees and 1960s generation.”

In this case, I was thinking about starting with a flashback, an event from the life of a manager named Paul Murray, a paint chemist who would become the head of all company sustainability efforts. As I got to outlining the book in detail, I didn’t start the book’s main story this way, which was an event from 10 years earlier, but I did turn the event into a prologue.

By the time I was finished, my positioning journal ran over 2,000 words. I did use a lot of the journal material in my book proposal. But the value of the journal was to facilitate early thinking. The various passages were like experimental clay models. I built them quickly without fear of making a mistake. I could shape and reshape them to get them into better and better form.

The journal is an essential step in book development because it helps you further clarify where you’re going. It can seem like an “extra” step. But an extra step that improves clarity is an extra step that eliminates missteps later.

Over the years I’ve learned to see boredom coming on. As it emerges, I stop, make a mental note of the sensation, and recognize that it probably comes from writing something rote. Something uncreative. Something uninspired and mediocre. And if I’m uninspired, not only will I become bored, so will my readers.

My experience is that boredom in writing often comes from regurgitating old thinking, borrowing overused structures, and using cliché wording. It comes from a mind on autopilot. If you’re not adding to the conversation, if you’re not raising the level of insight, if you’re not furthering the journey of discovery, the blanket of boredom rolls over your consciousness like fog rolling onto the seacoast.

Boredom, I find, is easy to confuse with another sensation—that “oh-my-god-writing-is-hard-work” feeling. The hard-work sensation feels somewhat the same, producing a similar reaction: Ugh, I hardly have the willpower to keep at this task. But boredom goes away when you recognize it and make an effort to overcome it. When you aspire to great writing, telling readers something remarkable and appealing, boredom often morphs into passion.

So when you feel bored, don’t feel you’ve hit a dead end. You’ve probably just lapsed into putting tarnished silver on your writing table. Nobody, including you, wants to be served second-class goods. Use the dreaded pall of disinterest to signal that you should switch off autopilot and go one better with your writing. You’ll have more fun, and so will your readers.

The best time to write the pitch is after you’ve finished the proposal. Only at that time have you refined your idea, market positioning, and marketing plans to the greatest possible degree. You are then in peak form to persuade an editor that you have a winner.

Of course, your agent could write the pitch for you. He or she does this all the time. But I suggest you provide a first draft of the language. Your agent can refine it and add his or her two cents.

Once again, for the record, I’m pasting below the language I gave my agent, Helen Rees, at Rees Literary Agency, to sell Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company in 2009.

 “In the late 1980s, a group of young leaders at Herman Miller, Inc., the $1.6 billion Zeeland, Michigan, office-furniture maker, set out to reverse the environmental damage caused by America’s industrial machine. Over 20 years, they rethought and revamped the entire approach to industrial production. They achieved a feat that has eluded most companies today – establishing a definitive pathway to environmental sustainability.

This is the story told in Merchants of Virtue. It is an intriguing tale of a handful of people on a quest to remake a traditional American company. Their experiences reveal insights and lessons for us all – about designing products, jobs, organizations, and our lives.

Other companies claim to have achieved sustainability, but few have done it like Herman Miller. The company relies on the twin bedrocks of Midwest values and globally preeminent industrial design. It is a company featured in business- and design-school case studies worldwide. It wins awards by the basketful, in management, design, manufacturing, and the environment. Its brand is akin to the Porsche of its industry.

To date, no trade book has revealed the inside story of its management. One reason is that Herman Miller previously shied from trumpeting its management successes. CEO Brian Walker and others, however, endorse the writing of Merchants of Virtue: They promise full access to people and to the trove of documents in their huge archive…”

This is unchanged from what I wrote in 2009. To it, Helen added a couple of lines about marketing. Notice that the pitch should hook your editor with your unique idea, how it differs from other books in the market, and why it has so much promise.

Don’t forget to add unique marketing strengths you have—for example, your keynote speaking gigs and prospects for bulk purchases. Editors love to hear about how their business partners—that’s you, the author—can help market the book.

The proposal will sell your book to publishers, but the pitch will get them to read the proposal. It’s worth more than a few hours of effort. If you want to know more about how to write a proposal and pitch, stay tuned for the publication of Stairway to Earth on October 3 in both print and ebook.

“Writer’s block” is like “the flu.” It is a catchall phrase. It is also like the flu in that the only way to get over it is to find what variety of block you actually have.

For the fun of it, I’ve put together a taxonomy of writer’s block. This is partly for fun, but you can see I’m also trying to make a point: Diagnose the block correctly and you can move faster to recovery.

A block can come at any point in writing. The most frustrating block for me is when I think I know what I want to say, and then, after I flail away for a couple of hours, I realize I really don’t. I have to accept that it’s the better part of valor to stop composing, rethink, re-outline, look for fresh words, throw out what I’ve already written, and then restart on the correct path.

Simply trying to bulldoze through writer’s block often ends up being the long way home. You have to first figure out why the block emerged to get around the barrier you’re struggling with. If you have thinker’s block, trying to overcome procrastination won’t do much to get you restarted.

Beyond the ethics of nonfiction writing, Mortensen’s transgression points to a lesson for authors doing research: Don’t use any published document or book as if it were a primary source unless you double-check the facts.

For my own part, once I finish a manuscript, I email facts, quotes, and/or passages to all key sources to check. In my recent book, Merchants of Virtue, over half of the 47 people who responded submitted corrections. Some of the “corrections” struck me as preferences. Others related to minor facts—confirming a mug was plastic and not ceramic. But some related to critical conversations. In one case, despite a painstaking effort to get everything right, I had put quoted words in the mouth of the wrong person.

So what’s your responsibility as a book author? I believe this is a personal decision, and you should make it in advance of writing your book. What will you trust? What should you check?

If you don’t want to make a published mistake, go back to all interview sources and double check quotes, numbers, and the general veracity of what you’ve written.  Find a primary source to corroborate all secondary sources. Remember that even honest people often exaggerate or gloss over inconvenient facts. Double-check quotes even if you have recorded the interviews.

Gay Talese, one of the masters of nonfiction narrative, once said he never records a first interview. Why? Because people so often shoot from the hip, saying things they don’t really mean. What’s the use of a recording? He’ll go back a day or two later and, having taken notes on the trenchant quotes or anecdotes, ask his sources if they really meant it. A verbatim transcription of a source won’t help with getting the facts right if your source tells a tall tale.

When it comes to using secondary sources, remember that even reputable magazines and newspapers err or omit relevant facts (even publications like the New York Times and Fortune). It’s not a matter of dishonesty or carelessness. It’s that reporting free of errors or misimpressions is so hard. If a publication cites a case, a survey, or an expert’s testimony, get the original.

In The One-Minute Meditator, a book I co-authored with David Nichol, MD, we started one chapter with a quote we believed came from Henry David Thoreau: “The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.” A few months after publication, the curator at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods emailed me. He wanted to verify the origin of the quote, because he could not find it in Thoreau’s writings. I had to admit I hadn’t corroborated it. The staffer was able to verify the quote really came from Meister Eckhart, the 13th-century German mystic.

Egg on my face.

The lesson is that when you’re done with your manuscript, check everything.  Bear in mind that during editing, magazines and newspapers often “tidy up” the facts in a way that can leave out caveats. The facts that remain may come from sources who embellished or oversimplified. And the “facts” themselves, once published, take on a life of their own even if they are false: Their only source is endless repetition in cyberspace.

If you build a book on other people’s research and reporting, you’re likely to pay dearly when your “facts” crumble under cross-examination by astute readers.  Better to remain a skeptic about anything you read or were told. Budget time for fact checking to avoid embarrassment.

So what can a writer do to promote freshness during self editing? How can the writer shed the baggage and see his or her text naked? I actually think editors are crucial because writers can’t shed all of their baggage – let alone make up for weaknesses in their craft. But when you have to edit your own material, what are the tricks to induce freshness?

Here’s my list:

1)      Use forgetfulness: An oldie but goodie. Set your text aside. The longer, the better. Overused pet words, favored locutions, poorly wrought anecdotes, mis-ordered of material, and awkward phraseology will stand out. People with poor memories definitely have an advantage here.

2)      Switch perspective: Put yourself in the shoes of a critical colleague, especially a non-writer. Or pretend you’re writing to someone in another country, in another socio-economic bracket. How would this read to someone at the soup kitchen? Or to your mother or neighbor or childhood friend?

3)      Change appearance: Change the type size, font, or screen color of your text. Or print the text in a new way, with different margins or in two columns. Induce unfamiliarity. See my earlier post on font-switching by clicking here. The font change forces me to read every word – and not skip over familiar woodwork.

4)      Switch environments: If you write in an office, edit in your kitchen. Or better yet, edit in someone else’s kitchen. Or in a room or place where you feel a bit out of your element. I print out late drafts and retreat to my deck. Outside, the text somehow reads differently.

5)      Change media: Convert your text to another medium. For starters, read it aloud. Even better, have someone else read it aloud. Or video yourself reading. Or enter key passages into a voice synthesizer – an electronic voice can butcher your words, but it can also show where you butchered the language.

Nothing beats a good editor. But when you don’t have one at your elbow, you can do a better job yourself by neutralizing the effect of over-familiarity. Changing time, place, perspective, appearance, environment, and media can all help.

I’ve recently toyed with text-to-speech synthesizers. They surprised me especially with their word emphasis. For fun, test them online. (Here’s one.) Let me know what you think. Do you use other ways to help self-edit?

But that was a mistake. Little did I know that, ten years later, I would write a book about Herman Miller, Inc.—and I would thirst for the full text and texture of those decade-old conversations. Yes, I still had my notes, buried in boxes in my basement. But I couldn’t pull from them the detail I wanted—and certainly not the quotes—and now I wanted every twist and turn of the conversation.

I mention this because it demonstrates just one reason why I’m now a big advocate of recording all interviews: You never know what you’ll need later. Even a day or two after an interview, you often realize that what you emphasized in your notes is not what you want to emphasize in your writing.  With a recording, you can go back and retrieve the lost threads

This seems obvious, but a debate rages among journalists about whether to bother with a recorder. Are recordings a help or a hindrance?

To be sure, recorders can hinder a relaxed, free-flowing, honest conversation. In fact they can ruin an interview, especially about sensitive topics, because sources can clam up or deflect tough questions. Recordings also require you to take time—often time you scarcely have—to transcribe. Pulling the most valuable nuggets from a long transcription is also hard. So there is a case to be made that recorder-free interviews are a better option, above all for quick-turnaround articles.

But with digital recorders today, the advantages of recording vastly outweigh the disadvantages. For a book, unlike an article, the interviews you rely on are often months old. A recording—just the sound of someone’s voice—restores the language and music and “body” language of the conversation. Recordings put you right back in the moment.

Other advantages of recorders are legion: You can listen to your source better during the interview, because you’re not simultaneously using your mental bandwidth to condense the conversation for your notes. And you’re a much better conversationalist and probably ask better follow-up questions.

If you do record, how do you make the best of it? A few steps I follow: Put the recorder as close as possible to your source. Explain the ground rules of how you will use the recording—to put sources at ease, I tell them I won’t share the audio with anyone. Do use a notebook to a least jot down the time (minutes/seconds) when juicy stuff comes up. With these time stamps in your notes, you can later zoom right to the good parts on your computer—without all the back and forth of an old tape machine.

The most useful aspect of digital recordings is that, just before you write a part of your manuscript, you can listen to key snippets of conversation. The recorder restores your total grasp of the material.

I did three more interviews with Brian Walker for my book, Merchants of Virtue, in 2009 and 2010. I don’t plan to write another book that would include his comments. But who knows? I now have the audio of those interviews and 120 more stored in my computer. With the cost of storage dropping close to zero, what’s there to lose? Writing the manuscript for Merchants of Virtue was easier because of the recordings, and in some unpredictable way my writing in the future probably will be, too.

1)     Choose a mix of content from varied geographies. Good examples, anecdotes, case studies, and survey materials should come from all over. It’s not much more effort to sound like the Urbane American, instead of the Ugly American.

2)     Feature experts, if applicable, who hail from around the world. Don’t come across like American car makers did in the 1980s and 1990s—as if the best ideas come only from the U.S.

3)     Choose metaphors and figures of speech that travel well. Not everyone sees the sense in expressions like “three strikes and you’re out,” “doing an end run,” or “inside the beltway.”

4)     Use diverse cultural references. In one of my recent books, we featured Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim thought. If you have a universal message—and on some level all good books do—make it resonate in any cultural setting.

All of this will please your readers. It’s easy to lapse into being parochial, but with a little forethought, you can easily demonstrate a broad world view.

You never know how this will pay off. I worked with one author whose book, about an American business subject, attracted a lot of attention from business people in Guatemala.  He ended up making several trips there to speak and build his business. He had no idea this would happen beforehand. Prepare your book to take advantage global rewards.