Lesson #2 From Writing our Book

Originally posted on Linked in March 2022

Javier and I learned a great deal as we wrote our first book. This post is the second in a series of some of our key lessons learned.

Lesson #2 - Start with an outline but prepare to deviate --- in other words, be flexible.

When writing our book, we found that an outline was a fantastic tool to guide us but we couldn't become too fixated on sticking to it. As we spoke to people and continued to research topics for each section and chapter, we found ourselves evolving our thinking quite a bit.

We made a decision early on to designate one person as the primary writer for each section and the other person would review, edit, add and subtract content for that section. This also worked very well for us because the other author could look at the content with a fresh set of eyes. We found that each section ended up different and much better than our original outline.