There are many strategies to writing a book. You can sit down at your desk and just begin writing. This works well for very few people because at some point in the writing process - you could be halfway through the book before this happens - you are going to hit a roadblock and not know how to continue. Worse, you can lose track of your focus quite easily and go off on tangents that have absolutely no relevance with the rest of the chapter you are working on.

Another frequent writing approach is to jot down a few ideas, maybe even a list of chapters and their subject matter and to start writing. This can actually be worse than writing without any structure because you end up with very large chapters of more than 50 pages and then extremely small chapters of only a couple pages. That does not make sense and it does not result in a book that reads or flows well.

A better way to write your book, albeit still not the easiest way, is to draft an outline. I know, an outline feels too structured for many writers. Please bear with me. Writing an outline, a detailed outline, will not only help you organize your thoughts in a clear and concise manner, it will create a better book. Your book, when organized in an outline will be balanced. You would not have 50 page chapters and 5 page chapters, you will have equal chapters, they will all have a point, and you would not be as likely to go off on tangents.

Additionally, when you use an outline, your book will be written faster because you can approach it in a systematic way.

Now we are going to talk about the easiest approach to writing a book using a template or blueprint. The secret to this is that you are going to create much of the blueprint yourself. Why? Because only you know exactly what needs to be contained in your book. Here is the template part ready?

Remember the outline that we discussed? Go ahead and write that outline but make sure you have 1 chapter for every 10 pages of content. This means if you have a section you think will take 20 pages; find a way to break it into two parts. Now create 20 chapters if you want a 200 page book, 30 chapter titles if you want a 300 page book and so on. There is more...

Under each chapter title, you will want to create 10 points you want to express in your chapter. Each point will cover approximately one page, maybe a little more and maybe a little less but you will end up with 10 pages for each chapter.

Why does this work? It gives you a clear structure to write, so when you are not feeling up to it you really do not have any excuse to not get at least one page done. It also makes it really easy to write your book. Simply turn each point into a question, sit down and answer it. You will have your page written in less than five minutes... really! This means that if it takes you 5 minutes to write a page, you could write a chapter each day, right? That would mean you could have your 20 chapter book, your 200 page book, written in 20 days. Now that is fast and that is why using a template works so well.