#388: Writing Well: How to Gather Your Materials

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Hey, Kingdom Writers, this is Shelly Hitz, and I am so thrilled that you're here. Today we are going to talk about gathering your writing materials. So I am going to share with you something that I did helping my dad write a book. And we're still in the process as of the time of recording this, we're still in the process of editing and working out his book, but we're hoping that it will come out in the next few months. But for those of you that don't know, my dad was assaulted and had a brain injury in 2009. He was in a coma for six weeks. And so he has a really powerful story of just coming back from that. And yet he has a brain injury. And so he is not able to do what most of us are able to do. He has very little short term memory. He does have some long term memory, and this was long enough ago that, you know, he can talk to us a little bit about some of the things about it. But when I realized like we were going to help him write a book, I was like, okay, God, what do we do? And it's. It's kind of like we are ghostwriting. But I wanted it to be as much of his words as possible. So whether or not you're helping someone else with their book, or maybe it's your own book, one thing that I want you to do from the very beginning is just gather all your materials that you have on that topic. So for my dad, I just spent a session where I gathered all of the videos of his talks on YouTube since his injury. So he has a Ted Talk, he has different sermons. He had been interviewed by his trainer at one time. So I gathered all of those links and all of the videos, and then I gathered all of his blog posts. He had a blog where he was updating it and, you know, sharing information. And so there was that information as well. And then I had my own blog during that time. So. So I wanted to kind of gather and look at any information that I had in that blog and really just gather the information that we had. And then what I did is I took the YouTube videos and the different videos of his presentations, his sermons, and I had them transcribed. And so this is something that any of you can do that are speakers. Some of our books have come from our talks. Now, you do have to do quite a bit of editing. So it's not like a quick and easy, like, oh, you know, you're just gonna get the transcript and be done. Now if you really think about it in advance and you outline your book and you're thinking about it being a book when you're recording the audio, then it can become a book a lot quicker. That's what I did years ago with my book Procrastination to Publication, and it worked out great. But I had it in mind already that it was going to be a book. So you talk different when you know it's going to be a book than when it's a talk, right? Or it's a podcast or whatever. And so anyways, I had all of the videos transcribed, I gathered all the blog posts, and then I started interviewing my dad. And there's a great app called Otter AI O T T E R A I and basically it records your audio and at the same time it transcribes it. And you can get quite a bit for free. So, you know, I haven't upgraded yet, but when we would be at dinner, like, my dad stayed with us for five weeks this summer, and we. When we would be at dinner or even in the car and I would start asking him questions, anytime he would say something, I would try to record him really quick or I would try to type it out. And he talks slow because of his brain injury. It has affected his speech. So I would try to somehow capture it. Otter is a great option, like even to capture your own thoughts. But if you're helping somebody else with their book, doing interviews is a great way to get some of the content because you can ask them the questions that you're wanting to about the content you're wanting to include in the book and get a lot of great content that way. We really got a lot of great things from my dad that way. And I honestly didn't know how it was going to work because of his brain injury, but I loved that part. Part of it. Now, if you're kind of stuck with your book, you might want to have somebody else interview you. And in that case, maybe you just hop onto Zoom and they interview you. You record it and then you have it transcribed afterwards. There's tons of transcription sites. A very common one is called rev.com but you can also upload audios to Otter AI. So there's lots of ways to do it, but that Many times it just gets the words flowing and you get some things onto paper that maybe were stuck deep into your mind or maybe when you sit down to write, you just feel like, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to write. Have a friend interview you. Record it. You don't ever have to share the recording, but just get that recording transcribed so then you can gather some more information.

So what I did is I just sat down and I like to do things in chunks of time. So a lot of times you can either be a chunk writer or a consistent writer, where you're just writing a little bit every day, maybe 15 minutes to an hour every day. For me, I prefer to work in bigger chunks. And at the time we were hosting our unlock your writing program and we were encouraging people to write either 15 minutes a day or an hour and a half a week, having a day off for Sabbath. And so I was committing to do an hour and a half a week. So I, you know, I sat down and for an hour and a half I gathered, you know, all the videos, all the information. I uploaded them to be transcribed. And then another session, I went through all the transcripts and I began to pull out content. Now what I did is before this is I had a working outline and it ended up being the outline we're going to use. So I kind of already had it chunked into content versus, you know, with the outline. But, you know, if you don't have an outline yet, that might be the next step for you is once you gather all your materials, you know, see what you have, and then start to see how could this fit into chapters. Well, how, you know, what kind of an outline would I like to have? And then it's like a puzzle. And then you begin putting those puzzle pieces into place. So it's like each chapter is a bucket and you're putting, you know, the different content into that bucket that you have gathered. And so that's what I was doing. And you know, the first chapter is really about his assault and the man who did it. He was actually. He fled from the police and he was wanted. And you know, they were. They had people hunting him down and they had permission to shoot him if they needed. I mean, it was crazy. I think he was, he was on the run for an a year before they caught him and he did go to prison. It's. It's a whole. It's a whole story. But anyways, I wanted to make sure I got the facts correct too. So, you know, I was using some of the blog posts and then those had some links to some of the news articles. And you know, that first chapter, I was just taking the content that I had found in all the different places, and then I was just kind of copying it and pasting it or typing it, and I was just kind of dumping it into that, that space. So how I did it and you can do it, however works best for you. You know, some of you use Evernote or Scrivener or Word or Pages. I now, at this point in my career, I like to use Google Docs because it's easily accessible on all my devices. And I don't know, I just, I have everything in Google now, so. Not everything. I have some things still in Dropbox, but I just, I like using the Google products now. So I had a chapter heading, you know, in the Google Doc it was as a heading tag. So that in the outline view, I could easily go back and forth from each chapter. But then I would just basically dump the content that I thought I could use for that chapter. I would just kind of dump it in there and just, just added in there. And there was no rhyme or reason. It was just if it fit that topic for that particular chapter, I dumped it in there. So that's what I did on one of my work sessions, right on another session. Then I began to go back through that content. I began to put it into order. I began to make more sense of what, what chapters are we going to need more information on? What chapters do we have? You know, a lot. Like, we had a lot of information on his chapter on forgiveness, because that's what his TEDx talk was about, is that he, you know, was able to forgive his assailant and also, not only that, but help his kids and his family in the process. But there was a lot of content for that chapter, and then there was not very much content for the last chapter. So then it showed me, okay, I need to get more content for this final chapter. And I did more interviews with my dad. But then also there was a situation where I was able to have someone else be able to contribute a little bit to that final chapter as well, because it was about their story as well. So I'm not going to go into all the details about his book, but I just want to kind of help you to know, get inside my mind and just think about, like, could any of this be helpful for you as you write your book or as you help someone else write their book? Everyone has a different way. Like this is the first time I've actually written a book in this actual format. But it's. It actually worked like I felt like it was flowing and once I got all the content organized and now it's like it was chronological order and all of that. Now CJ is finessing it and he's editing it and working through all of it. So it's working. And we will have a book before too long. It's going to be a short book, but my dad has always been short on words. Even when he was a pastor, his sermons would be 20 minutes. A lot of times, like he just, he never was one just to sit and talk and talk and talk, unlike me and my mom, who have all the words. But it's going to be powerful. So we're really excited. The title that I feel like God gave me is Bounce back choosing to rise when life knocks you down. And that's because my dad literally was knocked down. He was literally punched in the face. And then he was in a coma for six weeks. And he did bounce back many ways, not only physically, but emotionally, spiritually. And so that's what all the different chapters are about, how he bounced back in a different way. So it's been exciting to help him do this and he has loved it. When he was staying with us, he actually came on and shared with our Christian Book Academy members on one of the zoom calls and he just loved that. And many of the, the members said how it was just so encouraging and inspiring for them because part of his book and part of his message is that when you have a setback, you can have a comeback, right? And so I want to tell you today, if you've had a setback in your writing, it may be a setup for a comeback.

Just like my dad, he's had to go through a lot and he is still dealing with all of the different things from his brain injury. But he has such a great attitude and he really has. It's a miracle that he's even alive today, let alone walking, talking, doing all the things that he's doing. So I just encourage you that if you've had a setback in your writing, God is here right now with you and he is able to give you a comeback and help you get across that finish line. You remember the first draft? It's the first ugly, messy first draft. You gotta just get that out of your head onto paper. No one will ever read that or see that, not even your editor. And then you move into the self editing phase and we walk you step by step. Through every part of the process in Christian Book Academy with our Kingdom Writers path. You start with that first draft, then you go to the final draft and then you self publish and then you have a book launch and finally ongoing marketing through impacting lives. So we'd love to have you join us. Come join us at ChristianBookAcademy.com where we help writers become authors. It is such an amazing feeling to hold your book in your hands for the first time. I can't wait for my dad to experience that soon. And even though he has a PhD and he has a doctorate degree, I don't think besides his doctorate, I don't think he's ever had a published book. So this will be a first and it will be so fun to have been part of this and just to really hear the lives that are impacted as a result of his story. So I hope this was helpful. Let us know and we will talk to you next time. Bye Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer have have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.