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9. Write a short e-mail to yourself, as if you were
a reader writing to a friend about what was so
great about this book. How did it make you feel?
What gripped you about it? You can do this in
general terms, but it must be enough to make
you want that book to see the light of day.
10. Put all this away for one week. During this week,
work on steps 1 through 9 with a different idea.
Then come back to your original premise and
see if you are still excited about it, if it still “calls
out to you” to be written. If so, start developing
it in earnest.
In this way, you can, in very short order, have several
possible novel ideas cooking at any one time. Eventually,
you’ll choose the one you are going to push through to
the end. That’s always a tough call! But this process is
much better than grabbing your fi rst premise and charg-
ing ahead. Much time may be wasted this way.
Ever since I started writing professionally, I told my-
self I have only a fi nite time on this earth and can only
write a fi nite number of books. I need to choose the best
ones for me and for my readers both. This is the method
I use to do that.
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