236: What's Your Recipe for Writing Success?
Heaping spoons of curiosity, passion, and hard work.
“I’m not the person to write a prescriptive book on “These are the twelve steps to writing a nonfiction book.” I thought it was better to incorporate those lessons into real-life stories. And frankly, that’s how I learned best to write, so that’s why I took that approach.”
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Guest
Bill Whiteside is a sales and marketing executive turned software salesman turned lay historian turned writer of narrative non-fiction, specifically a forthcoming book about an incident in Winston Churchill’s tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister during World War II.
Summary
In this episode of “Getting Unstuck—Cultivating Curiosity,” I talk with Bill about the process of writing the book on Churchill, which he’s detailed in a new book, Everybody Knows a Salesman Can’t Write a Book. As Bill has written, “My book is for anyone who dreams of turning a creative idea into commercial reality, especially anyone who wonders how to manage the intellectual and the business challenges of writing a book while working a traditional job.”
Bill was a previous guest in episode 203, where we discussed the forthcoming Churchill book.
Takeaways
√ Bill’s forthcoming book is a story about Winston Churchill and a deadly incident in the early days of World War II of which most people are not aware; a clash between the British and French, who up to the time of the incident, had been allies.
√ The book is an intersection of “how to write,” the content of the incident between Britain and France, and a memoir of Bill’s life during a specific period.
√ One of the key questions an aspiring writer has to ask themselves is “Do I have a deep enough passion for this topic to sustain me over a long period of time?”
√ In addition to passion, to motivate your readers, it’s important to have a sense that you can bring something different to your account of the story, especially with nonfiction.
√ One of the challenges of writing is deciding what to leave in, what to leave out.
√ There's always a reason not to do something. And most people find that reason and embrace that reason not to do something And it's the people who ignore that and say, I'm going to find the reasons to do something for the people who break through who are successful.
Links/References
Website: www.perfectlytruestory.com
Sign up for Bill’s monthly newsletter: https://www.perfectlytruestory.com/background-and-newsletter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-whiteside-lancaster-pa/
Twitter: @PerfAdequate
Email: bill.whiteside@perfectlytruestory.com
Show Credits
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"Getting Unstuck" theme music: Original composition of "Allegro ben ritmato e deciso" by George Gershwin. Arrangement and recording courtesy of Bruno Lecoeur.