Richard Bandler reveals the steps necessary to write a book.
NLP Life: You write a lot of very good, comprehensive, entertaining books, how do you do it?
Richard Bandler: One page at a time. I figure out the big things I want to do, I break them into small pieces and I do each of the pieces.
That’s why most of my books have parts and not chapters because I set up signposts. I go “This is where I want to get, they are the big steps to get there, these are the smaller pieces and whether it’s chapters or parts of paragraphs.”
I lay it out and sometimes I dictate it, sometimes I type it and you make sure it all fits together.
You give it a good read after you put it aside for a few days and you may have to add a little piece, but I don’t spend a long time writing a book.
My first book took me 6 months and it was painful and it’s not that great a book. I find the shorter period of time, the more concise, the more my thoughts are focussed, the more I can get done quickly.
And remember if you don’t say it perfectly you can always rewrite it and the trick is to get the words on the paper and the ideas down and then to take a pair of scissors and cut 60% of it out and flush it out and instead of worrying about what other people are going to think about it, just worry about what you think about it and make sure it fulfils what it is you want.
I had a good friend, Robert Anton Wilson who was a science fiction writer who sat down these same two hours every day and wrote a couple of thousand words. I had tremendous respect for him, I couldn’t do it that way. For him it worked out because he was a professional writer. That’s how he viewed himself. He wrote a magazine article one day and part of a book the next and he was prolific, he wrote 33 books and probably hundreds and hundreds of magazine articles but to him, he could switch from one thing to another.
I’m very focussed. I’m very good at doing one thing and getting all the way through it but, by the same token, I’ll have seven or different projects going on at the same time.
I’ll be doing workshops, I’ll be making CDs and I keep it in a different place in the house. I write in this room, I record in this room. He did everything in the same room and he had it sorted out in his head probably better than I did. A brilliant man and a much better writer than I am.
I’ve got a lot of good ideas but sometimes I need somebody. I’ve had editors come back and go “You say really important things but it gives me a headache to read your writing,” but once I read how they re-write it then the next time I do a better job.
The trick is to be better than you were before and if you’re not improving then you’re stagnant, you’re not adapting to your environment and responding to it and learning and you can!
