I’ve started the next book for No Starch Press. There’s an outline, and I’ve written both the introduction and the afterword. All that’s left is the hard stuff in between, twenty-some chapters of it.
Where to start writing? That’s easy: First, I write the stuff that’s most likely to make the book fail.
Every project has easy parts that are fun and go quickly. Those are the tasks you’re most familiar with, that leverage your existing skills. Then there’s the parts that require you to learn new things, or demand that you actually spend time and energy breaking them down so others can understand you. These are the parts of the project that are most likely to make the project fail. I want to get those parts over with as quickly as possible.
If the entire book is going to collapse because four chapters are impossible to write, it’s better to know that up front than after I’ve written the eighteen easy chapters leading up to them. I’m writing about 500 words an hour on this part, where I normally write 1000 words an hour. It’s drudgery, but they’ll get done.
I’ve seen a lot of IT projects fail by spending their initial burst of energy on the easy stuff. If you do the easy part first, the hard part gets time to grow in your mind. You’ll spend energy dreading it. Worse, the time you spend doing the easy stuff might be completely wasted — after all, if you can’t do the hard part, then you have to throw everything else away. You can always do the easy part after you succeed at the hard bit, and it’ll make the rest of the project go more quickly.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish this section of this chapter tonight…