Jon Acuff's Blog

Right now, I’m in the beginning stages of writing my fourth book. And though I’ve learned the lesson I am going to share with you a million times, it hit me last week as if I’d never seen it before in my entire life.

The hardest part of writing a book is that every good book hides behind a bad book.

To write a good book, you have to write your way through a bad book first.

Scratch that. Let’s make that a horrible book.

And you know this is true. We’ve heard brilliant authors like Anne Lamott share this wisdom time and time again, but I promise when you sit down to start a new book you will think:

“Every sentence must be perfect.”

“I can’t waste time on this first draft.”

“I can’t throw away any of these words, they have to start great.”

But the truth is, for me and for you and for anyone who will ever write a good book, they are very easy to find.

They’re hiding behind the shadow of a bad book.

That’s where they are. Write your way through them. Go find them. Clear the bad book out of the way so you can get to the good one.

Question:
Have you ever struggled with perfectionism?

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers. He’s written a ridiculous amount of brilliant books and in this short video explains the shape of stories. If you’ve got 5 minutes today, watch this. Whether you ever want to write or not, this is a perfect example of how to communicate an idea. (Heads up, there’s one profanity.)

A friend asked me that question the other day, and I thought it might be good to answer it via video because it’s one that comes up a lot. Check out the clip, and let me know in the comments if you think authors need blogs .

Two days ago, I almost lied in a blog post.

How?

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At the end of the Quitter Conference, we’re doing a writer’s Q&A. As I’ve started to think through that, a lot of ideas about writing and publishing have popped in my head.

I’ve written three books. I published Stuff Christians Like with Zondervan. I published Quitter and Gazelles, Baby Steps and 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me about Debt, through Lampo Press, Dave Ramsey’s publishing house.

After talking with a half dozen publishers, I learned that they tend to ask 3 fairly consistent questions when they look at a proposal from a new author:

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Sometimes we like to complicate the answer to that question. When we look at our blogs and our traffic, we mystify the relationship between blog writer and blog reader.

But the answer to why people don’t read your blog is actually pretty simple. And it’s a question your readers would ask, if you gave them the opportunity. Here it is:

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What is satire?

Let’s get that out of the way first.

Satire is just humor with a purpose.

That’s all. There’s no mystery involved. It’s not that complicated. Satire is a vehicle you use to take people somewhere.

How do you write it? Here are the 5 steps I use with my satire blog and book Stuff Christians Like:

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This is a spoiler alert.

If you haven’t seen the episode of the Office where Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) leaves the show, you’re about to learn the ending. But, there was a tremendous blogging tip hidden in that episode that I don’t want any of us to miss.

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One of the goals on Twitter is to get someone to retweet what you tweeted. So if I tweeted, “Buy my new book Quitter on Amazon!,” my hope would be that someone would retweet it so that all their friends would see it too.

There are two ways to get people to retweet you:

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The first draft of the first chapter of my new book Quitter was horrible. It was technically correct. It was written with precision. It had all the right pieces in all the right places. But something was terribly wrong about it. What?

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