The email came from writer and friend Elizabeth Clarke. She went on to explain, “I got a puppy…” and it seems the lively little guy is getting in the way of her good intentions to stick to a writing schedule.

Being more of a cat person than a dog person, I am biased about this, but I consider cats better pets for writers because they’ll sit in your lap and purr while you sit at your desk and write. I imagine fish would also be good writer pets. And maybe rabbits–they’re nice and quiet, right?

I have no pets at the moment, but I am plagued by five — yes, I’ve counted them  — squirrels who chatter and squeal and scramble back and forth and back and forth across the rattly tin roof over my porch. They drive me nuts. I have a water pistol and am actually getting good at hitting one every once in awhile.

It’s so distracting, all that racket and all the time I spend trying to chase the little bastards away. Then again, writers are easily distracted. In fact, sometimes anyone watching might even jump to the conclusion that we’re intentionally even looking for ways to avoid writing. Can you believe that?

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My typical process is to start every project by writing longhand on graph paper with my current favorite pen, getting down everything I can think of or find that relates to the subject. I’m a big believer in the spew-now-edit-later approach, and usually end up with many pages’ worth of raw material.

The next step is to winnow it down, sift out everything but the good stuff, and transcribe that to a fresh Word doc. Then comes hammering that into the actual first draft, which then goes through several more iterations before it becomes the so-called first draft the client sees.

But on this particular morning, I was all out of graph paper and loose-leaf paper. I didn’t even have any used-on-one-side printer paper. The only thing around to write on was a small stack of used envelopes (I recycle these for to-do lists and random notes to myself before ultimately putting them in the recycle bin). So I decided to see whether I could capture the gist of what I needed to know and explain using only the front and back sides of one used #10 envelope.

It worked beautifully and helped me keep a straightforward task from getting more complicated than it needed to be. I filled up my “canvas,” transcribed the notes to a Word doc, and realized I had a serviceable draft right there, already.

With some projects, you need to write a lot in order to discover what it is you’re really trying to say. With others, it works best to spend more upfront time cogitating and nailing down your points before you start to write. Writing takes time and focus and lots of practice either way, which is why people hire me to do it for them. The hard part is the blank screen or the blank page, getting that first draft out. Then comes the easier, fun part: tweaking and polishing and fine-tuning.

Discovering the envelope trick turned the hard part into a game, the object of which was to stay within the lines and make a linear journey from point A to point B, leaving out the hand-wringing stage entirely. I love it when that happens.

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The bottom line is that it is much easier for most writers to write other peoples’ stories, marketing copy, bios, or brochures than to write our own. My friend and fellow writer Nancy Gordon, of The Gordon Group, LLC, compares it to the case of the cobbler’s children who have no shoes. Whatever kind of work you do, you tend to be less motivated (or maybe more intimidated) about doing it for yourself or your loved ones than for your customers.

When I was in the restaurant business, I knew gifted chefs who ate only cereal with milk or PBJs at home. And I had a landscaper friend who always had elaborate plans for the perennial bed she never managed to plant in her own yard despite having beautified the gardens of half the town.

Maybe that’s what stops more experts from writing books: they have the expertise, the experience, the passion, the content to write a book, but actually doing it would mean taking time away from their customers and their business. And risking embarrassment. It’s one thing to give advice, it’s quite another to put it in writing and put it out there for public scrutiny. That’s the humbling lesson I was talking about. I realized that writers share the fear of writing that non-writers have when it comes to doing our own work.

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For consultants, coaches, and other entrepreneurs whose product is their expertise, writing a book is one of the best ways to establish credibility and market themselves. They know their material cold. The challenge lies in translating what’s between their ears to the printed page.

So, in response to requests from plenty of colleagues and a big kick in the butt from Tac Anderson, I’m coaching a group of four local superstar entrepreneurs through the process of writing their first business books.

The pilot biz book writers’ group includes Sarah Lewis, Kathy Martin, Rich Breton and of course Tac. We’re doing a workshop format supplemented by one-on-one coaching sessions as needed. Stay tuned for updates on our progress–the goal is for each of us (yep, that includes me) to have bona fide manuscripts completed by the end of September.

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