On Your Mark: From First Word to First Draft in Six Weeks

by Cathy Fyock, Kevin Williamson

You have a book inside you, but how do you get it out? Author Cathy Fyock has written five of her six books in less than six weeks, and has a formula for getting the book out of your head and heart and onto the written page. She and coauthor Kevin Williamson offer tips for identifying your obstacles, turning of "that voice" inside your head, getting a game plan, creating momentum, and finishing your draft. With their practical tips and exercises, you'll finish with an action plan for getting your book done!

Genres: Writing

164 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2014

Reviews

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short, co-authored book held my interest and was amusing, at least the first half. The second half felt like a basic pep talk on writing do's and don'ts of the sort that freshman college instructors hand out, like, No typos, please, we should be beyond that, but, since we're not [sigh] and I'm stuck teaching freshman English, here's a list of the kind of errors I really don't want to see in your manuscripts and why it's important that you give some thought to style... I might actually recommend the book for that purpose.

I do want to point out that their dictum "No one writes five thousand words who shouldn't write fifty thousand" is worded imprecisely. In context, they seem to have meant that you can write as much as you need or desire and that you should have faith in your ability to do so, but not necessarily that you should write fifty thousand words. Elsewhere in the book they say "You don't want to write a 500-page tome, and no one wants to read one" which is the opposite statement (and also overstated to the point of untruth, as I read a 500-page book yesterday and will read another one today, voluntarily).

[Stan Skrabut · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the 2015 ATD-ICE conference, I sat in on a presentation given by Cathy Fyock. She spoke about the importance of writing for your career. More importantly, she spoke about getting a book written in the shortest amount of time possible. As she noted in her presentation, she wanted to model that behavior and wrote her book,  On Your Mark: From First Word to First Draft in Six Weeks *. Yes, she did it in six weeks. There is lots of good advice in this book. Read more