MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)