This is not the writing phase of the project yet. This is a top-secret spy mission where you’re going to sneak behind enemy lines, turn on your computer, and see if you can find the launch codes. Think of it as prewriting writing. You’re seeing if your idea has any teeth.

After you’ve developed your idea, decided it’s good enough to proceed, and given it some structure, you’ll further gauge the quality of your idea by seeing how good of an introduction you can write. This helps for a few reasons:

First, if you can’t easily and quickly write 2,500 to 3,000 good words on the idea, it’s not ready yet. An introduction doesn’t even have to prove anything—you’re just making statements and promises. If it’s a great idea that you understand well enough, it should be easy to write a great introduction. 

But also, the introduction is where you establish your argument or your theory, and once you start writing, you get really clear on what you mean and don’t mean. You won’t state this exactly, but the content of the introduction should fill in these blanks: In this book I will show/teach you __________. This matters because ____________. If you can’t fill those blanks in in a way that really excites you, you’re not ready to write yet.

Parts of this introduction will show up in the final draft, but most of it will change by the time you’re done. That doesn’t matter. What’s important now is: Can you clearly explain why you’re writing this book, and what will happen to the person who’s reading once they’re finished?

Not sure how to get started? Consider starting with what got you interested in your topic. Did you hear a story that piqued your interest? Do you have personal experience? The introduction is one of the places where it does make sense to use “I” statements if you want to explore your connection to the material. 

Another option is to give a brief overview of what you know about the topic so far. Don’t worry yet about covering ground that you plan to cover later—you’re not going to go deep enough or pull from sources at this stage, so it will naturally be more of an overview, and you can always remove details later if you end up going over the same details in a later chapter.

Before we go any further, let’s stop and take inventory of what you have so far. It’s been a few weeks or a few months, and you have:

• A compelling idea that won’t leave you alone
• A tested idea that people were interested in when you brought it up in different formats
• An organized idea with a skeleton of structure
• An exciting, engaging, compelling introduction.

If you ignored my advice and skipped ahead to start writing without creating the structure, you probably stalled out after a few thousand words because you’re trying to make a cake without a recipe. You don’t have to have everything figured out before you start writing—some things will only be clear as you write—but you need to at least have some things figured out.

If you have the elements listed above—a compelling idea that’s been tested and structured enough to see the shape of a book, and an introduction you’re excited about—then it’s time to start the research phase of the project.