One of the biggest pitfalls in the world of writing nonfiction is the risk of being overwhelmed.
That’s true of authors as well as readers — when you sit down to write your book, you can quite easily find yourself staring at a virtual pile of knowledge and no clear path to sort it.
Enter the reverse summary technique, as explained by Esbe van Heerden.
In it, you work backwards, obviously — the first step is to summarize your book, then create a table of contents from that, and so on.
Van Heerden has the subsequent steps and an explanation of each on The Creative Penn.