Take Off Your Pants!, by Libbie Hawker

This is hopefully the first in a new series of reviews of books on writing. If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing space, or in the “on Writing” section of Barnes & Noble, you’ll know there’s three how-to books for every writer on the planet. Sometimes it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, so hopefully this will help you guide your efforts a bit more easily.

Take Off Your Pants is an excellent how-to book for a specific kind of writer. If you’ve already nailed the art of producing effective writing, you already have a really good idea of your own sense of style, the types of stories you like to write, how to engage your audience, etc. but you’re trying to increase the volume of work you can put out, this is the book for you.

The premise is: in the world of writing, there is an eternal war between the pantsers (people who write and just see where the story leads them) and the planners (people who make an outline and need to know where the story is going). Hawker makes the argument that, for the professional writer, planning is the only viable option because it’s the only way to produce the volume of work necessary to stay relevant to publishers and agents, as well as to sell enough books to pay the bills and not starve to death.

This book presents outlining not as a method for producing formulaic work, but for producing crowd-pleasing work faster and more efficiently. It is very practical, and if you follow its advice, you come away with the book with a pragmatic, usable outline that can help you to start producing sellable work.

As someone trying to make money as a writer, I think this is an indispensable tool for the practiced writer trying to make a living. It has already helped me to increase my production without losing sleep, meals, or time with friends and family. You rarely get writing books this down-to-earth, and you really get the impression that Hawker is “in the trenches” with the average writer, whether working or aspiring.

As someone who appreciates the artistic process, I am annoyed that a book like this has to exist. The idea of having to crank out more work to simply not starve to death is problematic. Famously, this is what led many authors to drug abuse and other over-the-top methods to increase their productivity.

But Lizzie Hawker didn’t invent the world we live in, she’s just giving us a tool to help us survive. I definitely recommend this one. It’s an indispensable tool I’m glad I’ve read.