My mother loved to paint. I’m not talking art, I’m talking rooms.

She’d head on over to the local Benjamin Moore store and buy three gallons of whatever shade of yellow was on special, and cart them home in our station wagon.

Next, she’d set up the step stool, even before she got her coat off, spread a few sheets of newspaper around, pour some paint into that flat little tray, and get to work.

A real draft horse, she’d have the entire living room covered in no time flat.

And when I say covered, I mean covered.

The ceiling would be smeared with yellow, the windowsills, the baseboards. The sofa, the coffee table, the TV set.

Of course, my father, a careful, meticulous craftsman, would have a bird the minute he got home from work.

He couldn’t understand why anyone would paint a room without prepping it first, without utilizing drop cloths and blue tape. Sure, it took a few hours, but it made the job run so much smoother.

After the fight, Dad would spend the next three days cleaning up her mess with whiskey and turpentine. (The whiskey was for him, not the paint.)

I didn’t agree with a lot of things my dad had to say when I was young, but I’ve come to appreciate his passion for prep work. His insistence that it saved so much time and effort in the long run.

Which is why I’m a huge fan of book outlines.

A book outline keeps everything clean and crisp and in it’s proper place. It keeps you from writing stuff that will only need to be cut, or from losing the saleable focus.

Look, you can slap together a book pretty quickly if you’re not too concerned with making a bloody mess, like my mother. (You’ve flipped through that business-card-book tripe before, so you know what I’m talking about.)

But if you’re looking to create a book that really matters, that actually does something for you, your business, AND your readers, well, that takes a bit of planning. That takes a tiny bit of prep work.

An outline is the blue tape and the drop cloth all rolled into one.

So, yah, I know it’s a pain in the rump, but just sketch the thing out. You’ll thank me later.