How I wrote a book in 9 months

While also running an organization + raising a 1 year old + growing another person

May 02, 2025

With just a week and a half until When We’re in Charge comes out — pre-order it now!! — so I’m deep into promo-mode, a process that requires me to put my dignity in a box and revisit it later.

A question I’ve been getting asked a lot as I talk more and more about the book is simply: How did you write this?

I wrote an initial answer to that when I kicked off the pre-order campaign earlier this winter:

Some backstory! I came up with the idea for this book in the summer of 2023, as part of my time as a Dial Fellow with Emerson Collective. With some feedback from my incredible agent, Stephanie Delman at Trellis Literary Agency, I wrote the 60-ish page proposal over the course of about six weeks at night after our daughter went to bed. Stephanie sold the book on my daughter’s first birthday in November — fortuitous, since the process of writing the proposal helped shake me out of my postpartum fog.
Run for Something has a four-day work week (which I talk about in the book and make the case that everyone should consider!) so I spent nearly every Friday in 2024 doing hundreds of hours of interviews, then writing draft after draft to figure out what I had to say. My evenings of writing were mostly shot (because pregnancy meant I was going to bed at 8:30) but I found a way to get it done.
In July and August, especially during the heatwave in NYC and when I was 6-8 months pregnant, I often spent at least one weekend morning at home working on the book from while my heroic husband took the toddler out.
Ultimately, I finished the final draft just a few weeks before the baby was born in September. (Nothing like a hard deadline of childbirth!)
I did copy-edits and what I called the “postpartum/post-election review” while I was on maternity leave in December.

All of that is true!

But it’s also not the full truth, nor the truth I look for when I personally devour other people’s writing-process posts… so I figured I’d get into the weeds a little bit on practically, how I got this done.

On technology + tools:

I did all my interviews over Zoom and paid for an Otter.ai account for a few months to transcribe them in real time. I didn’t use AI for anything else beyond transcription — although it was interesting to see the summaries the tool automatically generated and notice the themes across conversations.
I kept track of all my interviews in a Google sheet — including keeping records for who wanted to do a final review of any inclusion in the book, preferred pronouns, email addresses, and other notes. I also tracked race, gender identity, and industry to ensure I was talking to a diverse group of people in all the ways I wanted that defined. I used Calendly to make scheduling easy.
For my first book, everything just lived in Google docs, but given all the research I was doing and all the different topics I wanted to cover, I needed separate documents for every interview, every word-vomit, and ultimately every topic, so I figured out how to use Scrivener, which was worth the time to figure out.
I bought nearly all the leadership books I read for research on my Kindle and read them over the course of the six months leading up to writing my proposal and then into the early months of writing. I’d keep notes on interesting themes, page #s for stuff that I wanted to go back and reference, and quotes I wanted to pull out.

On actually sitting down and writing — then getting feedback:

For those who aren’t familiar, non-fiction proposals sell an argument and (obviously) a proposal to write the book —not a complete manuscript. In my proposal, I suggested the book would be structured as such:

An introduction, then 10 chapters, each one articulating a key value about how the next-gen leads now and how you can bring that value to life in your circumstances.

1. We’re authentic — we don’t bullshit.
2. We are our real selves — but not necessarily our full selves (unless we want to be).
3. We understand the internet is not real life, but it is part of real life.
4. We do not dream of labor.
5. We are inclusive — but we know inclusivity requires some exclusivity.
6. We live together or die alone.
7. We are not nihilists — it’s not that nothing matters; it’s that everything matters, and the crisis is now.
8. We are clear-eyed about the obstacles and opponents.
9. We know what success looks like — only winning is winning, but sometimes losing is also winning.
10. We ask neither forgiveness nor permission

I started out with running docs for each of those values, dropping in anecdotes I heard in my interviews and notes from my reading as I went that fit the theme. Ultimately, when I went back to write through those ideas and connect them to action-items (because I wanted the book to be prescriptive, not just descriptive), my structure changed slightly as I tried to build a cohesive leadership framework. However all of those values are still present across my writing. Here’s the final table of contents:
The final table of contents (plus an intro)
I didn’t exactly write the book in order — I took each topic one by one as the ideas felt ready enough, and then tried to bang out a fully fleshed section as much as I could within a few writing blocks, with each section being somewhere between 7k-10k words.

I’d send chapters (such as they were) to my excellent editor, Sarah Ried, as they were done, often with specific questions I would want her feedback on or things I felt hit-or-miss about. At this stage, I was just looking for broader guidance about what it was missing, whether any of this made sense, if the tone felt right, etc.

Those were my slice-checks — the feedback she gave me on the early sections helped shape the ones I’d write later.

I kept re-ordering sections and recombining things (moving documents around in Scrivener accordingly) as the book came together over the spring and early summer, trying to bucket themes under larger section headers.

Sarah didn’t do line-edits until I sent her a mostly complete manuscript sometime in July. The last sections I finished in August/September were the intro and then the conclusion.
The only people to read any parts of the book until it got closer to done were my agent (hi Steph!) and my husband, whose feedback helped me both gut-check my impulse to be self-deprecating (including one tracked-change comment where he simply noted “a man would never describe himself like this,” in case you’re wondering why I married him) and also reinforced for me the need to aggressively sign-post myself — tell the people what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you said and why.

He consistently pointed out to me that because I wrote to figure out what I thought, my thesis of my argument was usually six or seven paragraphs in. Per usually, he was right: When I went back and restructured accordingly, the book went from “collections of thoughts” into “cohesive story.”
Eventually I got feedback from others, including a few close friends whose opinions I trusted and my cofounder, who gut-checked how I described our work together and fact-checked my memory on a few things. This was terrifying!
Once I had the full manuscript done and my editor sent me back line-edits, I transitioned over to Microsoft Word to more easily track changes.

Once I’d done one pass working through Sarah’s edits, I printed out a full copy and read it again, noting pages I wanted to revisit one more time with my laptop in front of me. At this point, the final manuscript was nearly due and I wouldn’t get to change things until after a copyeditor had reviewed (and after my baby was born.)
I sent in that iteration of the manuscript in the beginning of September and didn’t look at it again until the end of November, when I got edits from the copy-editor plus a look at the layout of the book. I had a few more chances to make tweaks through to the end of January, which I did again through a mix of a hard-printed copy and Microsoft Word.

I also used this time period to send quotes for approval to anyone who’d asked to see them. (Not everyone did, but for those who’d requested it, I wanted to accurately reflect the integrity of our conversations. No one had substantial changes.)

More philosophically, I was able to write this in nine months because whether I realized it or not, I’d been thinking about it for the last eight years.

Many of the chapters came out much quicker than I expected, because once I landed on a section topic, I’d just let my brain dump out through my fingers and see what came out, writing around and through the various conversations I had and the research I did.

And as it turns out, I have been thinking about leadership — about what it means to do it differently, about the tension that lives at the heart of next-gen leadership styles, about the inherent challenges of wanting to be yourself but not being able to be your full self and the way we don’t have clear models for any of this anymore — since I started Run for Something in January 2017.

As Nora Ephron says: everything is copy. My absolute worst days (and some of my best ones) over the last eight years made for what (I think) are some of the most compelling parts of the book.

I’ve been asked a lot if writing the book was hard.

On the one hand, yeah, duh, of course it was, in the sense that writing anything long is hard, and doing so during an already hard year (while pregnant) was perhaps not the most ideal circumstances.

But also? If I’m being honest and maybe a little annoying? Writing this book was so much fun. It scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. It shook my brain up in a deeply satisfying way.

I feel the same way about writing these newsletters each week — when the topic feels right or I have a lot to say, I get into a flow and all of a sudden there the paragraphs are. It’s not that writing is easy, but rather, that because, as my husband and many college professors before him pointed out, I write to figure out what I think.

And yet: as I said last week, while I firmly claim the identity of “reader,” I feel less confident in calling myself a “writer,” even though objectively that is true! This will be my second published book, I write constantly for work, and I take great joy in this process. I am absolutely a writer! (Except: Am I? Yes! But really? Yes! But really really? I don’t know! Who cares! Just typing this out makes me feel like an asshole and also an imposter. Welcome to my anxiety spiral a week-and-a-half out from publication!)

So there you have it. How I wrote a book in nine months (plus eight+ years of thinking.)

Let me know if you have additional questions about the book (or anything else) in the comments.

If you’re into this newsletter, you might like my book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership, available for pre-order and officially on sale on May 13th.

Get it in all the normal places:

Amazon
Bookshop.org — get 15% off with code AMANDA15
Barnes & Noble — get 25% thru 4/25 with code PREORDER25
BAM!

Events in NYC on 5/15 & DC on 5/21

WHEN WE'RE IN CHARGE

Amanda Litman

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