At this stage of the guide building process, also known as our DISTILL process, you've probably realized you have a giant glut of information that you'd like to share with your readers. Thing is, your readers are busy people, and they need a slimmed down, no-nonsense, distilled version of what you're trying to present to them. So, with that in mind, it's time to figure out exactly what the most important information is, not for you, but, for your reader. It's time to go through the selection process.

Getting Started

Getting started is complicated. Starting at the beginning is often time consuming, so when it comes to retracing your processes, or providing a guide for beginners, it's often difficult to remember exactly what that distilled, tuned-in information looks like to the beginner.

At this stage of the process, we should start determining the minimum learnable units required to teach someone the the most crucial elements they need to be successful. In fact, you should ask yourself what 20% of the information will give the readers 80% of the knowledge they need to successful grasp, or carry out, the information within your guide.

Out of all the key points you scribbled down during the Idea Stage, are there any that stand out among the group? Is there anything in that brain-dumped mess that is so important to convey, that you should highlight it within your Guide?

It should be obvious which information is the most important once you're able to stand back and look at the information from a higher ground.

Let's Continue Our Process Of Building A Guide

Let's imagine for a moment that we have decided to write a guide about Beer. There are a lot of things to write about when it comes to beer, but given our reliance on the DISTILLED process, I may have decided to write a Guide To Beer Brewed In The American Midwest. How can we begin to further distill the information we've begun to collect into and my

A step-by-step process for choosing your main points:

1. Boil down your sub-point to a single keyword: eg. Beer.
2. Now take your sub-point, and describe it as specifically as possible, while using that keyword: eg. The Best American Beer.
3. Then, determine a specific aspect of your sub-point: eg. The Best American Beers In The Mid-West.

If you can turn your sub-point into a specific, poignant topic, there's a very high likelihood that you can begin to gather your most important topics quickly.