Let’s say you want to write a book. Maybe you’ve had a fascinating life, and you think your autobiography would interest people. Maybe you have expertise in a particular field, and you think your insight would be of use to others interested in the subject, either recreationally or professionally. Maybe you’ve had an idea for a story you just can’t get out of your head, and you decide to finally try to wrangle the idea into something resembling a narrative. Whatever the case may be, you’ve decided to throw your hat in the ring and join the noble ranks of us writers.
There are, now, several things you must do in order to actually embark on this process. Some of those things are of the more administrative variety. For example, you have to actually figure out where you are going to do the actual writing of your glorious contribution to the literary arts. Maybe you’re more comfortable with a pen in your hand and you want to write out your book longhand, in which case I would recommend getting a new notebook dedicated just to your actual draft, apart from whatever notebooks you might use for, say, notes about the project.
Maybe you want to type your project out, in which case you need to decide on a typing utility. I have made the case for why Scrivener is the best tool out there for all manner of writerly endeavors here, and I really can’t praise it highly enough. My sister bought a dedicated writing machine from the 90s that uses an infrared beam to send her draft to her computer, so she can type without the distraction of having the internet but a window away. Many old school writers stand by Word as the only appropriate word processor.
Some people find talking considerably easier than typing or scrawling out their thoughts in a notebook, and for you I have great news! We live in a future where speech-to-text options are manifold and powerful! Scrivener has a very easy to access dictation functionality, as does Windows when using Word. You could even record you draft into a little handheld microphone, and then set it up to play your words into the dictation program while you sleep. My little seven year old nephew is dictating his book into the Apple Notes app. Of course, you could cut out the text phase altogether and just format your book directly for audiobook release, but the audiobook marketplace is complicated and dominated almost entirely by Audible, who does not play that nice with creators.
Once you have decided on your production medium of choice, you have to get to the actual putting words on the page. Here, if you are writing fiction, you have a choice. You could plot out your novel in an out line, hitting the major plot points—which I will cover in another post—and maybe even detailing scenes chapter by chapter. This is what I do. Having a framework helps me when actually writing, as I know what I need to say every time I sit down at the keyboard. Steven King famously doesn’t plot anything at all, he just writes and ‘lets the story tell him where it needs to go’. This strikes me as wildly more difficult, and I would suggest that not all of us can be Steven King.
Personally, I start in a notebook, drafting out everything I know I want to have happen in the book, and if it’s a series, things I know I want to have happen in the series. This is where I will map out the magic system I will use, as I write predominantly some form of fantasy, the governmental system, sociopolitical backstory and major historical events. Not all of this will ever make it into the actual drafts. It’s just stuff I want to know in order to shape the narrative. In my most recent series, I mapped out a ten thousand year history with several distinct ages and a cast of dozens of immortals with a distinct hierarchy and social environment full of rises, schisms, falls, and betrayals, and literally none of that made it into the trilogy.
Once I have spilled my messy and loosely connected thoughts about backstory and power structure onto the page, I start making annotations, which thought goes into which book, if they even make it into a book, and then refining as to which thought goes into which quadrant of a given book. From these annotations, I generate a detailed outline, identifying everything I want to have happen, chapter by chapter, for each quadrant of the book.
This is how I approach a fictional book. For a non-fictional book, this outlining process is not optional. In fact, it is critical, and your outline is one of the strongest pieces of your eventual pitch to secure representation and an eventual publishing contract. That’s because with a non-fiction book, you don’t have to actually write the whole book to get a book deal. You just need to write the first three chapters and have a compelling outline of the rest of your book. The outline is a non-negotiable part of the process. Even if you’ve written the whole book before seeking representation, they will ask to see your first three chapters and your outline.
So, all of this happens before I even write word one in an actual draft of the novel. I spend as much time pre-writing my novel as I spend actually producing the first draft, at least. Part of the reason I can get a first draft out so quickly, without having to stop in the middle and readjust plot points and rework character arcs and whatnot, is exactly because I have such a robust outline of the direction of the draft.
When you do get to writing, realize that the pace of your writing is your pace, and try not to compare your production rate to other writers. I wrote my first novel during National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, which happens every year in November. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to produce a fifty thousand word draft in thirty days, which averages out to producing 1,666.6 words a day. This is a pace that can be difficult to maintain, especially if you are balancing your time with work, kids, or, should you be one of the lucky few, an actual social life.
The key to producing a final product is to keep working at it. Every day, commit to putting words on the page. Neil Gaiman has famously said that he wrote his award winning novel Coraline by writing like fifty words a day for a year or so. Personally, I aim for between two and four thousand words a day. Whatever the pace you can find time for, the critical part is that you continue getting some words on the page every day. Whether it takes a month or five years, putting words down every day will eventually see you with a finished first draft in your hands.
After you have finished a first draft, the hard work actually begins. First, take a minute to recover from the valiant yeoman’s work you have done in creating a finished draft. Step away for a while, a couple weeks, maybe a month or two. Read something you love, maybe something that you would like your book to resemble when it’s finally finished. Note that this is not the time to send your book out to whatever first readers you might have lined up. First drafts are ugly, and not for sharing.
Once you have sufficiently recovered and you have a freshness to your step, return to your book and read it once, all the way through, without making any edits or changes. You can take notes along the way, but first see what you have actually produced with your now refreshed eyes. I export a copy of my draft and send it to my Kindle, where I can read and make highlights and notes easily as I go.
What notes am I taking? Well, I’ll log typos, because I can’t not, but that isn’t what this read is focused on. This read is for the big stuff. How is the pacing? Are my characters relatable? Do my plot points advance the story? Is the action resolved by the choices of my characters? Does the story start with action? Are the scenes in the best order? Is there any foreshadowing? Is the writing level appropriate for my intended audience? After this read, you go back to make the big changes, which can be the hardest to make. Anyone can see something like you shouldn’t write ‘the the’, but seeing the bones of the story and figuring out how to make it stronger is a real challenge. This will be made easier if you have read a lot of good books, but only a little. Analyzing the structure of a book is a wholly different mindset than losing yourself in the narrative. This big picture edit, called a developmental edit, might be asking a bit much of yourself. There are developmental editors who you can contract to consider your draft and make suggestions for these necessary changes, but prepared to drop over $500 on such a hire.
After you have finished with your developmental edit, now you can go back through with a fine-toothed comb to catch all the little things. This is where you consider smaller issues, like is this sentence flowing well, or is this the best word for what I’m trying to say. Is my sentence structure varied, or do I start each paragraph with the same word. This is called line editing, and the goal is to make your book as smooth and readable as possible on a line-by-line level. There are also dedicated line editors you can hire, likely for less than you would pay for a developmental edit.
Finally, you get to the niggling detail work most of us probably think of as editing, checking the grammar and punctuation. This is called a copy edit, and before you attempt to take such a look at your work, I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with a style guide. There are several you can choose from. Personally, I favor the inestimable Benjamin Dreyer’s stylebook, Dreyer’s English, for reasons I detail here. On thing you can be sure of is that you will not catch all the errors. Again, you can hire a copy editor, and frequently line editors will do both, and even professionals will not catch everything.
Now, with your three edits done, you are ready to send your book to your early readers. The best early readers are readers who like the genre you have written in and who regularly read in said genre, as their sensibilities for what is or isn’t working in your book will be most useful. Be sure to give your readers clear guidelines as to what you want them to be looking for, characterization, how engaging your book is, typos, anything really. Personally, I have some reader for typos, others whose opinion I value on structure and characterization, and some that I have read it just because I know they will give e me encouraging and positive feedback. One thing to keep in mind when getting reader feedback is that criticism of your work is NOT criticism of you as a person, no matter how much of yourself you have poured into your work. Also, you do not have to take any suggestions from a reader. Neil Gaiman has said, ‘When someone tells you something isn’t working, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’
With your reader notes in hand—which can take months to actually get, as reading and taking notes is a labor of love and will not always be the highest priority for your reading team—you can return to the manuscript and start trying to fix what they’ve noticed. When you have finished what you cn now consider a second draft, you are ready to send it out to beta readers, more objective readers that should ideally not be personally known to you. You can hire beta readers or often trade a read for a read with another author.
After you have finished your work with the beta readers feedback, now you are ready to do one of two things: you can send your query out to agents in pursuit of representation and a traditional publishing deal, or you can dive into the world of self-publishing. After years of querying in vain, I finally decided to self-publish, and I will break down that process in a later post.
That is it. That’s how you write a book. It is hard work, and can take years to finally get to a finished product, but it is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. If you’ve got that story banging around in your mental attic, there’s no better time to start than now!
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