Seven Tips to Help You Write Your First Book
So you want to write a book.
Some authors will tell you there are formulas you can follow that will make the experience quick and painless. Or that seeing a novel through from beginning to end is easy enough if you really love what you’re writing about.
Those people are lying.
For some folks, writing comes as easy and natural as breathing. The difficult part is completing a work—powering through the beginning, middle and end. Forcing yourself to write the connective tissue that ties together all of your favorite scenes. Pushing through writers’ block. Settling in for the tedious process of editing, amending and rethinking. Looking for plot holes and adjusting them, even it means reworking major parts of your story. Tying up loose ends or getting rid of the threads all together when they don’t advance your tale, even if it means scrapping one of your favorite scenes or characters.
Sure, learning how to write well requires a lot of practice, skill and no small amount of talent. But even the most gifted authors sometimes struggle with completing a novel, play or even a short story. Ernest Hemingway himself said, “The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” The same can be said for all creative works.
To write a book, you need to arm yourself with patience, dedication, discipline and perseverance. Some guts, too—eventually, you’ll have to trust in the quality of your work enough to send it off to someone who might tear it apart, and that requires courage and a thick skin. Because even if you think your finished book is as close to perfect as it can be, it will likely be rejected by a publisher – several times, too.
Still interested? Good. That level of determination means you’re just the kind of person who can pull this off. As R.L. Stine said, “They [writers] don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”
Yes, the road to finishing and publishing a book is paved with blood, sweat, tears and disappointment, but the reward for those who make it to the end is well worth the effort. And while there is no magic 10-step guide to writing a book, we can give you seven tips that might make your journey a little bit easier.
Every creative work—books, plays, movies, the list goes on—begins with an idea. If you’re an author, that idea might be a very loose plot. For example, a boy discovers a magical talisman, acquires supernatural powers, and incurs the wrath of the gods.
It might be a scene. Maybe you can’t stop visualizing a girl with blood smeared on her dress, running through a dark and sinister wood in the dead of night.
It might also be a character. Perhaps you keep imagining a chain-smoking detective with a wicked scar on his face, a sordid past and hitmen hot on his trail. You feel there’s a story here; you want to know what he’s done and why he’s on the run, and you want to share it with the world.
Ideas come in so many shapes and sizes. They’re usually vague at first, and that’s normal. Stories do not spring fully-formed from authors’ imaginations, like Athena sprang from Zeus’s head. They begin with an idea that must be nurtured and developed, and which will likely change many times as you work and refine your story. Don’t be surprised if your finished manuscript looks nothing at all like the idea you started out with so many moons ago. That’s part of the process—but you need to start with something.
If you find yourself feeling a little dry in the idea department, scour the internet for writing prompts. Watch a movie or read a book you wouldn’t normally consider. Go for a long walk outside and see what your surroundings have to offer. Inspiration is everywhere, and sometimes all it takes is changing your perspective or breaking out of your comfort zone to discover an idea for a story worth telling.
Once you have your idea, the real work begins: sitting down to write, and that usually means coming up with a plot if you don’t already have one in mind.
“The plot is the toughest job in novel writing,” said author Shannon Baker. “I love creating characters and relationships, the setting, the premise, the general idea of the book. The nuts and bolts and twists, reversals, keeping the middle from falling like a failed soufflé, creating an ending no one saw coming? That is hard.”
She’s right—it is hard. But fortunately there are a few things you can do to make it a little easier. We said earlier there is no foolproof formula or 10-step plan for writing a book, but there are a lot of different approaches you can take to figuring out the structure of your novel and the best way to tackle each part of it. Which approach works best really depends on how you like to write.
Some people are “pantsers” and feel most at home writing by—you guessed it—the seat of their pants. Writers that fall into this camp like to follow an idea wherever it takes them without any kind of outline to guide them along the way.
If you feel more at home outlining the general “nuts and bolts” of your plot ahead of time and using that as a roadmap, you’re most likely a plotter. One of the benefits to plotting is that working with an outline gives many writers a sense of direction and makes it easier for them to identify foreshadowing opportunities early on. Plotting can also help writers avoid potential plot holes that might be difficult to correct once they’ve gotten too far into the book. If this is your first longform project, try the plotting method first. If it doesn’t work for you, you can always abandon your outline and switch to writing spontaneously.
If you’ve decided to go the plotter route, remember one thing above all else: try to keep your initial plot as simple as possible during the beginning stages of your book. Avoid writing yourself off into corners before you’ve gotten the bones of your novel down on paper. What may seem like a great subplot now might clash entirely with the overarching storyline, or might lead you into a tangled web of loose ends that will make the editing phase a nightmare to deal with. Take notes on all the ideas you’d like to explore so you can come back to them later, but don’t clutter your plot in these early days.
The same applies to your cast of characters. Work with a tight circle of key players. Give one of them a major obstacle to overcome early on in the book, and keep challenging him or her until the conclusion of the story. Make sure to raise the stakes as you go, building up to a crisis where all seems lost. Then, finish your book with a resolution—but don’t make it easy for any of your characters to reach it. Once you’ve gotten to that point, you can revisit all those juicy potential subplots you filed away for later, see which ones still make sense for your story, and determine what parts of the main plot you’ll have to adjust in order to accommodate them.
Nothing kills motivation like writers’ block, and when you’re deep in the trenches of your novel it’s bound to happen. Sometimes it’s triggered by burn-out; you’ve been working non-stop and your brain just needs a little break and some time to reset. Or you’ve hit a wall in your plot and you just can’t seem to figure out how to get your characters to the next key event.
Don’t worry. These things happen to even the most accomplished authors. It’s also often the point when many fledgling writers abandon the chase and give up on their novel.
But not you. You’re made of stronger stuff. You’re not going to let a little writers’ block stop you from seeing your story through to the end.
Experiment with different ways to jog your creativity. Make a playlist of music that inspires you to keep writing. Show what you’ve completed to a friend or colleague and ask them for feedback and advice. You may just need a fresh set of eyes to point out something that’s been right in front of you all along, or simply to offer up a new idea from a different point of view.
Most importantly, though, make sure you set a daily word count and strive to meet it no matter what, even if you think what you’re writing is completely unusable and you end up deleting everything the next morning. If you can’t bring yourself to write the next scene in your novel, write about something unrelated—your day, what you see outside your window, last night’s dinner. Just write. Sometimes that’s all it takes to find your way back to the good stuff.
Stephen King said, “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
Maybe your first draft doesn’t need a rewrite, but King’s advice still applies when you sit down to edit your manuscript. Cut out anything and everything that doesn’t create tension or drive your story forward in a specific way. All your reader cares about is whether your main character accomplishes what he or she sets out to do. Whether it’s a backstory, a subplot, a character, a scene or even an entire chapter, if it doesn’t keep your audience reading, scrap it.
Easier said than done, right? We get it. Usually, taking the sword to a project you’ve spent months on and hacking off pieces of it can be heartbreaking, especially if you’re proud of those pieces. But try to keep your eyes on the prize and remember that anything unnecessary, even something as small as a sentence, weakens your writing and makes it sluggish. Nothing kills tension and flow like filler and fluff; you want your book to be a lean, mean, attention-grabbing machine. If you feel really attached to a scene or character that you know doesn’t deserve a place in your novel, keep it in a personal archive but do your readers (and yourself) a favor by pulling it from your book.
Very few writers are ever satisfied with their final manuscript. Even bestselling authors often admit there are things they would have written differently, scenes and plot points they might have changed. This is as natural as getting writers’ block, and you’ll probably experience it after finishing your book, too. But you’ll never become a published author if you don’t send your baby off.
Once you’ve finished self-editing your manuscript as best as you can, once you’ve sent it to your friends and family for feedback and beta-testing, once you feel you’re as close to being done as you can get, send it to the publisher or publish it yourself. Get it out into the world. Don’t shove it into a desk drawer or squirrel it away under your mattress with the intention of publishing it “some day,” because that’s as bad as quitting halfway through. You’ve accomplished something most people never will and you’re so close to being done—it’s time to take that final leap of faith.
You’ve done it! You’ve sent your book to a publisher or you’ve made it available online for readers. It may not be a bestseller. That publisher may send you a letter of rejection. It will be hard and disappointing. You will question your ideas, your abilities as a writer and whether you should have ever tried to write a book at all.
And that’s all okay. J.K Rowling, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Louisa May Alcott, John le Carré, and even Dr. Seuss each faced rejection at some point in their careers. You’re only following in the footsteps of so many other greats. Be kind to yourself and recognize how far you’ve come since you started out with that fuzzy, half-baked idea so long ago. Remember that what you’ve done takes passion, perseverance and courage, and celebrate the fact that you stuck with it when so many others might have walked away. Keep trying and you’ll eventually taste success.
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