“How do you write a book?”
Lily from Vancouver wants to write a book. She asked me how to do it. And here’s more or less what I said.
To start with you need an idea of what the book’s going to be about. This is the spark that gets you going. (I’ve talked about this before “The Golf Club and the Sponge”, so I won’t repeat myself. In any case, Lily’s already got her idea. Let’s go on.
The next thing you need, I’d say, is an outline of the basic story. There’s got to be a sequence of events that finishes with a satisfactory ending. This isn’t difficult, but you’ve got to have it. For example, ‘boy meets girl and after a lot of trouble they fall in love,’ is one. ‘Child that everyone laughs at finds special powers and saves the world’ is another. There’s actually a very small number of basic storylines and we use them again and again.
Next, you need to think about how you are going to keep your reader wanting to read on until they get to your ending. This is difficult, and I guess many of the successful writers just do it instinctively. You need an idea of what your reader is like - probably they’re someone quite like you - and what’s going to grab them. You might want a lot of suspense, or funny scenes. You might want a lot of fascinating characters. There will almost certainly need to be a central character whom the reader likes, finds interesting, and wants to come through. (Excellent books with unsympathetic central characters do get written, but it takes a special sort of writer to do them well and a special sort of reader to soldier through them and still enjoy the experience).
Now we need to start writing. This is also hard. The first few pages can often seem unsatisfactory. Don’t worry too much about it. You can come back and re-write them later. Just get going.
And above all, you need to keep writing. This is also hard. Try to write something every day, even if it’s only a few sentences. If you can’t write something every day, have a time or times in the week when you do write. Don’t let yourself put it off. Once you stop, you can stay stopped for weeks or months. It’s very hard to start again. Don’t let yourself lose confidence. Confidence is key to the writer. Have faith.
September 18th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Hmmm. You keep saying each step is hard. And that can be true, but it isn’t necessarily true for all people at all times. For me, sometimes the writing just flows, at other times I need to work on something else to get unstuck. And sometimes, I just need to write, even if I think it’s drivel, because I know that sometimes the creativity and the spark comes with the editing and re-writing, not the original brain dump.
September 21st, 2009 at 7:23 am
Hi Carma! I agree with all of that. Sometimes yes, it does flow. And it’s stuff that you couldn’t have planned, and very likely it’s not drivel but the very best you can produce. But does it happen every day? Not for me.
Editing and re-writing is often necessary. I reckon on a minimum of three re-writes for each book, and sometimes it’s reached eight. But I do find that once you are into re-writing, it’s less about creativity and spark and more about careful, careful craftsmanship. And if you do get a surge of inspiration you have to ready to contain it, because it may take you in a direction that unbalances the story you are trying to tell.