The Creative Process of Writing a Book
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In a recent post (found here), I talked at length about how much it costs to self-publish a book and detailed the various things that I feel are most important in setting your book up for success. In this post, I want to take a step back and talk further about the process of creating the manuscript itself.
Writing, like any creative exercise, is a complicated endeavor. Think about recording an album. First you need some inspiration. Then you need to write the music. Then you need to mix, master, and distribute it.
All of these steps take time. During that time, you’ll tweak and refine the music so that it gets closer and closer to what you’d originally envisioned in your head. The same will apply to your writing.
Yet, instead of mixing and mastering your work, you’ll be employing a few slightly different steps. And while no one’s creative process is exactly the same as someone else’s, here, I’ll discuss the steps that I think are most common, so you have a starting point for developing your own.
So, just what are those steps? Here they are, in order. We’ll dive into each one in more detail in the following sections:
- Come up with an overall idea or theme
- Research your idea and find inspiration (taking copious amounts of notes along the way)
- Organize your notes into major categories so you can create an outline or framework for the book
- Write a draft of your book
- Send that draft to your editor (you’ll repeat steps 4 and 5 several times)
- Publish (when you finally feel it’s ready)
Okay, nothing too crazy there, right? Exactly. The goal is to have a process that works for you, then work that process so you can give yourself the time and creative space required for developing the product you’ve envisioned. Even though these steps are fairly straightforward, there are some nuances to each one. As such, let’s talk about them in a bit more detail.
Come Up with an Overall Idea or Theme
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t have an idea or theme for your book, it’s going to be very hard to figure out what to research, let alone actually write it.
Picking one specific idea or theme helps you hone in on your end goal, creating a target at which you can shoot. It really doesn’t matter what your theme is either; whether you’re writing a self-help book or a sci-fi novel, all that matters is you have a core concept around which you can base your work.
Research Your Idea and Find Inspiration
Once you’ve decided upon an overall idea for your book, it’s time to get to work. Even though researching and finding inspiration might not seem like a daunting task, this one can actually take a lot of time.
Like your high school english teacher always said, you want to know what you’re going to say well before you sit down and start writing. Your research and inspiration phase helps you do just that.
I recommend starting this step by looking for similar books to yours, so you can gauge your competition. Then, read some of those books to see what critical ideas they may have left out or failed to articulate fully.
For example, let’s say you’ve read the ten best-sellers on long-distance running and don’t feel like they discuss the impact that stretching and meditating have on peak performance. Such gaps in the market could help you find your niche and serve as compelling reasons to write your own book.
Another place to look for what’s missing in current literature is in the reviews section. Have any readers of the top-selling books brought to light any glaring omissions or shortcomings of these works? If so, take note of such things and see if you can cover them in your own manuscript.
For example, if you’re writing about the challenges of parenting, and you see that readers have criticized the most popular book on the subject for not talking about how to get through the early, sleepless nights, then maybe you could cover such a topic yourself.
Or, if you’re writing a sci-fi novel, and the reviews on the best-selling books in the category constantly talk about how no one has yet written about time travel back to the 1500’s, then maybe you could use your book as a way to fill that void.
Now, of course, this is your book, not the market’s, so always write what you want to write, not what the market does. Seeing the shortcomings of current product offerings can give you inspiration, however, which can get you moving. Even if you don’t want to cover such subjects right now, make note of them in case inspiration strikes and you decide to incorporate them down the road.
Once you’ve taken a look at the competitive landscape, next, think about your book’s potential style. What kind of messaging do you want to put forth in your work? What ideas or concepts have you heard recently that you’d love to write about?
It goes without saying that it’s not okay to plagiarize, but if you want to take a few simple ideas you’ve heard before and give them your own spin (while giving credit where credit is due), then by all means, go for it.
If you’re writing something that doesn’t include specific facts or discoveries, such as an adventure book, what other books have you read recently that inspired you? What about those books ignited that inspiration? Was it the setting, the characters, or the overall writing style? Write those things down and think about how you could fit similar concepts or ideas into your own work.
Lastly — and I think this one only applies to non-fiction — start digging into some scientific research that you could reference in your manuscript. Citing legitimate sources, such as research studies or journal articles, will make your arguments stronger, especially when you’re just starting off and don’t yet have a reputation as a thought-leader in your space.
For example, if you’re writing a self-help book, and want to talk about brain chemistry, make it easy on yourself and leverage some of the information that’s already out there. It would be foolish to recreate the wheel. It would also be foolish to present facts to the reader that don’t have scientific backing — doing so could even get you into legal trouble down the road.
As you’re gathering all of this information, make sure to have a central place that you’re storing it all. It could be on Google Drive, a notebook, Evernote, or somewhere similar. I like to keep my notes in my iPhone’s Notes app, so I can quickly access them and write something down when inspiration strikes. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, just find the way that works for you.
That brings me to the most important part of the inspiration phase. Once you’ve set your thought-train in motion, your mind is going to be subconsciously thinking of new ideas, even when you’re just performing normal, everyday tasks. For example, some of my favorite content in my first book came to me when I was simply walking around town or weightlifting.
The point of researching is to get the ball rolling so you can purposefully put your mind in this state — the one where it’s automatically working on new ideas in the background for you, without you even realizing it.
Sometimes, you’ll find that you don’t have enough content to start writing yet. That’s okay, and it’s why I advise getting started on research as soon as possible. Once you start feeding your mind some ideas, it will put those ideas on the back burner where they’ll cook slowly and eventually lead to new insights when you least expect it.
Of course, this process can take a while, which is exactly why I say that this step, overall, is more time consuming than you might first imagine. It’s all in the name of quality work however; the longer you give your ideas to develop, the better product you’ll create in the end. Just don’t let marination turn into procrastination. As soon as you feel you’re ready, move on to the next step.
Organize Your Notes into Major Categories
So now you’ve gathered most of the information you want to discuss in your manuscript and you’re just about ready to start writing. Before you actually put any words on the page, however, you’ll want to have an outline or framework for your book.
This applies to both fiction and non-fiction. How can you write a coherent story if you don’t have a beginning, middle, and end? How can you form a compelling argument when your ideas are all over the place? Those are rhetorical questions :-).
You can carry out this part of the process in any way you so choose. For example, you could write all your ideas on index cards and stack the cards containing similar ideas on top of one another. Or, you could do the same thing digitally, in a word processing document.
The only “must” here is that you take all of your ideas and group them into “buckets” so you can start to define your high level concepts. These buckets will then become sections or chapters of your book. On the fiction side, organizing your ideas can also help you create a timeline of events, which you can then break down into chapters.
To keep the analogy of writing a book on parenting going, let’s say you have a myriad of ideas about the following subjects: getting through difficult nights with an infant, deciding what to feed your children, determining how to discipline them, and letting them develop into their own, unique people.
Each subject you come up with forms the basis of either a section or chapter of your book. Depending on how much content you have, you may decide to break each subject down further.
The key is to work this categorizing process until you feel that you have a good enough outline, with enough ideas under each topic. Once you’ve done that, the book will, more or less, already be written, at least at a very high level.
That’s not to say you’ll know exactly what to pen at each turn of the page; figuring that out is part of the fun of actually writing. It’s just to say that if you give yourself some good starting points, it’ll help you churn through your first draft with minimal writer’s block.
Write a Draft
Here comes the crazy part — actually sitting down and writing your book. If you worked steps 1–3 in the process like I advised, then this part shouldn’t be as daunting as it might otherwise seem. You have your chapters (or timeline), categories, and ideas, so now it’s time to just sit down and let it all flow out.
The biggest piece of advice I can give in this step is to just write, without worrying. When I wrote the original draft of my first book, I thought it was garbage; I didn’t show it to anyone. But that wasn’t the point. The point was just to start.
Think of writing your manuscript like you would carving a statue out of a slab of marble. Your first pass-through will be super rough, and that’s okay. At least you started. In your next attempts, you’ll step back and see where you messed up, so you can refine the rough edges and get closer to revealing the final product that’s hidden within the stone (aka your manuscript).
Putting your thoughts on the page freely also gets your mind to the place I talked about earlier, where it subconsciously comes up with new ideas and refinements in the background. This was one huge insight I stumbled upon while writing my first book.
I’d pen a chapter and know that it wasn’t done, but wouldn’t be able figure out why. Then, at some random point in the next few days or weeks, while doing something unrelated to working on my book (be it walking, playing basketball, or lifting), what was missing in said chapter would just dawn on me out of nowhere.
I’d pull out my phone and write that idea down, then integrate it during my next writing session. These refinements got me closer to revealing the statue I knew existed somewhere in the stone of my manuscript.
I think every author will find and approach the actual writing process slightly differently. That’s okay too. If you like your first draft, then by all means, send it off to your editor. It just so happened that I didn’t like mine, so I decided to write it again before showing anyone.
Only you can know what the right decision is for you. Regardless of what you decide, once you’re satisfied with your work, send it off to a trusted advisor. That’s the next step in the list.
Send that Draft to Your Editor
This step, too, is relatively straightforward, but it’s also one of the more difficult ones. That’s because when you’re waiting for your editor to do his or her work, you can’t really make modifications to the manuscript. You don’t want to be changing everything that he or she is looking at — that would make things super confusing for the both of you.
Yet even though that waiting period can be difficult to get through, it can also be rather illuminating. For when you stop wrestling with the ideas in your manuscript, you give your brain yet another opportunity to enter the “subconscious ideation” phase.
When you’re in this phase, make note of any new ideas or refinements that come to you, then integrate them into your next draft (once you’ve received your manuscript back from your editor, of course).
Getting your manuscript back often means that you have a lot of work to do. If it’s an early draft, your editor will undoubtedly mark things up and suggest some major changes, reorganizations, and deletions. That’s okay. This is all part of the “statue refinement” process.
Combine all your editor’s comments with the new ideas you’ve generated during your downtime, then return to step 4 (write a draft). In the early days of your manuscript, you may find that you want to rewrite some things entirely on the next go-round. As you get closer to finishing, you and your editor will inevitably have fewer and fewer things to tweak.
You may also find yourself cycling through steps 4 and 5 again and again. That’s perfectly normal. One thing to note on that, however: sometimes step 4 will mean “write a draft” and other times it will mean “tweak a draft.” Again, this is all just part of the process.
When you’re finally able to look at your statue, and say, “It’s ready,” then you can move on to the final step.
Publish
This one’s pretty self-explanatory as well. I won’t go into the details of what’s required for publishing because it’ll depend on the route you go and the platform you choose.
There are countless places you could publish your book (Amazon, iBooks, IngramSpark, physical stores, etc) and many ways to go to market (traditional publishing, self-publishing, etc).
Whatever the means is, when you’re finally done with your masterpiece, deliver it to the right places, then step back, and watch the money pour in! Just kidding on that one :-) … in reality, this is when the real work begins. It’s time to build awareness and market your product.
I’ll be covering some of those marketing ideas in a (distant) future post. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this one. Happy writing!
Questions? Comments? Drop me a line!
I’d love to answer any questions you have on the creative process, so leave me a comment below. Or, if you’d like to take a look at how my first book came out, you can find it on Amazon, here.
