What’s the best way to write a book?
In total I’ve written four books. Three of these are technical books, and I promote completely separately to my fiction, but a lot of the same principles apply.
William Bernhardt asked me a question today, it’s something I see people asking a lot in different forms on Twitter,
Now, I don’t know what’s the best way is — that’s a very subjective thing, but I can talk to you a little about how I approach it and the whys. How’s about that?
Writing a book is a long process
Yes, let’s start with this one! Because a lot of people seem to forget this one, or have been lied to about it.
There’s this impression that you can knock out a book in about a weekend! This seems to have been propogated by a lot of TV murder mysteries where someone is on a weekend retreat to write their next novel.
Writing a book is a sizeable project. Melody Harper’s Moon came to 80,000 words and 450 pages. A lot of other authors I know produce 150 page novellas. I’m actually a big fan of short books, and would love to go that way on future projects. So those books are probably about 30,000 words.
If I go hard out, I can probably do about 3,000 words in an extended evening. The more I write in one go, the more mistakes I’ll make, but I don’t worry about that to start with.
So flat out, to write a new Melody Harper book is going to take 30 days MINIMUM.
Well, I’m not going to work flat out — amongst other things it wouldn’t be fun, and I’d also have writer’s block! The key thing is to know from the outset it’s going to be a big commitment.
Plan it out
I tend to start out writing with gathering all the information I need and do research ahead of time. I’ve ended up doing things like researching how Lunar and Mars colonies will works, effects of low gravity, how periods are affected in space, how in vitro fertilisation works.
I need this to swirl around my head a while — I find just letting it brew and collecting notes helps. Walking really helps me play around with ideas, and see where I go.
I then construct a storyboard like this of the key events of the book. [This will obviously contain spoilers]
This gives me an idea of my key scenes and moments for the book. I will often then start writing these scenes out in whatever order I fancy. This is actually a lot of fun. But it will give me the key dramatic moments of my book and an initial skeleton.
I’ll sometimes find as I write some up, I have ideas for other scenes or even notes that “before this you need to include X”.
This planning really helps me (more on this later).
Write regularly and whenever you can
For Melody Harper’s Moon, I would actually write on the train into and from work — I would just email the work to myself, and stitch it in of an evening into my main manuscript. It would help me clock up a few hundred words.
I’m now using Google Docs, and finding using a Chromebook is superb for keeping writing.
You need to try and get into a routine for writing a few times a week — I’m good with evening.
But it’s also important to give yourself time off.
Stitching together
Once my framework is in place, I go right back to the beginning, and start writing the book from start to finish. This is where I’m currently at with Melody Harper’s Baby.
With the key scenes created I’m able to build up to them, creating small moments of foreshadowing and trying to avoid things coming out of the blue. But I have a clear sense of direction at this point.
Knowing what’s to come, I’ve occasionally played around with things, including the order of key moments because “it will work better this way”.
Writing is an error prone business, I know I’m going to make mistakes, but try not to be too fussy about it at this stage. I might keep tweaking a paragraph and in several drafts remove the paragraph altogether.
If you’re focusing on details, you’re missing the flow of what you’re doing. I actually have an exercise in my coaching toolkit on just this!
As I tell friends, everyone likes to mock you about using there instead of their, like you don’t know the rule. But when you’re writing, mistakes happen, there’ll be time to sort that later.
80,000 words done is not done
The most heartbreaking moment is when an author writes the last word in their manuscript, and realises they’re not done. They’ve just completed the first draft!
Still, try and find time to celebrate this milestone, many don’t get here. And try and put it away for a week to come fresh to it.
You then need to go back to the start and go through it, sharpen the language, check for inconsistencies, maybe even use Grammarly to nudge your language useage (I do). This might take another few goes.
You then need to give it out to readers. My first beta reader had a simple brief, “tell me if the story works, and you believe in the relationship”. I didn’t want spelling or grammar, I needed to know the story worked.
There were issues — minor ones, but they needed a few more rewrites. I then sent out to a larger pool of folks. Sometimes there was information which I thought I’d conveyed and needed to be written more clearly.
Someone else suggested moving the reason Melody writes a journal to the front of the book — she writes it because she used to use it with a therapist to review what was going on in her life.
In total I needed to get through about a dozen drafts on this basis. Not everyone was a major rewrite. Finally I was happy enough to publish.
Don’t get sidetracked
We have talked about what a major commitment writing a novel is. Nothing is so certain as when you are working on a book, you’ll come up with an idea for an even better book.
You need to try and avoid these distractions. It’s hard enough to write one book, but two in parallel is very difficult.
Try and have a document folder on your computer for ideas, but this should be a “parking lot” where you don’t work on anything until your work in progress is complete.
That said, it’s okay to take very small side projects. For me, I’ve stopped writing for a few weeks to focus on some small projects (including this blog) and will be picking up again probably over the weekend. I needed some time off, and I’ve not started anything big.
Even though I’ve a great idea for a musical about dealing with end-of-life of a loved one.
