Once, my mother told me that she felt her life would be an interesting story to tell, then she told me she’d like that book. Funny thing is, that wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like that.
Most people want to write a book, but hesitate, because they feel like they don’t have the skill, the time to learn the skill, or the patience to make the time to learn the skill.
They don’t trust their ability to write something that takes months or years, when they can barely finish a 800 page essay in English class. But, I’m a magician, and today, I will show you all a magic trick. I make your anxieties disappear, and I will pull a novelist out of your muggle body.
So, how does one write a book?
In order to write a book without experience, the first thing you need to do is teach yourself to have the patience to write the book, then make time to actually write the book so as to learn, and finally, use proper writing skills to perfect your book.
You can only have the patience to learn to write a book by creating a constant weekly/daily writing habit, then you can make the time to write your book by finding it, and marking it out.
Finally, the proper writing skills you need to learn is plotting that allows your story to make use of the 5 elements of writing. Then, you need to improve your writing literary skills through improving your figures of speech use.
Now, you will here how there are two types of writers in writing, the pantsers and the plotters. But I’m here to tell you if you know exactly what these things up top mean, the rest will come to you.
Let’s get to making you know that they mean:
1. Create The Proper Environment
You need to be a writer.
There is the saying, “You are what you do”. So, if you want to be a writer, you need to do writing. This one is the easiest to do, as it ironically has very little to do with typing down words. Instead, it is about creating a writer identity. How do you do this? Simple, you change your internal, and external environment.
Internal will be behavioral change, and the change in your body movement. This means you need to start changing the things you do. For me, that meant I had to wake up every morning, and dress as if I was going to school, but I’m just going to the kitchen table to write.
If you want to get a deeper idea of how this is done, I’ve written a how to be consistent with your writing article.
The external behavioral change means choosing, or creating a room for writing. If you live in a big place, you can choose a certain room. Only ever go there when you are going to write. I never had this option.
So what I’d do is go to the kitchen table, and while my family sits behind me watching TV and making noise, I’d be sitting there, all dressed up, and start writing. For privacy, i faced the table to the wall, and wore my headphones. In those times, I always felt like someone else entirely.
2. Create the Habits
In order to become a consistent writer, it would help to create writing habits.
Now that you’ve begun to behave like a writer, its time to start being a writer. You do that by creating writing habits.
A simple habit that you could learn is waking up early in the morning, and if you optimize the additional time you have, you will be able to 10x your productivity in the morning.
Atomic habits is the go to book for habit creation. There are 4 steps to creating a habit.
- 1- Make it obvious. So this means the night before you should create the area you will be writing in. Clean of the desk, and place what you will drink from, drink from, what you’ll rest your back on, and anything else you think you’ll need.
- 2- You need to make it attractive. This basically means you should do something you like while doing the habit. For me, that’s listening to music, ASMR, and eating specific foods, like energy drinks, or sweet cakes. Look for something you enjoy doing that you can do absent mindedly. Then, stop doing it and only do it when you write.
- 3- You need to make it easy. What you need to do is create a writing progression. Say if you write a sentence that is A. When you write a paragraph, it is B. A full page is C. 2 Pages is about D. A scene. is E. And a full chapter is F. Then, aim to write only on level A. It you get bored, increase to the amount when you feel tired. This strategy allows you to always feel like you’ve done something even if you write something extremely easy. For example if you write only a sentence, you can say I wrote a level A today, and you will be content. What you want to do is write always, until it becomes boring if you do not write.
- 4- Make it satisfying. Try to write down the goal for your next writing section the day before. When you finish writing, you need to then cross out the goal. This will make you feel very satisfied. Progress makes people feel satisfied.
3. Do Warm Ups
You will need to do warm ups write before your writing session.
I already mentioned how you should have a writer identity, then how to have the habits of a writer. The next is how to activate your writer mind. You can do this through the use of rituals.
An hour before I write, I watch authors I wish to embue, then I start to write. Or, I will read a chapter, then I will start to write. Sometimes, I spend time going over the scene layout, or over the sentence I will write first, tryign to find the best words to use.
For you, you can either take the things I do, or do your own.
As long as it puts your mind in a book zone, where you feel comfortable writing, then that is enough. The warm ups a just to get you in the headspace for writing, and without them, you will sit through your writing session, and when you are done you will feel depressed.
This disappoint is something you will want to avoid, so next time, you will avoid any expectations for yourself so you don’t disappoint yourself again. Before you know it, you have no goals to reach thus no satisfaction, and you give up your writing.
Don’t be this guy.
4. Rest Your Mind
You will need to take proper amounts of rest to recover your strength.
Now, in case you did not know, willpower is limited. Think of your own physical strength. When you lift something for too long, your hand tires, and you will have to put it down again. This goes the same for willpower. When you do a task, or force your will to make you concentrate on a single task like writing, you are holding up a weight. Eventually, you must place it down.
But unfortunately, most people do not do this.
They will either purposefully continue holding up the taks by forcing themselves to concentrate and write even when they should not. Or, they will place their work aside, and do something else, but their mind is still on writing, and they feel guilty for not continuing the work. You really shouldn’t. You should stop working, and relieve yourself of residue thinking energy, by focusing on something else.
If you do not stop working, your mind will tire throughout the night, and by the time the following day feels you will feel a strong ache in your heart at the thought of having to write again. You won’t feel the excitement, just how tired you are. So, how do you shut of your mind.
You will need a cool off rirual. You already have your warm up ritual, now you need a proper cool of ritual. For me, after I finish the work for the day, I save the work, then i close word. I then pack away all the things on my table, and I sit down, and clap my hands while sighing hard.
One clap. If I look down and there is nothing to pack away, I have completed the work for the day. After that, I go hang out with friends, watch TV, or just do whatever fun happens to reach my mind at the time.
5. Practice Deep Work
You need to practice using your deep concentration.
There is no book better for this then Deep Work. Basically, we humans have different forms of work; 1 we work absent mindedly. These are things like counting works, ordering work, or something like that. 2 there is the deep work.
These are work that need us to be cognitively engaged. These are things like essay writing, working mathematics. Or, writing books. You will need to master your deep work whenever you want.
This can only be done when you train your mind to concentrate more. This means embracing boredom whenever you get the opportunity. Allow yourself to sit without playing on your phone, and let your mind be bored. Then, when you are writing, you will need to engage your full mind in the task.
6. Enjoy the Process
You still need to reward yourself.
If you manage to do these things for more than a week, you will have to reward yourself.
The fact that you have fun while you write by fitting in your favorite habits does not mean you should not reward yourself after successfully achieving your task.
Remember, your task now is not to write a Nobel prize book. it is to come back, and write every week. If you manage to do that, you deserve a big reward, so give yourself one.
Also, you should take breaks.
A mistake that I made and a few people I taught did was to be too excited when they saw they could write consistently for days, so we tried to write everyday. if you can manage that, you should. But for beginners, I advise you leave out 2 days to rest, even if you don’t want to rest.
If you don’t want to, then rest by doing some other productive thing, like reading how to write theories. But you must have days of.
7. Create A Book Outline
Finally, you must outline your book.
The first technique you need to learn in proper writing skills is outlining your book.
This is because you probably already have an idea of what you want to write. Outlines serve a number of purpose. First, they tell you how the story is going to go and how far you are now. Secondly, they contain your inspiration.
Finally, you will remember we spoke about making it satisfying. There is nothing more satisfying then seeing how far your story has gone thanks to your work.
To write your outline, there is an article for that. However, in summary, you need to first write out all the scenes you have in mind. If you know the ending, write that down too, and you will be done. When you are done writing the scenes, you need to write your character’s development.
This is a far more complicated topic and you will need to read another article for it.
Once you have that, you will know where each scene fits, and what scenes are missing. But make sure you plot out the intro points for the outline, second plot point, where the hero starts struggling in the world, the mid point where things turn positively for the character and they start winning, the fourth point where the character falls into despair after a horrible failure, and it is darkest.
Then finally, the climax where the character goes up against the big bad with what they discovered at their lowest, and they win. Then the resolution. For all stories, even none violence such as romance, it acts out the same way.
For non fiction, you are ready to do an outline on points that strengthen what you said earlier.
8. Do Research For Your Story
Following your outline, you are in the perfect spot to do some research.
This would be a good place to begin researching your stories work, or if you are doing none fiction, you can begin doing research for the world.
After the outline, you know what happens, and the rough draft of the locations that need to be there. You can do research for those locations. For non-fiction, after the outline, you know your main points.
You can do research that proves your points, or research that defeats your points, and try to build them up.
9. Set Goals For Your Story Writing
Finally, it would be very helpful for you if you were to set more concrete goals.
So, you have the write identity now, the writer habits, and basic book writing skills, this would mean you are ready graduate to a more intermediate level. Now, you want to do more than just write, and write good. Now, you want to write faster, so that you can actually see you work finished.
Then, you will want to set the goals you wish to observe in your writing. Set a goal of how much you thing you can write in a weak, the bare minimum. Then count that out, and set a date where you should finish your writing.
Then, tell your friends, and family that you are writing a book for that time, and see if they are there to learn. You can do the opposite too, and see a date you want to finish writing, then set out to see if you can catch it.
That’s what I am doing now. Seeing your progress over the months will get you closer to the bliss and joy of being a writer.
10. Just Write The First Story Draft, and Don’t Try To Make It Perfect
Just vomit out the book, and be done with it.
As you are writing the first draft, even after all these preparations, be prepared to see something bad.
Joe Abercrombie often calls writing his first draft, vomiting out onto the page. Then he sifts through it and sees what he can salvage, or what he will have to remove entirely. You need to have the same mindset on your first draft.
Do not worry about pretty writing, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, or even some plot inconsistencies. Just try to write out what you wrote in your outline. Try to add meat to that outline skeleton. When you are done, you will have a proper book to work on.
11. Don’t start New Books
Trudge on soldier. Stay on the frontlines.
Do not feel disheartened, and begin a new book.
Let me show you some of my clairvoyance skills. You will struggle with the plot, you will struggle keeping the story liens together. Then, you will struggle keeping your arguments together. You will struggle. But make sure you write and finish your first draft.
You should have a goal with your first draft. Try to make the worst piece of writing anyone has ever seen before in that genre. And just keep on writing that worst piece of writing, because otherwise, you will not be able to learn the next important part about being a writer.
12. Edit Your Story
When you are done writing your book, you will need to start really writing it.
Finally, you have to Edit your book. A commonly misunderstood stage of writing is the editing.
People think you write, finish, then edit. That is not true. Drafting is not writing a book. Drafting, editing, re-editing, reviewing, and re-editing again is writing a book. All books. This is how it is always done. And to edit, you need 2 stages; developmental editing, and line editing.
Developmental editing is when you have finally finished the drafting and you read the story, then you find it needs fixing at a story level. If you drafted properly, the character arcs will not make sense. Some character’s actions will feel weird.
Sometimes, the characters at the end will not feel like the same characters at the beginning of your story. And the story itself may feel different. So take a pen and paper, and write down everything that happens in each of the 5 parts using a single line. Then you will see what needs t be fixed.
Fix it using the outline. Rewrite on the outline the actions that must be taken to make the story more congruent. A similar proses goes to non fiction. Go over the text and write out all the main points you were trying to make. Fix the ones that don’t fit anymore, and rework most of your arguments to fit around the evidence you found.
Then, you rewrite.
Then there is line editing.
You will have to developmental edit a few more times before finally, you will start to see something that is not half bad. Something that may even have been half decent as a movie. But unfortunately, it is a written work.
A poorly written work at that. So you go over the thing, line by line and try to add atmosphere to the story. Add suspense in the scenes, and make your story that much more engaging.
Once you have mastered these, I swear you will be that much closer to mastering mastery, and mastering writing your books.