Anybody can write a book.
The majority of us have computers and word document on our laptops. So why then don’t people who have a story idea or a certain topic to discuss just write a book? Well, the truth is there is a bit more required to write a book.
But it is not that hard in all honesty. You can learn how to be productive enough to write a book, and how to be consistent enough when you have started your book. Then, how do you do the step by step process to write a book?
In order to write a book, you must first get yourself a strong motivation that will allow you to write consistently over a long time span, then when you are writing consistently you must focus on improving your writing skills through practice, drafting and editing. Finally, you must show your book. This can be to friend’s, schoolmates, publishers, or a writing competition. it does not matter. Just put yor work out there.
Again, I know. Mouthful. But what you must understand is that in spite of how long this looks, it is actually just 3 simple stages which are a one time implementation.
After you’ve implemented them, you never have to do so again.
What Writing A Book Looks Like?
Writing a book follows 5 stages; inspiration, planning, research, drafting, and editing.
The first stage of writing is the inspiration stage. The inspiration stage is when you get inspired (shocker) to write a book. Maybe your own personal life, or the life of someone you know is so dramatic, you wish to write a book about it. Maybe its a song.
Even if you were sitting there and you suddenly realized something about the relationship between the French revolution, and the Meiji Restoration’s similarities. It does not matter. All that matters is you think to yourself. “”This should be a book. Who can I get to write it? Wait… why don’t I write it?!”
Then there is the planning stage. This is where you flash out your idea to a massive cohesive story, or argument. You could do an outline if you prefer detailed plans, or you could just dot down random scenes, and ideas that come to mind if you prefer being a pantser.
This is followed by the research stage. In the research stage, you will have research the topic of your book. You could read other books, websites articles, or physically go wherever you need to go, and experience the phenomena yourself.
This research is necessary to augment your planning, as it will make everything much more realistic.
After that you will have the drafting stage. This is when the author does the actual writing/ typing of the book. This is the longest stage obviously, and it is also the least exciting for others, but the most rewarding for others. After a few months, you will have finished your manuscript.
Finally, we have the editing stage. After your book is complete, you will look at it and realize that it is one of the worst atrocities of modern warfare. You must then do developmental editing.
This is when you observe the story as a whole (the characters, the plot, the setting, and the laws of the world. In a non-fiction, you will be looking at the structure of the arguments), and try to see if they all fit together, and naturally lead to the other.
When all that is complete, you can do line editing. This is when you look at the sentences, and try to see if they make sense. You observe the metaphors, the spelling, and the words people use.
This could be draining, and completely unrewarding as you do it. When you are done though, you will be very satisfied with your efforts.
This is how your average author writes and completes their book.
How To Write A Book?
1. Start Writing And Be Consistent
The first thing that you do before you write a book is build yourself so that you will be consistent, and you will keep writing for up to a year.
The hardest part about writing a book is not necessarily coming up with a story.
Its not even writing “prettily”, since most people could learn just how to do that just with practice. The hardest part is instead getting yourself to sit down, and write everyday. The reason why this is so hard boils down to the main misunderstanding about writers.
People believe writers write because they enjoy writing.
That’s true for some authors. It’s clear that writing for them is a passion. For others though, it is not so.
In fact, a study conducted found that mental disorders are extremely high amongst authors, which tends to happen due to how stressful the whole writing experience is for them. Yet they manage to finish their book, and begin writing another one again.
Why? The answer is simple, and it is why most people can’t handle writing.
Authors don’t write because it is fun. They don’t write because they will get paid for it. They don’t even write because a book will be finished when they do. Authors write because they are writers.
3 steps you must take to be a consistent writer are; 1 overcome your non-writer mentality, and shortcomings, 2 adopt a writer identity, and 3 build habits that will support your writer identity.
Overcome Your Mentality
Most people place writing and authors on a certain pedestal, and crucially, they place themselves beneath the pedestal.
This means that they view authors through rosy tinted eyes, calling them things like smart, or hard-working. It’s fine to be nice. What Is not fine is to turn around and start degrading yourself to do it.
The first thing people tell themselves is that they are stupid, so they could not write a book.
The truth is, writing a book does not take intelligence. If you can speak, you can write a book. When you speak and explain yourself, you make an argument. Now, just put that in words and you have a non-fiction book.
When you tell a story about how your day went last week when your tire popped, you are telling a story. Putting that in words makes that a novel. Writing is not about intelligence. It is about basic communication, just put in words.
The second thing people do is they tell themselves they are lazy. This is not true. The truth is people get a lot of things done everyday, but they never notice the things they do because they see that as a part of who they are. A friend of mine would sit down and play video games till late at night, and I could barely go an hour before I tire.
He was also fond of computers, and could build websites practically the whole day. I always got frustrated and gave up immediately. Was I lazy?
No. But I did not see myself as a computer guy, or a gamer. So I had trouble gaming.
The same is true for most people.
If you were to dot out your day, you’d find that there are things that you do which most people just don’t have the stomach for, and you do them everyday without ever noticing that you do them. This is because these things are not what you do, but who you are.
Your identity. You can tire from doing something, and be lazy about it, but you can’t tire or be lazy about being something. It’s constant.
Finally, people will tell themselves that they just don’t have the time.
The truth is, people like Tolkien wrote their greatest epic living in a house with their children, and still having a full time job as a professor. There is always time. An hour a day, or 2 could be enough to write a book. I write 2 hours in the morning, from 5-7, then I do about my day.
The problem is if there is time to do what you need to do or not. For most people, the answer to that is a resounding no.
Become A Writer
Now that we have spoken about how identity allows us to do many things without tiring of them, it is time we talk about building a writer identity.
In order to be able to write consistently, and always make yourself time to write, you must first build yourself a writer identity, so that a day spent not writing feels a bit odd for you.
To build a write identity, you must….
Build Writing Habits
This is where you must use the ideas established in Atomic Habits to build yourself a writer identity. (1) Make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
I could go into details but the best way to help you build these writing habits is with the 5 culprits article that I wrote else where. It helps you systemically create any habit that you want, and after a month, it becomes instinctual, and you can do the habit as quickly as you can do other habits like watching videos, etc.
The habits that you should focus on building are (1) reading habits, and (2) writing habits.
2. Write Well
You must increase your writing skills so that you can write good books.
After you’ve completed the mentality stuff, and you have gotten yourself to be able to write consistently, you will have a new challenge. Now you must learn to write well.
This basically means your book needs to be able to best reveal what you have in mind. Whether people accept that or not is up to them. Your aim is to have people agree or disagree with your arguments, or with your story. What you don’t want is for people to ask “what are you even saying”?
Basics of Writing
The first thing you must familiarize yourself is the types of books that exist out there, and the basics stories out there.
You must understand the type of writing formats, and what characteristics define that specific format. This is a simply process, as it can take no more than one day. If it takes more than a day, I honestly thing you are doing something.
In essence, I like to group writing into 2 main types of formats; poetry, and prose.
Poetry is basically anything written to the tune of a rhythm in totality. Meanwhile, prose is written speech normal speech. The thing is you would not write down two people having a conversation. Instead, you’d write down something with purpose.
The purpose of speech could be to educate you about something, like someone explaining to you how to change the oil in his car (non-fiction). Or it could be to entertain you, like when a guy is telling a story of how he slept with 7 girls in a single night to a girl he likes (fiction).
These two are the very basics of all forms of literature written, and the genres merely describe a type of these two.
Basically, poetry and prose is like a house, and a car. The genres of the poetry and prose are like a building, a hut, a convertible, and a truck. Poetry is the house, while a building (epic poetry) and a house (romantic poetry) is just a type of house. Prose is the car, while a convertible (fiction) and a truck (non-fiction) is just a type of car.
Apply These Basics as You Plan Your Book
When you have learned the basics, you will be able to write a better plan for your book.
Since you already have inspiration, you need to now make a plan/outline of that inspiration. You can merely look into the details of what makes fiction/non-fiction, or poetry. Then, you could look into the details of the genre you want to make.
For example, if you wanted to do fiction, then you should know that there are elements to fiction books; character, plot, setting, POV, and themes. Knowing this fact about fiction, you can create a plan by creating development, progression, and design for the characters.
Then, you could look up how to do an interesting plot for that keeps readers tied to their seats. You could look up how to do an interesting setting.
How to choose the best POV to write in, and finally, how to discover themes in a story. Additionally, you know fiction is covered under prose, so you could also try to figure out how to improve your prose writing. These have all been covered in the blog.
Again, this should also not take more than a day to completely understand. If it takes longer than that, maybe I should commit seppuku.
Draft Your Book Consistently
Now that you have your story’s plan, you may begin drafting your story.
Again, here you will need to check out the 5 culprits blog on how to consistently write everyday. But the cut and dry of it is you must plan the following day the night before, remove procrastination by selecting a specific time and place you must work in.
Then you must remove distractions from the place like phones, or apps.
When you’ve done that give yourself a workflow direction, this way you can actually progress in your writing. In this instance, you’d have to be specific about what you will be writing. What scene, or chapter will you focus on today?
When that is complete, you will need to focus on building up motivation. Spend an hour before each session pumping yourself by showing yourself the goals you want to achieve, showing yourself how you will get there, and showing yourself what happens if you fail.
You do these things, and you will have no problem drafting literally everyday.
But even if you feel the temptation, I heavily advise you do not. Leave 2 days of rest for yourself. For me, it used to be Wednesday, and Thursday. Now, it is Saturday, and Sunday. On these days, your job is to have fun.
I mean it.
Choose something fun an exhilarating. Go to the club. Go buggee jumping. Take yourself out to an expensive dinner at a place. Just do something that will excite you, so that you forget about writing completely, until the 2 days are elapsed.
If fun for you means sleeping in all day, watching shows, and eating snacks, please, be my guest.
Edit Your Book
When you complete your manuscript, you put it away from a week, then pick it up again. It should look really bad if you did it properly.
Now, you need to go over the story, and edit it. The first form of editing is developmental. Here, you go over the stories structure, and the plot. Does it make sense? If not, then try to fix it. If you do not know why, there are resources you can check out. We’ve covered it in this blog too.
When that is done, you go through it by line editing. here your goal is to fix grammatical problems and spelling errors.
Additionally, you want to choose words that enhance the scene, creating proper atmosphere, foreshadowing future events, and fit the overarching themes of the story. This is so college kids can read your story, and wish to die.
3. Show Your Book
Showing your book will allow you to finally accept your writer identity, and people will begin to look at you as a writer.
Most people are very anxious about showing their work to other people, and we have an article for that too. But if that’s you, then it means you are in the right place. That’s why you need to show your work. When you do, you will realize you have grown to become a writer.
Approach Traditional Publishers
For this one, you need to approach a literary agent.
Show them your work, and if they accept you, then they will definitely find a publisher for you. If instead you decide to go find a publisher yourself that’s cool too.
Self-publish
Maybe you could decide to publish your work online.
This way, you get to keep most of your money. Unfortunately, it is a rather complicated process, and you will need to work extra hard editing everything yourself.
Give To Your Family/School
The simplest way to show your work is to just give it to family members, friends, and schoolmates.
Writing Competitions
The best though is to enter writing competitions.
This is because not only will you show your work, but you will also probably get published easier, so number 1 and 2 are also done. Finally, you will make a lot of money if you win. Who does not love a bit of glory money eh?
As soon as you have mastered the 3 steps of writing a book, you will have taken you biggest leap to mastering mastery.