So, you’ve got the urge to write? You have an idea that you’d like to turn into a book? You want to see that book on the shelves in your local bookstore?
Don’t wait. Do it NOW.
I doubt that the idea of writing a book just occurred to you sometime during the last few days. You’ve probably been thinking about it for months and quite possibly years. You’ve bought books about how to develop stories and write books. If you’re like me, you read a lot and every time you read a particularly good book—or a particularly bad one, for that matter—you get that itch to fire up the word processor and start writing something.
But you never quite get to doing it. Something else always gets in the way. You don’t have the time right now, so you put that idea back on the shelf, always meaning to do something soon.
I did that for twenty years, then one day I realised that if I didn’t do something about it, it would never happen. I made a resolution, right then, that I was going to write a full-length book and get it published. And I started that same day by thinking about some of the story ideas that I’d had.
You want to write a book? Start now. Don’t tell yourself you’ll have time for it next month, or next week, or tomorrow, because you know as well as I do that you won’t have the time then any more than you do now. Believe me: once you’ve started you’ll find the time; in fact once you’ve got started you’ll have a job stopping yourself, and you’ll always be able to find some time, even if it’s just a few minutes here and there.
Don’t wait until tomorrow. Start now.
I don’t have an idea for a story.
Actually, you do. In fact, you probably have dozens of ideas. The problem is that you’re not recognising them as story ideas, and most of the time they’ve drifted out of your head and been forgotten before you caught them. The trick is to try to become more conscious of them, to be watching out for them, and to cultivate them deliberately. That takes a little practice, but, just like anything else, it gets easier the more you do it. Try it. Do it while you’re driving, or wandering around the supermarket. Watch people, and watch things, and make up stories about them. It’s easier than you might imagine.
Early one winter morning I was driving to work as usual. It was still dark and I saw bright lights in a field off the freeway. It turned out be a crew sinking an oil well, which is nothing unusual in the area where I live. And then I thought: what if they dug down and found something unexpected? A cave filled with treasure? A buried alien spacecraft? Primeval bacteria that could wipe out half the planet?
One story idea I had started with a question: could I write a steampunk story without relying on the alternate history trope? Another began with a place I wanted to set a story in—a city that had a particular feel to it, an atmosphere I wanted to create; the story came later as I imagined some of the people living in this city. Another idea came to me while I was watching a movie and wondered what direction the story might have taken if one particular event had happened differently.
Writers get ideas from the most unlikely places. I’ve heard of people getting inspiration from songs or even just the titles of songs, quotes from movies, newspaper headlines and a thousand other things. One idea I had recently came from something I saw printed on a can of baked beans.
When you get an idea—especially one that you like—write it down. Many writers keep a little notebook with them at all times just for this purpose. I drive quite a bit so I also have a voice recorder that I can use safely one-handed when driving (at least, when I’m on the interstate with cruise control on, and there are no other cars close by). It takes no more than a few keywords so that you can come back to the idea when you have more time. There are few things more infuriating than coming up with a really intriguing idea then not being able to remember it later.
Being honest, most of the ideas you come up with will be no good. But every so often one will grab you by the brain and you’ll just know that it’s right.
They say to Write What You Know. I make shrubberies; that’s what I know.
This bit of advice was one of those that I took to heart—to my cost. I’ve been a software developer since 1979, and the first short stories I wrote were based on ideas that came from thinking about the technology that I worked with. They were awful. They were centred so much on the technology that only other programmers would have had a chance of even understanding what I was talking about, let alone enjoying the stories in any way. Just thinking about those early scribblings makes me shudder.
Don’t take the “write what you know” thing too literally. Sure, you know a lot about what you do for a living but there are a billion other things that you know. You read the news, you watch movies, you read books, you have hobbies. And there is one subject that only you will ever know in any real degree of detail: you. Your childhood, your school days, the places you’ve been on holiday and on business, people you’ve met, the best and worst things that have ever happened to you. Other people you know might have been there when these things happened, but only you saw it from your point of view.
So, sure, write what you know—but remember that you know much, much more than you might think. Just write, and when you hit a place where you need to know specific information about something, that’s the time to do some research. You might be surprised by how much you can write before you need to do that, though.
I don’t think I have the talent.
Next time you’re in the bookshop, take a look around. What do you see? Books, of course. Lots and lots of books. As a ballpark estimate, in my local bookshop the Science Fiction aisle alone probably has something like five or six thousand books on the shelves, and at a rough guess I’d say that means that there are around a thousand authors represented.
Do you think that every single one of those authors has actual talent? From my reading experience, I’d have to say that at least nine out ten of them are not what you would call talented. They’re good, sure enough—but real talent is rare. That’s why we reserve the word talented for those few that have something special about their writing.
If you can spin a yarn and turn it into a story that people enjoy reading, you’ve got what it takes, and the fact that you want to write means that you’re ready to try. Skill? That comes with experience, and from feedback from a good editor. And you never know, but you might find that after all you are one of those who the rest of us call talented. But if you don’t write, you’ll never find out.
Plotters and Pantsers—or, why you should plan before you write.
You have a story idea and you know where your story begins. You know exactly what the characters are going to do and say in the first scene of the first chapter and you want to get it down while it’s still fresh in your mind, so you fire up the word processor and you start writing. Great! At least, it feels great as you throw down those first few paragraphs. Then you begin to lose that momentum. You find yourself stopping to think about what happens next before you can write more. You write more, then you stop again.
Twenty minutes, tops, and you’re at a brick wall. You’ve reached the end of the scene you had in your head and you don’t know what to write next. You don’t know what should happen next, because you didn’t think that far ahead. Five minutes of staring at the screen and you’re about ready to give up.
Sound familiar? Don’t feel bad if it does, because you haven’t done anything that many, many people before you haven’t already done. I think most people who want to write start off in pretty much the same way.
The problem is that you can’t really write the story until you already know the story, in detail, with some fairly detailed knowledge of all your characters and what happens from the beginning of the story to the end. That’s a pretty tall order. There might be people who can structure an entire novel in their heads as they go along, and just keep on going—but if such people even exist then they are very, very rare. The rest of us are, I’m afraid, human; we just can’t do that.
Some people will say that there are the plotters, and the pantsers. The plotters plot the story out, chapter by chapter and scene by scene, thinking about the characters and the pace of the story and every little detail, before they begin the actual writing. The pantsers write by the seats of their pants, working out the details as they go along. Personally I don’t believe in pantsers—I think even the people who call themselves pantsers actually have a plot when they sit down to write. Perhaps the difference is that they just don’t plan things to the level of detail that the plotters do, but then, I don’t know anyone who describes themselves as a pantser so I really couldn’t say.
My guess is that for the vast majority of us, at least 75% of the time spent writing a book, and probably closer to 90%, is actually spent plotting. And the more you plot (within reason, of course), the better your book will be—with better, more rounded and realistic characters and a richer, more detailed story and perhaps even a subplot or three.
I’m not going to tell you how to plot. My own process is rather complicated and it would take a long time to explain, and in any case there are plenty of books that go into this subject in detail. A lot of people say that no two writers have exactly the same process (although I suspect that they have a lot in common) and that what works for one probably isn’t right for another—so telling you my process probably wouldn’t do you any good, anyway. Frankly you’re better off developing your own that works for you.
The point is, always plan your story before you start writing, to the best degree of detail that you can manage (you’ll know when you’re there). Your plan then becomes a map while you’re writing each and every scene; you’ll always know where you are, where you’ve been and exactly where you’re going. Writer’s block? When you have a map, there’s no such thing.
I’m in front of my computer, with my plan, scared to start.
Been there, done that. And I can take a good guess that what you’re scared of is getting it wrong.
Here’s the thing. Nobody’s going to see your writing until you’re damned well good and ready to let others see it. Don’t know how to write the first scene? Then write the second instead, and come back to the first one later. Write the end of the story first and work backwards, if that comes naturally to you—you wouldn’t be the first author to work that way, not by a long stretch.
So write the first sentence, and you know something? The second sentence will be much, much easier, because you’ve cracked the ice and now things will begin to flow. Keep writing until you’re ready to stop and take a breath. Look at what you wrote. Is it junk? Okay, then look at it and figure out what’s wrong with it, and make it better.
You can fix bad writing. You can’t fix a blank page.
Pete Ford, a British expat, currently lives in Colorado. However, his writing and his spelling remain in England. His current work in progress, Dr. Gunn and Mr. Bohemia, a Steampunk action/adventure, is slated for release in November, 2013.