Book Writing For People Who Don't Know Where To Start

I wrote my first short story when I was six years old. It was about a man walking outside of a creepy castle. He gets attacked by a vulture and nobody ever sees him again. That's about it. I still have the story because my mom saved a lot of my elementary school work.

Writing is not that hard. If it was, then a six year old boy wouldn't be doing it. I believe it is natural and normal to tell stories. We use stories to teach lessons and bring clarity to problems that might otherwise be inscrutable if reduced to pure data.

Now, writing well is a different story of course. I'm not saying that writing well is always easy--but I don't think it's as hard as it's often made out to be, either, provided that we don't lose the urge to tell tales.

I kept telling stories and writing things down, but it amounted to little more than a shelf full of journals and doodles. I did a lot of writing during meetings when I was supposed to be paying attention at work, and I found it much more fun to jot down my own imaginings than to focus on schoolwork during my education.

When I was 19 or 20, I started reading Kurt Vonnegut. The first book I read was called Welcome To The Monkey House. It was a collection of short stories that changed my life. I know, I know, lots of people will tell you that they've been truly altered by a book. They usually don't change, do they?

But I changed. From that day on, I started doing some writing, every day. I wrote with purpose, although I didn't yet know what the purpose was. I wrote because every time I read a page of Vonnegut's writing, I got the sense that he loved to write. The joy of the creative process came through to me in every paragraph, even though many of his books treated very serious themes, if in a goofy manner.

I knew I liked writing, but now I set out to see if I could love writing. I wanted to work on some longer projects.

I was determined to get my daily writing in. And if I could just make myself sit down, then I could do it. The words would arrive on the page. I'm not saying that good words arrived every time, or even most of the time. But if I could just avoid the other distractions and put in the time in my chair, I could have some fun. That's how I kept making progress: by keeping it fun.

Much later I would read a book by Steven Pressfield called The War Of Art. In this book he says that real writers know that the hardest part about writing isn't composing the sentences, paragraphs, and pages that make up a book. Sitting down in the chair is the hardest part.

If I had read it back then, I would have agreed wholeheartedly. It didn't take long before I hit my first real stretch of writer's block.

Writing a longer project was much harder than whipping together a sloppy short story or a blog post. It was challenging enough that I decided to read some books about how to write. One book turned into two, and two books turned into a dozen. By the end of that year I had read so many books about how to write that I had neglected to write much of anything myself.

"This is research," I told myself. "I'm almost ready to get back to it, I just need to learn a little more."

I had let my daily habits get interrupted. Once my word count dropped, I was out of the routine. I was no longer producing good or bad writing because I wasn't producing anything at all. I had wrung my hands and over-analyzed for so long that I was essentially needing to start over completely. 

I committed to finishing the novel. I only knew the broadest strokes of it. I had a couple of characters in mind, about 10% of what would be the finished plot, and I was terrified--I was so scared of wasting time. I had forgotten why I wanted to write to begin with: to enjoy the process and see where it led me.

I haven't done a lot of things I'm proud of in my life, but this time when I made the decision to commit to my daily writing schedule, I stuck to it. I did not concern myself when the story turned and twisted on the page. I didn't despair when it felt like I was writing the crappiest book in he world. I lost characters I thought would be fun to write and new characters showed up to say hello unexpectedly.

I had never had so much fun in my life. For the first time I was truly losing myself in the act of creating something just for the thrill of doing it. 

And a funny thing happened: even though I was only writing a page or two every day, the file got bigger and bigger. After a few months of steady work, I could not believe how many words I had written into this same story.

I would finish my novel two years later.

This is going to sound irritatingly simple, but it's true: books are written one letter at a time. Letters become words, words become paragraphs, paragraphs become sentences, and then one day there are enough pages and the book is done. First you make the mess, then you clean it up.

I ignored my own advice for a long time, even though I read them in the same books I was reading that were teaching me about writing. I believe 100% that a wannabe writer will learn more about writing half a page every day for a year than reading every book about writing in existence. I truly do.

If you don't know where you're going, it's easy to make progress. In the middle of a circle, you can just start walking and you'll be on your way. Do not stress about where the book will take you if you are writing fiction. If you're writing a non-fiction book that is heavy on research, I would still urge you to get some writing done every day, just to stay in the habit.

Above all, I believe that writing should be fun. The easiest way for me to make it fun is to do it often, because it is impossible to feel bad when obvious progress is being made. Who doesn't like to complete tasks? Writing a book was one of the most rewarding tasks my brain has ever helped me accomplish.

I cherish the time I spent. Now I look at the (self-published) book I wrote and wonder who the person was that could write 450 pages just for fun.

Just start walking and you'll arrive at a destination. Have a good time along the way and you'll never feel that the minutes were wasted.