Twelve Hundred Words About Writing Eighty Thousand

You'll find no bullshit within.

             I’m not a published author.  I’ve self-published a total of four books and I think I’ve netted about thirty dollars.  I wrote two books before I knew what digital publishing was, and they will remain unpublished because they need to.  I’ve also had about ten false starts over the past ten years.  That is my resume.  I have a vague idea of how to become a successful writer, but it will take time and some investment capital.  As of today, I don’t know a damn thing about how to be successful.

             But I know how to finish writing a book.

             I also know how to finish books from an absolute standstill. I went from writing crappy poems and song lyrics and jokes to writing a book in an afternoon.  I just said, “Fuck it, I’m going to write a book.”  I took a lot of writing classes in college but not a single novel-writing class. I just started. After the first one was a disaster, I bought a few advice books that gave me a few tips.  Those help. A writing book gives toy the feeling you’ve entered a bizarre fraternity.  A subset of humanity that type all of their thoughts, mostly in isolation, in hopes that others will read them and give a shit.

             They’re a bunch of weirdos.  I am one of them.

             Maybe you have had that itch in the back of your mind for years that you want to write a book or at least get some thoughts down.  I can tell you how I did it.  I can’t tell you how to write a good book or a successful book.  You’ll have to find qualified writers for that.  But if you’re a normal person who has that inkling, here are a few things to keep in mind.

             First, no one cares.  Ouch.  Yeah, that sounds brutal, but it's important to accept this right upfront.  No one cares if you plan on writing a book, if you are currently writing one, or even when you complete one.  You could get a few compliments on a job well done, but odds are no one will read it.  People don’t read that much. You have to do it to satisfy yourself. The destination is not the payoff.  You have to enjoy the journey or it's not worth your time.

             Write alone.  This is lifting from Stephen King’s On Writing, but the first part of writing is writing by yourself with no one’s input.  You are the alpha and the omega of the story you are assembling. It is good practice to be solely in charge of making all the life and death decisions.  After you have a completed draft, something coherent that others could read, then you look for readers.  My advice is to only give it to other people who read regularly. Don’t bother loved ones that aren’t into what you’re doing, even if you are dying for their opinion. 

             I also don’t get those people who pop open their laptops in Starbucks and click away at their manuscripts.  I have to assume they aren’t writing anything at all, or they would be at home lost in their own worlds.  Make your own coffee.

             The next realization: You suck.  Hey, I’m not here to mince words.  You probably suck at this.  If you write a great book out of the gate, you should be giving me advice.  The point is to finish it.  If you are only interested in writing a single book, then rewrites will get you there.  If you want to push forward with more, then getting the first couple of stinkers out to the way is helpful.

             Okay, so how to actually do it?  This is the advice that NONE of these books delve into, by the way.  There’s a lot of good motivation and a few tips, but they assume you are a writing machine that needs calibration.  If you really don’t know how to start, here’s what I did:

             I thought about the stuff I enjoy.  I like sci-fi and I’ve always been a fan of time travel.  What about all these books and movies do I like, specifically? I wrote it all down in pen in a ten-cent notebook. The plot twists, action scenes, relationships, and surprises.  Every dumb detail.  Then I thought about a character in this mess.  Someone like me, but not like me.  I had a scene come to mind.  Tossed it.  Had another one.  Tweaked it three times then I wrote it.  It wasn’t the first scene in the story, but I wrote it first because it was what I was feeling.  That’s all I had. One scene.  It equated to a single chapter.  The book had a fuzzy beginning and no ending planned.  It was just a scene.

              Then, and this is the important part, you keep going.  It’s the work of typing.  What a lot of people don’t get as that for most writers, the blueprints of a story are hazy.  They are the bare bones of a few ideas laid end to end.  If an architect handed in plans this vague for a building, he’d be fired immediately. They have to be vague because you keep changing the rules and parameters. 

             This is the truth:  I have yet to complete a book where I didn’t throw the first five-thousand words or so away.  Maybe my third Hank book was the exception because I had so much story banked at that point. The point is to keep typing.

             How do you do this?  You need about eighty-thousand words minimum for a decent-sized novel. The first Harry Potter book, (the tiniest one) is seventy-six thousand.  That means if you can get one thousand words a session, it will take you three months.  You need a least an hour every day to do this.  Sometimes you crank out more, sometimes less.  Here is the important part.  Unless you can set up this schedule, don’t bother.  The notion of taking your sweet-ass time with a novel is insane.  Per the master of the writer’s work ethic, Stephen King, you have to get your draft done in three months. He is 100% correct.  There is something about stretching it past that point that pushes the limits of your interest.  You stop caring or you want to move on.  If you have something resembling a draft, you can proceed to editing and rewrites.

             For help with the building blocks of a fictional story (characters, dialogue, plot), there are plenty of books out there to help you.  My problem was plot.  I needed to beef up the middles or I’d just have a short story. For non-fiction, I will assume that you need to tell the truth, and to remember that specificity is universal. People like the details. 

             Don’t get bogged down thinking that writers are elite. Take a peek at some of the trashy novels littering the Amazon e-book market.  They’re not impressive. Their qualifications are that they finished writing a book.  That’s what you want to do.  If you want to write like John Updike, you’re wasting your time reading my stupid blog.

             So yeah, it’s work.  As far as the original germ of an idea, it helps to handwrite it with messy notes with lines and circles to spread it out and see if it has legs.  Some cool ideas are only part of a story, not the whole thing.  If you want it, it’s doable with time and patience. Like a lot of things in life.

             Remember the words in bold:  No One Cares. Write Alone. You Suck.  Keep Going.

             Etch those in my tombstone, while you’re at it.