How do I start writing a book?

 A book is nothing more than just a bunch of words on a few hundred pages. It can’t be that hard to write one, right? Most people don’t like doing taxes since it takes hours to complete. Imagine if your taxes took you a minimum of six months to file. Writing a book is a long laborious process that isn’t just writing out a story, it involves rewriting and editing and many times you never feel like it’s ever complete.

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Many people dream of writing a book someday. In the United States about 15% of the population has started writing a book. Of those only about 6% make it halfway through. Those who keep pushing might become published and about .15% of people in the U.S. are self-published. About 0.001367% of the U.S. population are published traditionally. If you make it to the point of holding your book in your hand no matter who publishes it, you are in small company. It might not feel that way when you see just how many books are published weekly and yearly, but authors are a rare breed.

4 million new books were published in 2022. A little over half of these books were likely self-published, which partially explains the huge numbers. If it takes 4.5 hours to read the average book, that means it would take you over 2,000 years just to read the number of books published in one year! - Zippia.com 

Completing your manuscript is one of the most fulfilling accomplishments that you will ever feel and even if people don’t like to read books, they will be amazed that they are standing in front of a published author. One of my first blog posts was, “How do I get motivated to write?” This is an important piece of not only starting a book but making it to the finish line. I followed that up with, “How do you get your ideas for stories?” You might have all the motivation in the world but without a good starting point you might end up staring a hole through your computer monitor. 

These previous posts help lay the foundation for this one that is merely how to start writing a book (like this post has already seemingly become). One would think that sitting in front of your computer with a coffee machine next to you while you focus on cranking out your book as fast as possible would be a good start. It might be for some, but this is why so many books go unfinished.

The most important thing that I recommend is laying the foundation for your book. You might have gathered some ideas for a story, but how will the plot go? Who are the main characters? Who are the minor characters? What kind of obstacles will the major characters endure and what is their role in the book? What is the setting? The timeframe for the book? Who is telling your story? What verb tense will I use to describe things? 

The simplest of questions should also be thought about and explained in writing to help you figure things out and begin to iron out the details and start to craft your story. If not, you'll more than likely hit that brick wall of writing that creates frustration and potentially writer's block.

• Who is the story about? 
• Not just a list of characters, but who is the focus of the story. How will you tell this story and from what perspective?
• What is the story about? 
• This isn’t just the general details of the story, but how will this story feel to the reader. What theme are you trying to get across to your readers and how will you drive your idea, so it is realized and understood and make them feel the lesson or idea.
• When is the story taking place? 
• This isn’t just a year or time that the main action takes place. Will you tell this story or parts thereof as a flashback? Will you tell this story as it unfolds or from another starting point before or after the main action?
• Where is the story taking place?
• Does this story have to take place in this specific location, or could it happen anywhere else? Making a story feel like it only works in a specific location feels more honest to a reader and may require specific knowledge of that place’s culture, geography, and other facets of that society.
• Why are the characters motivated to do the things they do?
• What brings your characters to life? Why are they in your story? How will your readers relate, love, or hate them? Are they believable or are they just stereotypes? Are the specific characters round, flat, major, minor and how do they fit into the story, develop, and ultimately accomplish?

Will you have your entire story mapped out? No. A good writer will use an outline as a guide, but a great writer will use an outline as a starting point for many more ideas that will flourish during the writing process to fill out the story, but without a starting point you will more than likely stall out somewhere along the way. It’s very difficult to just jump in and start writing, and again, this is why so many writers fail to produce anything and struggle to finish a project. I can easily point to a few files in my computer of stories that I started before I was really prepared to get deep into and while they initially began to write themselves I eventually crashed into a wall.

You don’t need to even know the ending or even how the climax will go, but having the basic facets of how the story will flow and how your characters impact everything is an important launching point for your book. I use a dry erase board next to my desk to keep track of my characters along with basic details of them that I want to use within the story. I’ll also note what their obstacle or obstacles are as well as their role within the story. This gives me an idea of how these characters need to impact my plot and will help shape the story. I also keep plenty of notes in separate documents inside of the same folder that holds my specific book files. This might include a general outline or story and plot ideas, information that is specific to plot points that have yet to be written, various research into people, places, or things within the story, and even a character dossier.

Once you begin writing create your own process to how you keep developing the story. In a future blog post I will discuss what elements need to be involved with your plot which helps create markers for progress. These markers help provide a basic outline to your plot where you can begin to fill in the gaps either before or during your writing. The key here is to get preparation work before just jumping into your book. As I mentioned in previous blog posts you need to create a foundation for writing consistently and writing toward goals of your choosing such as word count, chapter count, plot points, etc. This will keep you motivated to write. Taking the occasional break from writing can also keep your ideas fresh and keep you from getting burned out from focusing too heavily on the story for too long of a period. Yes, not writing is a key to writing!

If you have any questions or ideas for future blog posts please feel free to let me know!