How to Write a Book | A Quickstart Guide

It's no secret: Writing a book is hard. Do you want to write a book, but don't know how? Having trouble figuring out where to even begin? Today, we’ll discuss a quick and dirty guide (in 9 steps) to start the writing process and get those gears turning.

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Picking a genre is the first step in writing a book. Don’t base this choice on what genres sell best, but instead, what you like to read. A hard-core fantasy fan writing a contemporary novel is only going to produce a shoddy book – if you even finish writing it at all. 

Are you unsure as to what genres you actually like? Look at your bookshelf and take a quick inventory. If one or two genres outweigh the others, then you can assume that that is the genre you’re into. The main point here is to write for yourself, not the market.


For many writers, endings are the hardest part of any story. Most newbies start out strong but find themselves struggling by the time the ending draws near. So, before you put a single word to paper, take the time to figure out how your story will end. Not how it begins – that can be redrawn and revised indefinitely – but how it closes. Work your way backwards by asking questions like: How does the protagonist reach his/her ultimate fate? What are the catalysts that lead to the close? What was their origin? Your plots will sound much more plausible and you’ll avoid the dreaded cliché endings that plague so much fiction out there.




Characters are the soul of good writing. Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, Jay Gatsby… While the plots in these stories are exceptional, the characters are even more exceptional. Characters stay with readers for generations, whereas sadly, plots can be easily forgotten.
Before you start writing the book, complete the following character exercises:Write a character biography: When was the character born? What is her name? Was she rich, poor, or middle-class? What childhood experiences have stuck with her? What does she like to do in her free time? Answering questions like these will help draw a deep portrait of the character and make her more convincing to your reader.
Next, you need to understand the character’s motivations: What does your character want? What is their ultimate goal? What are her motivations for doing what she does?Then, you need to understand the character arc, meaning the character’s development throughout the story. The essential quality of every good character is change. For example, Harry Potter starts off naïve and ends up a strong, determined, brave adult, while Frodo Baggins is a nobody from the Shire who ends up saving Middle Earth.
Lastly, you must understand the struggle: Character A wants B, but C stands in the way. How A manages to overcome B and C is the heart of any story. For example: Harry Potter wants to defeat the Dark Wizard, Lord Voldemort, but the Ministry of Magic and the holcruxes, and the location of Lord Voldemort stand in his way.
So after you’ve created your characters, we move onto Step 4 . . .











Once you have your characters firmly in place, start creating an outline of the plot. Chiefly, the outline should: give a brief overview of what happens in each chapter, delineate the primary struggle in the novel, show how different events and characters interact and affect each other, all while allowing enough room for improvisation. You don’t have to follow your outline word for word. You can and SHOULD improvise. Just think of it as a rough guideline to hold your plot in place.







The first draft is where you discover the story by yourself. As you write, you’ll find characters and plots growing in directions you’d never thought possible. The outlines you wrote earlier will often be discarded as you experiment with characters, plots, styles and forms. This is a place for you to break the mold and push yourself creatively. Don’t bother being perfect; the faster you can jot down ideas on paper, the better. Eventually, this rough collection of thoughts, ideas, and plotlines will come together into a comprehensible story– after due editing and countless revisions of course. For now, focus on writing – anything.
 






Take a break and celebrate. You wrote the first draft. This is a huge accomplishment, so take the necessary time to reward yourself for all of your hard work.






This is the part where most writers fail. Slinging out a rough draft is easy enough; turning that incomprehensible mess into something readers would want to read takes time, patience and practice. Ideally, you should give yourself a few months between first draft and first rewrite. This gives you the creative distance necessary to analyze the writing dispassionately. Ask sharp, pertinent questions – does the plot make sense? Are the characters convincing? Is the pace too slow? Too fast? Is the writing crisp and creative enough? Is the story fun to read? The first rewrite should take you considerably longer than the first draft. Don’t worry about getting every word right – you’ll take care of that during editing. For now, focus on pulling the rough ideas in the draft into a narrative that actually makes sense.








Editing is the opposite of creative writing. Instead of spinning beautiful metaphors and creating lush imagery, you have to actually delete linguistic flourishes. The amazing adverb you found after an hour’s search in the thesaurus? Gone. Those long-winded, poetic asides? Deleted.To make this murder slightly easier, here are some tips:Minimize Adverb Use: Adverbs are the lazy man’s writing crutches. They reduce into a single word what should generally be conveyed by context. “He walked quickly to the door as Lily pulled into the garage” is not bad writing, it’s lazy writing. Try being more descriptive – “He rushed to the door as soon as he heard Lily’s car pull into the garage”.Use Plenty of Synonyms: This quote from Dead Poet’s Society says it all:
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”Tighten Up: A book is no place for lazy writing. Take out words and passages that aren’t absolutely crucial to the story. As a guideline, your book should be half its original length after a solid round of editing.Get Outside Help: Most writers don’t have the critical distance to edit their own books properly. Consider getting outside help – a professional editor or a friend, beta readers, or critique partners – to look over your manuscript.








You’ve written your first draft, you’ve rewritten that draft, you’ve edited the crap out of it, and now you have a book . So go celebrate! It’s not every day that you write a book, so soak in the feeling of accomplishment and success because reality will hit you all too soon when you realize you have to sit down and do it all over again for the second book. So ENJOY YOURSELF and give yourself enough time away from the computer so that sitting down again is something you look forward to and actually WANT to do. Going back too soon could make it feel like a chore, and you don’t want that!
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Until next time,