How To Start Writing a Book
get low to the ground and hide until a good idea comes out into the clearing. Then you snare it, take it back to your hovel, and teach it how to sing ...
Late fall/winter is a very “maybe I should write a book” time of year. Might as well—going to be inside in my big socks anyway, etc. And there’s National Novel Writing Month, which I’ve never done because I have … I don’t know. Sometimes I’m just a hater based on aesthetics.
But every time it comes around, I think, “Ooh, yes, writing books.” I get a little whiff of how exciting the idea of writing a book was before I started actually writing them. (Writing a book, for me, is basically assembling a bedside table collection of coffee cups and banana peels, and working on an imaginary world for so long that when I venture out, I have forgotten how to make normal eye contact.) Instead, wintry time makes the idea of taking on such a task seem suddenly remote and arresting, like a tarantula in a lucite paperweight.
To start writing a book, you need an itch
Nobody who writes books can write a book they know how to write at the beginning.
Why? Because the fun of figuring out how to write the book in your head is kind of the main attraction for the writer. That’s the mystery you’re solving when you sit down to write, and without a mystery, it doesn’t feel important or exciting enough. That’s right—even as you’re writing the thing, you’re reading a kind of ur-plot in which you’re the main character. You’re living a story, and at the end of the story, you have finished the book.
This holds true even if you plot everything and have a totally airtight plan for structuring your book. Even if you’ve written studies of every character. Even if you begin knowing exactly what the last scene will be. It is my totally unscientific contention that you can’t stay engaged long enough to write a whole book unless you’re pursuing something that lies just at the edge of your comprehension. That’s the itch—the question you’re asking yourself. The book is the answer.
Your question might be formal or structural. Prosodic or character-based. Many things I’ve written have explored what I might have been like if I had made a different decision in the past. It might just be an image that you find yourself returning to. But regardless, and forgive me if this seems too obvious to say, you have to have some kind of flicker, obsession, itch, to write a book. (Kelly Link has very cool, useful ideas about how to utilize obsessions.)
The good news is that you don’t have to work very hard to have an itch. You’re a human. Some things make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Some subjects fascinate you. Something in your life makes you viscerally angry and you have no idea why.
The bad news is that you have to be honest about what subjects, images, or ideas give you a rush. They may feel very uncool. Perhaps obtuse and inexplicable. They may indicate that you aren’t the lovely, innocent person you seem to be.
But you have to go with them. If you don’t, everyone will know.
To start writing a book, you need a well-stocked image pond
Here’s my like, #1 professional secret: I keep a list of words I like. It’s a word document with, yes, lots of words in it. I hunt these words when I read. If I’m not finding enough words organically, I’ll go out of my way to find them. (Nature guides and technical manuals are a great source.) If I get stuck, I look at my word list and let my eyes randomly land on two words. When I do, the negative space between the two words opens a little portal in my mind and an image dashes through.
You can also stock your image pond by taking random pictures on your phone that feel like something to you. You can also, of course, make a Pinterest board if you want to, although Pinterest/the whole internet comes predisposed to a certain set of aesthetic impulses, and as such it limits the sense of the available world to a pretty narrow channel. It’s good to go to places you don’t usually go, look up or down in places where you’re usually kind of just bopping along. Walking somewhere you usually drive is good. Walking a path day after day and season after season is also good.
You can also stock your image pond by borrowing a bunch of art books from the library and looking at them. (You can even add descriptive words or phrases to your word list as they occur to you.) I also find it really helpful to watch aesthetically deliberate movies, or watch regular movies in an aesthetically deliberate way.
NB: If you’re going to use my word list strategy, be careful not to plagiarize. That means don’t shark up whole phrases, and quite certainly not full sentences. I’m talking words here: ruby. lakebed. bristle. If you want to use more distinct phrases, there’s a way to do that—but you have to acknowledge that your work makes use of materials from the texts you’re farming. This is totally fine! Poets do this all the fucking time. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the notes section of any book of poetry and you’ll see how it’s done. If your project will acknowledge its debt to these other sources and also limn itself as an engagement with these other texts, you’re golden. If this concept isn’t crystal clear to you, stick to single words.
To start writing a book, you need a little bit of hubris
Just a little! Enough to believe that you have something to add to the world.
The ego has gotten a really unfair reputation in the last little while. I mean, I love Eckart Tolle as much as the next person in the metaphysical aisle of the bookstore, and I think his analogy of the pain body is a really useful one. But I don’t think that even he would say that we’re striving for all people to be continuously awake to our connectedness. To expect that of yourself would be a denial of your experience. Yes, ego is what makes it possible to covet someone else’s success, or compare yourself to every living writer, and it cultivates a certain bitterness. But without it you would probably wander babbling through town at the mercy of random people with your oatmeal dribbling down your chin.
Your ego is the one that tells you to put on your lipstick and sexy underwear. It knows how to drive a car! Or how to throw a fastball, or whatever. The flair and delight of being human is in these things.
It’s OK to want—even to want attention. It’s OK to believe you are capable of swinging for the fences. You don’t have to want it because you’re going to save the world with your book (although of course you might). You can want it because you want it because it would be fun because fuck it. Period.
If anybody ever tries to make you feel bad about having a healthy amount of ego w/r/t writing, just know that they are themselves probably so egoic that they have to hide it by being holier-than-thou. They are using their seeming morality to divide themselves from the rest of us with our hungry little hearts. The only people who will criticize you for writing a book (or writing an ambitious book, or whatever) are too afraid to do it themselves.
To start writing a book, you need a little bit of surrender
Surrender doesn’t mean lay down in the road and take a little gutter nap. It doesn’t mean fall at the first hurdle and stay down. It doesn’t mean you talk yourself out of doing something you want to do because it feels awkward or weird at the beginning.
Honestly, I fucking hate it when people pervert the concept of surrender to mean pliant, slack acquiescence.
Surrender means you agree to what’s here in the moment and act accordingly. Let’s say it’s 12 below and you’ve run out of milk for your coffee. Surrender doesn’t mean you let go of your preference and say, ah me, I suppose I must take it black from now on. Surrender doesn’t mean you stay in your house until it’s warm enough to go outside without getting frostbite. It means you put on a coat, layer up, and go have an adventure. Slightly more inconvenient than it would be under other conditions, but whatever.
It means you let go of the little voice that says, fuck you, this is horrible, I hope you die before anyone reads this, nobody will love you if they read this. You’re the only one who has ever felt this way and the others will surely shun you. You use that word too much. You should honestly become a whole other person before writing this book. You need to do some research. And maybe lose some weight.
Surrender means you assess the way things are and use that information to make your plan. To work with reality, you have to accept it first.
To start writing a book, you need a growth mindset
“Growth mindset” means that you choose to value the process over the product.
It means that if you go roller skating for the first time ever and totally, abjectly, fail at it, children fly past you cackling about how old and sad you are, you fall on your ass unendingly, the parents give you sad little hey buddy you OK down there looks, you go, “Huh, OK, next time I’ll come earlier before these cruel demon children arrive. I saw a flyer for adult skating lessons—that might be cool. Who knows, maybe there’s some really useful information that will make this easier. But I’m glad I tried. It was kind of scary and fun. I’m gratified by the fact that I’m willing to try. And I got to float around in a circle to “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire.”
A fixed mindset means that if you try something and fail, you go, “Huh, OK, I suck and I should never do that again. I will only come to the roller skating rink again once I have completely perfected my form.” A fixed mindset is how you end up re-writing one sentence again and again: Because in your cruel imagination you can conjure the possibility that even a single person on the earth will read this and have shit to say.
To start writing a book, you need discipline
Discipline is made much easier by having a doable plan.
I get that National Novel Writing Month is a fun challenge and a relatively brief period of time to devote to an intense process, but I also think that writing 1667 words every single day can be so demanding that if you miss a day, or three, you might be so demoralized that you give up the whole thing.
The trick to having amazing discipline is setting a low, low bar for yourself.
Your efforts compounded over time are powerful. Time will pass anyway. If it passes while you’re writing 250 or 300 words every day, you’ll have a novel, and it will be done much faster than you’d think.
I have been teaching myself how to play guitar slowly—and by slowly, I mean over the course of, ugh, 10 years. I get all fired up, and I tell myself I’m going to really commit. I make a ridiculous practice schedule for myself, and I have exceedingly grand expectations. It all falls apart after a few weeks, and then I put the guitar away for a year, and repeat the same cycle.
If I had played for 15 minutes every day, I would probably be Joe Satriani by now.
To start writing a book, you need a reward system
Please don’t try to punish yourself into writing a book. I mean, you can do it that way and it will probably work, even! But it’s unnecessary.
I think it’s nice to have a very specific book treat, something which is earned by the completion of the day’s work. I like doing the NYT crossword on my phone while watching TV. I also enjoy extensively reading subreddits that have absolutely nothing to do with my life. It’s a mind-dulling activity, but I like it, and I look forward to it.
Please note that my book treat isn’t doing an hourlong walk or eating a salad. I do those things, too, but they don’t count as treats. They’re part of my regular maintenance schedule.
If you try to con yourself by casting good, regular taking care of yourself activities as treats, you’re kind of punishing yourself without realizing it.
Also, please don’t try to write a book concurrently with renovating your bathroom or studying for the MCAT. For the duration of your drafting process, don’t worry about being the kind of person who bakes fresh bread for all their friends, always folds the laundry, never pays crazy money for a container of cut fruit from the supermarket, always gifts handmade jars of preserved lemons, whatever Martha Stewart shit your mind tortures you with. There are limits to our attention spans and our reserves of discipline. While you’re writing a book, you need to cut yourself a little slack in some other areas.
To start writing a book, you just need to start
The sick, sad truth is that if you want to write a book, you just have to write it. You can figure out a way to structure your time or plot everything beforehand, but these things do very little to forestall the actual writing.
Before I wrote my first book, Marilou Is Everywhere, I did a bunch of really kind of cute, naive google searches. “how to write a novel steps” “how to write a novel checklist” “how do you write a novel” etc. etc. (Maybe that’s how you got here!) The articles and blog posts that I found always annoyed the shit out of me. They were all, Freitag’s pyramid! Rising action! Three act structure! Like … no WAY Marcia, falling action after the rising action? Have a character who wants something? Please.
Past a certain point, the experience of writing a book is going to be particular to you, and nothing anybody else has ever said about their own experience will help you discover the particularities of your own. You have to find out for yourself.
And one last thing—
Don’t make it harder than it has to be
Given what I’ve said about discipline, growth mindset, and rewards, you might have gotten the sense that writing a book is difficult. This is not my intention. It can feel difficult sometimes, and if you’re having a hard day, I want to encourage you so that you keep going. But at the same time, I think writers make much of the difficulties of writing. It’s a little silly.
Your beliefs about the relative difficulty of whatever you’ve undertaken have a way of proving themselves true. If you have decided that writing is torture, and it takes forever and you have to spend ages and ages getting a single sentence right, you will probably have that experience. And if you want that experience, all the better! Some writers have a very BDSM relationship with their inner critic, and so long as it’s fun, cheers to them.
But you can also choose to believe that the writing process is easy, and relate to it as if it is easy, and hold it loosely, and see where that gets you.
Please let me know how it goes! Questions? Let’s discuss!
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