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How To Write A Book

Posted by: Teacher at December 11th, 2008

Congratulations on your decision to write a book! I will help teach you how to write a book.

Writing books can be a very rewarding endeavor. It can be financially rewarding in addition to giving you a great sense of accomplishment. Many people decide to become writers just because they love the actual process of writing. Imagine having a friend who will just sit and listen attentively for hours on end while you talk and talk and talk. She never interrupts you. She just listens as you go on and on with your story. That’s what writing a book is like.

Considerations before writing a book:

Ask yourself why you really want to write one. Are you doing it for the money? Do you want to get rich from it? Are you doing it for self therapy? Do you just need to tell your own experience through a story? There are many possible reasons here. You need to decide how realistic your goals are for the book. If you are just doing it for yourself, then just do it. If you are writing it for strictly monetary reasons, there are a whole bunch of things you should know first.

• Many people never actually finish a whole book. Like most New Years Eve resolutions, they start with good intentions, and then proceed to completely drop the ball.
• Writing a book is a lot of work. It takes determination.
• Getting published is an issue all on its own. Consider how many books get rejected. Is it worth it to do all that work just to get rejected?
• If you intend to get published professionally, you might want to write just a couple chapters and submit them for review. If the publisher likes them, you can finish the rest of the book.
• You really need to follow the publisher’s guidelines to actually get published.
• Most books will not sell more than a few thousand copies. (Is it still worth it?)
• If you are serious about it, promoting your book will require even more effort than writing it did. Out of the hundreds of thousands of English speaking authors, very few achieve the status of J.K. Rowling.

Steps to write a book:

1. Create an environment where you can write completely free of distractions and interruptions. Think back to high school when you had to study a very difficult subject. You’ll need complete silence. If complete silence isn’t achievable, then put some kind of white noise in the background to drown out distractions. Play some soft classical music or some other instrumentals without any vocals. Vocals will be distracting as you try to focus on writing your book. The television is a poor choice. You will be visiting this environment whenever you want to write. Find that room in your home that you can turn into the absolute perfect writing environment.
2. Choose your method of writing. Will you use the old fashioned pencil and paper? Will you use a laptop with a word processor? Will you just use the family home computer? Personally, I like to write using either my laptop with Microsoft Word or my desktop computer with Microsoft Word. I am very proficient with the Microsoft Word application. It helps me to get my work done the fastest.
3. Buy yourself a notepad that you can easily carry around with you. Some of your best ideas will come to you while you are doing everyday activities. You might be driving to work when this great idea hits you. Write every single idea down. When you are actually composing the book, you can refer to them for inspiration.
4. Forget about trying to get everything perfect right from the start. The worst thing you can do is try to be a perfectionist. Stop being anal about this. The goal is to get your story onto paper. Once it is on paper you can revise again and again. You can reword everything to a perfect polished state once you have the basic book written. Fixing grammar as you are writing will interrupt your thought flow and significantly increase the amount of time it takes to finish the book.
5. Commence writing. Start wherever you want. There is no right place to start. Just start. Get the words out that are dying to get out. Write and write and write some more.
6. Organize what you have written in to chapters or some other kind of order. Once you have enough content written, it will become intuitively obvious how you should organize it.
7. Proofread & revise. This is where you begin to shape your work into a logical book. You get to cut out all of the garbage. You can rewrite those sentences that you were a little stuck on during the first run.
8. Proofread & revise. This time you are going to even pickier about how things are worded.
9. Put the script away for a couple of weeks. Get your mind off of it. Read a new book.
10. Dig out your book. Proofread & revise it again. Once you have been away from the story for a couple of weeks, you can read it again with a fresh mind. This new fresh look at the story will help you find flaws that the average reader is also going to discover.
11. Get a friend to proofread it. Ask them to be brutally honest. Ideally, you would want that friend to be the same type of person you intend to target with the book. If the book is about a pregnant woman, you wouldn’t ask your guy friends to read it. You should find someone who is the type of person you want to buy the book.
12. Make final changes after considering the feedback from your friends.
13. Time to publish.

Tips to actually begin writing:

• Get into the zone. “The Zone” is a mental state of mind where the words come pouring out of your mind like Niagara Falls. Some people can get themselves into this zone before they begin writing. Others will come into the zone after they write a few sentences. If you’ve got a lot of everyday life issues on your mind, like all of the things you have to get done this week, try making a “to do” list for them. Writing a To Do list will help clear your mind of all that clutter so you can focus on your writing and be more creative.
• If you are telling a story, try to write exactly as you would speak. If you were to tell the entire story to the one person next to you, how would you say it?
• When in doubt, use the simplest everyday common words. Experienced and professional writers will develop their own writing style over time. Beginners should try to keep the story simple enough for an average person to understand. There are obvious exceptions to this for certain kinds of writing.

Specific Book Genres:

Writers typically focus on one type of product. Some like to write articles, novels, children’s books, etc. I suggest you seek guidance from people who are already working in that specific field. If you want to learn how to write a novel, I suggest you learn from an experienced novelist. If you are one of the many moms who want to learn to write children’s books, then I suggest you also get yourself a tutor who is experienced in that specific area.