Do you know how you write a book?
You spend 2-3 years writing every single day.
Write about anything. Everything. Pick a theme and riff. Say, Death – 500 words. Or – Love – shoot for 1,000 words. You do that every day, write to a quota, write whether the Muse turns up or not, and a couple of years down the line you have a portfolio of personal essays.
Grander themes emerge. You see a thread running through your writing. Now you start reordering the essays, compiling a contents page, adding material, blending stuff, taking things away. Before you know it, you have a book.
That’s how you write a non-fiction book, at least. Looks kinda the same for fiction.
If you write only one page a day, you’ll have a book within a year. And if you published a book a year consistently, you’d be considered prolific. But don’t think about publishing when you’re writing fiction. All you’re thinking about it crafting a great story. You’re playing. Put characters together and see if they come to life. Maybe they live for a bit, then need CPR. Maybe you can’t resuscitate them. No big deal. Move on. Don’t get attached just yet.
Write to amuse and move and sway and persuade yourself. If you can’t feel at home in the world you created, if you can’t befriend the characters that populate your world, how can you ever expect a reader to? But again, we’re not thinking about other readers just yet. And we’re also not only writing one page a day. A page is nothing. You can do ten times that amount easily, so long as you don’t get hung up on writing pretty sentences.
Here’s a couple of good signs you’re on the right track with your writing (and this applies to fiction and non-fiction):
- You read it privately for fun. You’re like Oscar Wilde keeping a diary in order to have something sensational to read on the train. When people ask you what you’re reading, you blush because you’re reading your own work. Self-indulgent? Good!
- Your own work makes you laugh. Or cry. Aroused, scared, sick, nostalgic – all that stuff. If you feel it, the reader feels it.
- You’re scared to show your work. It’s too personal. Too close to the bone. Here’s a tip: when you see white, keep digging. Double down on the vulnerability. It’s actually not that hard to bleed on the page. You just have to be a bit masochistic. Or at least not afraid to cut yourself every now and then.
- Your work comes out quick and hot. Like a good beer shit, as Bukowski would say.
You also challenge yourself with your reading. That doesn’t mean you read relics and dinosaurs. If all you’ve ever read are the classics and highfaluting Booker Prize winners, you need to go down to your local secondhand bookstore and load up on pulp.
You read widely. Inside and out of your chosen genre. Every night you read at least one poem, one short story, and one essay. That’s in addition to all the other reading you’re doing. You talk about the books you’re reading. Anyone close to you shows even the slightest interest in what you’re doing = licence to rant and rave excitedly. You buy them the book you’re currently loving and you make a miniature book club. You underline, dirty your pages with marginalia, chop up bits to take apart.
You set yourself homework assignments. This month you’re going to tackle character. Next month, dialogue. The month after that? Plot. You read Aristotle’s Poetics, Stephen King’s On Writing, Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, Tolstoy’s What Is Art? You take a masterclass with Neil Gaiman or Judy Blume or David Mamet. You apply what you learn.
You workshop. You keep notebooks, big and small. You play with different writing software and thus different mediums of literature. One day you fire up Final Draft and get that screenplay down. The next, you’re in Scrivener putting together a novel or short story collection. One afternoon you take your notebook out and create poetry.
You immerse yourself in your craft.
You get it into your soul.