At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, we live in interesting times. A lot of people will be isolating themselves or, as in the case of many of my stand-up brethren, suddenly without any work to do. As much as anything in these situations, I guess we all have to stay positive and keep our minds active. I know a lot of my comedy friends have mentioned over the last few years about how they’d like to write a book, so I thought I’d do a quick blog with some advice on getting started. Most of this advice would obviously apply to scripts/plays too but for simplicity, I’ll focus on books.
Novels look like big beasts. For years, I remember thinking that I could never write one. They just seemed massive. I know this puts a lot of people off, it did me for a very long time. With that in mind, here are a few tips to hopefully make it feel more manageable.
1/ Resources
There are loads of resources out there to help you get started. Stephen King’s On Writing is a good read but there are many more. Outside of books, there are podcasts. The Bestseller Experiment is a favourite of mine, as it has a lot of great authors talking about their writing and it is aimed at people who are trying to write that first book.
Stuff like that is handy for tips but also, especially with podcasts etc, it helps to feel like other people are going through what you are.
2/ Short stories
This is my particular bugbear but I’m always amazed that the first bit of advice in any writing book isn’t try short stories first. They’re fun to do and they can be as short or long as the story idea needs. They also give you the encouragement of finishing something, which I think is really important. There are an awful lot of half-finished novels in the world. What’s more, writing a short story gives you something you can show to people and get feedback on. I wrote about six of them before I started writing a novel and they really helped. We’re all insecure beings. Having somebody say ‘hey, this is great’ is the single best motivator to keep writing and move on to trying novels. That’s not to say you can’t go straight to writing a novel, but at least consider short stories as a good first step.
3/ Feedback
As mentioned above, it’s great to get. There are loads of places online where you can meet people writing in whatever genre you are interested in and find groups to join. When getting feedback, it is vitally important to find people who actually read the genre you are trying to write in. I’d be an awful person to give feedback on a romance novel because I don’t read them. Don’t give people something to read if they aren’t your target audience, otherwise, you’ll get bad and misleading feedback. On the upside, thanks to the internet, it should be easy to find people who do enjoy the genre you’re writing. Getting into a small group of writers is great for support and encouragement.
Giving feedback is also an important part of it – as a rule, be positive but be honest. Point out the bits you like and then pick one or two things that you didn’t understand or that didn’t work for you. Always keep in mind that you’re bouncing someone else’s baby. Finally, avoid people who are overly negative. Some people just deal with their own shit by bringing others down, find people who are positive about stuff as they’re better guides.
4/ Read
I know this seems blindingly obvious, but reading is really important. You learn by doing it and crucially, when you’ve started to try and write yourself, reading a novel becomes a very different experience. You’ll naturally pay attention to technique, the tense it is written in, word use – all manner of stuff. The best bit is, your brain will do most of that in the background while you’re enjoying the book.
5/ Break it into chunks
There’s two schools of thought in writing, pantsing and plotting. What that means is that some people just start writing and see where the story takes them (pantsing – as in flying by the seat of your pants) and some plot everything beforehand. There’s no right or wrong way. Personally, I’m a mix. I always have bits of the story before I start and there’s also big gaps. I like to break things into chapters, stick the chapters on cards and then pin them up on my noticeboard. Regardless of what approach you take, I advise you to always think in chapters – they’re essentially like a scene in a film and can be as short and long as you need. In each one, essentially one or two things need to happen. If you figure that out beforehand, it makes that chapter easier to write. Even if you don’t want to try and plan out a whole book, it’s great when you’re writing a chapter to have written down in simple bullet points what needs to happen in it – that way, if you get stuck, you refer back to that and ask – am I making happen what needs to?
Start racking up chapters and before you know it, you’re well on your way to having a novel.
6/ Always Forward
Try and resist the urge to keep reading and re-reading what you’ve already written. If you’re not careful, you might end up rewriting the same bits over and over again. That’s not to say don’t reread, but find a rhythm that means you’re always moving forward too. Personally, I start the day re-reading what I wrote yesterday, tweaking etc and then I move on to today’s new writing. Some people never reread until they get to the end of the book. In that case, it’s worth keeping notes for yourself of things you’ll need to change in the second draft.
7/ Routine
It doesn’t matter how much writing you do, it matters that you do it. Again, my friends over at The Bestseller Experiment podcast have a great thing they’re doing this year which is the 200 words a day challenge. It’s exactly what it sounds like, commit to writing 200 words a day. In reality, once you get going, you might well write more than that, but even if you’re not feeling it, you can still get 200 done. Generally, I try and find somewhere quiet but loads of people write with headphones on. If you can, it’s worth asking anyone who is around you not talk to you unless they really have to as it’ll break your flow.
8/ Technical stuff
Things like what tense to write in, what POV (point of view) to use, grammar etc can be really intimidating starting off. My advice – don’t worry about grammar and punctuation stuff, all of that can be fixed later. Just get the words down. Tense – my advice if you’re looking for a simple answer is write in the past tense. I’d say about 90% of books are written in that tense. As for POV – there’s three main options. First person – “I walked into the room” where you write like it all happens to ‘you’. Its upside is that it’s more personal and the internal monologue is right there for the reader, its downside is that you’re stuck in the eyes of one character. Third person – “Dave walked into the room”, so you’re more cinematic. Think of it like the camera is following them as opposed to the camera being exactly what they see. You don’t get the internal monologue as much but you can still do some of it, but it is less restrictive as you’re not stuck in one character’s head. I write typically in multiple third-person POV. That just means that one chapter is from one character’s viewpoint and the next can be from another. It is my preferred approach as it allows you to move around a lot like in a film and makes it easy to follow multiple storylines. The key thing is to just keep in consistent. If this chapter is from Dave’s POV then make sure you stick in that.
Honestly, if that all sounds complicated, it really isn’t. Once you get used to it, you’ll be doing it as second-nature.
9/ Software
There’s a few things you can use. I personally use a thing called Scrivener which is the industry leader and it is handy as it breaks chapters into separate documents for you. Having said that, I wrote my whole first book in Word and lots of people do that. If you’re doing that, I’d advise keeping chapters as separate documents and shoving them all in one folder. Whatever you use – make sure you back it up some way!
10/ Writer’s block/The Wall/ blah blah blah
People focus way too much on this. In writing any book, you will hit points where you’re not sure what is happening and you start to lose confidence. There’s an amazing interview where Ian Rankin, who is brilliant and prolific, describes how he still hits this every time on every book. If you get stuck, go back and look at your notes and remember what needs to happen. You don’t have to write a book in sequence – you can jump ahead and write a future chapter and come back to the sticking point later on. Failing that, take a break and write something else for a bit (short story!) and then you can come back fresh. The biggest single thing is, it happens to everyone and it is no big deal. Just keep going!
So there you have it, I hope that helps.
Caimh