I’m roughly halfway through writing my first book, and I can say with confidence that I should not only be finished, but I should have finished my entire three-book series by now.
While I won’t hide behind my excuses, they are still relevant. As I wrote this tiny newsletter, for example, my three-year-old was trying to crash his toy car into my keyboard, and I don’t need to tell you that playing defence while trying to write is no easy feat.
But so many authors eke out book after book despite insane deadlines and difficult life circumstances, so I have no reason to be as far behind as I am. When I started my maternity leave three years ago, I anticipated that by now, I would have a quasi writing career underway, and I hoped my book would be on the shelves.
What can I say? Mistakes were made; deadlines were overwhelmingly misjudged. Learn from my disasters—here are a few surefire ways to ensure you absolutely won’t write your book.
Forget to write regularly (and entirely)
Rule number one when not writing a book: forget about it. Often.
I still manage to spend a lot of my time thinking about my characters and how they might meet their demise or the challenges they could face in the book, but I spend very little of that time actually writing. Life as a mother of two gets in the way (not that I’m complaining), and before I know it, it’s 8:42 in the evening and my eyelids are drooping with sleep.
I have since learned that I need to schedule my writing sessions and actually sit down to my writing space as though it’s my actual job. Not doing so means that I get nothing on paper, and nothing on paper leads to…?
You guessed it: nothing. No words = no book.
Shift around your POV often
I read a lot of books. Any writer who plans to write her own will attest to a love of books and stories!
The problem is that I read books that have very different ways of telling stories, and I began my own book by writing it in past-tense third person—a common and wise way to write your first book, by the way. Third person is safe; effective. It tells the story clearly:
Jane opened the door and jumped back in alarm; it was Pete, brandishing a knife menacingly.
“I told you I’d meet you at the cabin,” he sneered.
About twelve chapters in writing my own story, however, I was deep into a series that cleverly used not only first person, but present-tense first person:
I open the door and jump back in alarm; it’s Pete, brandishing a knife menacingly.
“I told you I’d meet you at the cabin,” he sneers.
Seemingly very similar in all ways but one: in an action scene, of which there are many in a zombie fiction novel, present tense first person just seems to jump out at me.
For example, here is an excerpt from one of my favourite first-person authors who uses present-tense all the time, Sarah Lyons Fleming:
Adrian tries to come to my aid, but he’s stopped by three Lexers [zombies] that surround him. He yells something over his shoulder, and the twisted faces of the Lexers snarl, but I can’t hear anything but my grunts and the pounding of my heart. I push them away whenever they get close, my arms growing more exhausted with every shove. This is how I’m going to die.
I don’t know about you, but that kind of action packs a bigger, more impactful punch.
Anyway, if you want to not write a book, switching around your plot and mind-numbingly editing for hours and hours just to switch the tense and point of view is a great way to accomplish that goal.
Get caught up in semantics
For a while, I struggled with chapter length and word count and things like point of view, and it slowed down my writing process more than anything else.
While those aspects of writing a book are important, it’s more important to actually write said book. That means finding a flow—it means sitting down and just writing. Pumping out the content needed to fill the pages of a book. Considering that some would say 10 to 15 percent of the words are omitted after editing a book, volume is important.
Fiddling with elements of my outline while not writing a single word meant that I found myself no closer to finishing my book (although my outline was a thing of beauty).
Lose your characters in your plot
It’s so easy to rush through character development in order to get to the exciting part of the story, but the kicker is that your readers need that development to give two poops about your characters (or the plot, for that matter).
I frequently found myself in this predicament before I ironed out my extremely detailed outline, and I think it's because without an outline, your story doesn’t have any structure holding it up. A story’s structure is a load-bearing beam in the foundation of your story’s home, and without it, the entire operation can topple over in a heap.
Characters, moreover, are an integral piece of your story; without them, there is no story. Characters and structure go hand in hand, and letting your characters drive the plot is risky at best. At worst, it can slow down your writing and cause you to have to take giant leaps back in order to fix wherever you lost the literal plot.
How to write a book
There’s no one way to write a book. Some authors successfully sit down without an outline and see where their characters will take them, while others need a strict outline they can cling to (it’s me; I’m “others”).
But no matter which camp you lean towards, there’s one truth that is universally acknowledged (besides the fact that a “single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” of course), and that is that a book has words.
Words. Lots of ‘em. Preferably words that are cohesive and tell a compelling story, but words nonetheless. So my advice to any budding author to be is this:
Write. A lot. If you do anything right, it will be that.