How To Write a Book: Here’s What Happened
How To Write a Book: My First Attempt
My blog readers had been telling me for such a long time to write a book. It never really crossed my mind to write anything so serious. I didn’t do academia. I had no degree. I used to be a hairdresser. I felt woefully unqualified to write something that would go into a serious book.
Divorce; The Great Writing Motivator
After a divorce and all the chaos that went with that, I finally took time out to think about my life. As I mentioned others had already told me I that I should write a book. So, I decided this would be a good time. You know, broke, homeless, no love of my life and frankly - bitter. Emotions are the tools of every good writer and mine were raging.
But how the hell do you write a book?
I had a good fortune (and last pennies) to be able to jump on a plane to California where a friend had offered me a place to stay for as long as I wanted. Once there I arrived in San Francisco and took a cab down to a place named Santa Cruz. I lived around 30-minutes from the town centre in the mountains of Bonny Doon.
After finally arriving, I got acquainted with a cat with no claws named Cloud then at some point, I began to write my first real book.
How Do You Write A Book?
Just start!
For some time before this trip I had a good but rough idea for this book.
The idea - the big idea - was taken from a blog post on the subject of how humanity was more zoo-like.
We are all controlled Zoomans in a purpose built human zoo. We are controlled. The controllers rule by fear. I built on this idea for writing my first book.
I called the book Escape from Zoomanity.
I had a big idea and I began to write.
To be honest, I had no idea of the layout, my grammar and English is never great, and my spelling can and is usually terrible, but I knew how to open WORD and start typing on my tiny Samsung notebook. I also had a good understanding of storytelling.
So I just began typing away and typing away.
For the whole 10-weeks I stayed in California I kept writing and drinking tea until I ended up with a very rough first draft document of around 40,000 words.
When I got back to England I followed up with a publisher that had asked me about writing a book (friend of a friend). I sent them the first draft and they told me it had to be laid out properly, chapters added, and so forth.
That made me feel a little downhearted so decided to leave the document for a while and then after 4-months go back to it. When I went back to it two things happened.
The first was I didn't like the way it read. The second thing was, that I felt it would be too big a job for me to break everything down into chapters.
So …
Delete & Rewrite
I deleted the whole thing and started again ( I am not sure I would take that approach today).
I wouldn’t do that today but that is what I did then. I just coyldn’t get around the edit so it was a start-again process.
So here are five tips (there are more) that I stuck with to write my first book.
The Big Idea: I stuck with my big idea.
Chapters: I carefully laid out the chapter names.
Noted Out: I wrote notes thoughts and ideas for all the chapters.
Built on chapter title: I then went back to the book and wrote everything I could about that chapter name.
Edit: Once done, I sent it to an editor.
With my editor polished and refined the whole new book together. I finally had a book - my first REAL IN PRINT book.
Escape from Zoomanity was finally published in 2012.
From my initial idea to getting the book into print took around FOUR YEARS.
I think that was mostly because I had no idea what I was doing.
But the good news is most NEW AUTHORS have no idea what they are doing and that is part of the fun when writing a new book.
My big piece of advice is this; if you really want to know how to write a book … Just get started.
Today, yes, I am an author but I had to start somewhere … You can too!
Peace.
Author and writer, Alan Forrest Smith
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