When you mention to friends or colleagues that you are publishing a book you quickly discover two key facts:
- They are also getting a book published. Or rather, they are writing a book. Or actually, they’re thinking about writing a book. Or, more likely, they someday think they would probably like to write a book
- They have questions. Which is nice, because it makes you feel like a proper author. And yet, terrifying… because you don’t feel like one
Imposter syndrome aside, I thought it might be fun to dig into the three questions that people most often seem to be interested in
Question: How Do You Write a Book?
This question usually means two things: how do you start and how do you plan
How Do You Start Writing a Book?
Sit down and start writing. It’s that simple and, of course, that difficult. Simple because that’s literally all you need to do – take a piece of paper, a keyboard, a napkin, anything. Just start. Write something. Anything. Even if it’s terrible it doesn’t matter. Writing anything of any value is hard. It is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the words you naively scribble down on your first day are carved in granite. You will edit them: many times. You might even delete them and write something else. I find that the easiest way to overcome the Blank Page issue is to make it not blank
We instinctivly know this from other walks of life: we only really know that we don’t want to buy a new outfit after we’ve tried it on, for example
Same with writing – put something down. Try it on. Put it back on the rail and put something else on. It’s OK
Depending on how your mind works this can be a lot easier if you have a plan, of course…
How Do You Plan?
So this varies wildly, of course. I remember hearing P D James speaking, possibly on Radio 4, many years ago; she kept meticulous notebooks of carefully planned out plotpoints and characters. In contrast, I remember hearing Willy Russell interviewed about Educating Rita, many years ago: he said that he formed a rough idea of the characters and then just started writing. Allowing them space to breathe and room to grow
Obviously, my memory may be incorrect on both of these points of view, but the broader point here is that no single approach is right for everyone. For us, we used flip charts and marker pens to try and scribble down the crazy ideas and plans that kept exploding from our collective imagination. When our brains find a creative gear they tend to accelerate quickly, and trying to keep pace or remember where we went can be challenging
We tried a few approaches – including just making it up as we went along – and ended up throwing a lot of text away. Eventually, because we wrote as a duet, we found it easier to start a Trello board (think: glorified scrap book). We added columns for characters and chapters. We added little cards into each column to represent what we knew each must contain. We also added pictures of places, people, and anything else that helped to keep us on the same track
Question: Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
We’ve spoken about neurodiversity in many blog posts but, for us, it means that we can go weeks with completely empty heads and then have a sudden explosion of ideas and imagination. Largely we just bounce ideas off each other and spend hours in ‘what if’ and ‘how about’ moments. This can be anywhere and at any time: in the shops, in the middle of dinner, half way through meetings, at 2am, and so on
Question: What’s The Best Thing You’ve Learnt From a Literary Course?
Nothing. That sounds unfair, so I’ll rephrase: neither of us has been on a literary course, so we haven’t picked anything up from them. Now, this isn’t to say that literary courses aren’t worthwhile – many people love them and learn a lot from them. If you’re inclined to do one then don’t let us stop you
I think the problem for me, or rather maybe the reason I don’t do them, is that it just feels like another reason to delay starting. The line of thinking tends to be something like:
“I’d love to start my book. I should probably do a course first. I’ll book one for next summer. I shouldn’t really start until I’ve done that”
(attends course)
“Well that was amazing, I have so many ideas – but, they did mention an advanced course, so maybe I should do that before I start. I’ll book that for next summer”
And so on…
Pixar
And of course, it wouldn’t be 2025 without some rules from the Internet. Enter people quoting Pixar’s Story Structure / Spine at you. If you haven’t heard of this it goes something like this:
Once upon a time _______. Every day _______. But one day_____ because of that ______ because of that _____ because of that _____ until finally ______. And ever since then __________
I was in a leadership meeting at work recently, and we tried to tell the story of our own careers using this method. I’d recommend you try it. What you might find is that while the above structure is absolutely brilliant for telling the story of Buzz Lightyear or Mike Wazowski (and let’s face it: Pixar are just slightly more successful than me) it’s a little more complex when talking about your own life
It depends on the story you are trying to tell but overall I find this type of trope difficult to use. For some books they are perfect and produce fiction that certain groups of readers will love and cherish. The risk, of course, is that over time all stories become subtly different versions of the same thing. I’m going to intentionally side step the ‘there are only seven plots‘ argument here and explore that in a different post
I love to write about people who feel real and about worlds that feel genuine. If there’s one thing that we all know about real people and place: they are rarely simple or formulaic
Coming back to the neurodiversity point, our ideas as writers are rarely straight forward or fomulaic and it is challenging to tie them down into a simple structure. Again, some people find that fomulas, character arcs, and so on can be really useful in structuring their work. I just feel that you shouldn’t let it either be another reason not to start writing, or to constrain where your story heads or who your characters are. I really enjoy Sayaka Murata‘s work, for example, and that is rarely straight forward or formulaic
Thinking This All Through
I suppose, thinking this all through, what I’m essentially saying is: get started and do what feels right for you – not what feels right for on the Internet (irony not lost on me here). Stop finding reasons not to start writing
In the words of Yoda (and which finer literary creation could one end with): Do or do not. There is no try
In the words of me (and, hopefully, I’m not a literary creation): if you want to be a writer: start writing stuff down