Collected Email Q & A Author Advice
[Author Note: Originally published on my website in 2014-ish, when I’d written 10 or so books. Now I’m at 48 myself plus another 12 co-authored…still stands.]
Q: I’d like to write a book, but I just don’t know what to do or how to get started. For instance, I’ll start working on a story, and then I’ll suddenly lose the motivation to get it done. Is there any advice that you can give me in that aspect, or even getting started as a writer in general?
A:
Losing motivation mid-book and moving on to brighter, shinier new ideas is not unusual at all. It’s the number one thing that keeps people from becoming authors, actually, by finishing a book. I suffered from it myself all the way until I was age thirty and finished my first book, and still suffer from it to this day, really. I’ve just gotten worlds better at overcoming it.
Here’s the secret: finish the book.
I know, I know. That doesn’t sound like an answer. It sounds like the danged problem, all spelled out again. But it’s actually the secret. You have to finish a book, no matter what. Write garbage to get it done. Write the most nonsensical idiocy if you have to in order to wade through the middle and get to the end parts you want to write (hopefully) or just hold your nose and write crap all the way to the end if you have to. Force your way through to the end, however you have to do it, because in order to become a writer, you have to finish books. It’s a requirement. It is not, however, a requirement for you to finish them well on the first try. Because you can rewrite them as many times as you need to in order to achieve a finished product you’re proud of. Your first book, you may get to the end and say, “I don’t think there’s any way this can be fixed.” And that’s fine. Another secret: most authors don’t publish their first book. It sits in a drawer somewhere, gathering dust, and we’re all too ashamed of it to ever let anyone else see it.
The truth is that you have to start somewhere, and the rush of confidence that comes from finishing your first book, even if it’s bad and you never want it to be published, is vital to your future success. Because when the next book gets to that mid-way slog point, you can look back and remember that – “Hey, I did this once before. I can do it again.” And it’s motivation like nothing else. The realization for me after finishing that first book was that if I could do it once, I could do it again and again. Two weeks ago I finished my 25th book. And that never would have happened if I hadn’t blundered horribly through to FINALLY, after twenty years of starting to write books, finish my first one.
I can’t promise you that it’s easy to get to the end of that first one. It almost feels like you’re thrashing blindly in the dark, wallowing in the mud toward a finish line you can’t even see. No, I can’t promise you it’s easy, because it’s some of the hardest mental work you’ll do just getting to the end of the first one. But I can promise you it’s worth it if you keep building that mental muscle.
Q: My writing sucks. How do I make it not suck?
A:
Lots of practice and reading on craft. Writing can be one of the most satisfying and simultaneously nerve-wracking experiences you can have. The thing about professional writers is that we’ve all been there at the start, when we’re looking at our writing and think, “Uh…this doesn’t exactly look like Gillian Flynn (or whoever).” Just to make you feel better, most authors stick their first book in a shoebox and never let it out. Defender (my first book) in its current form is probably in its twelfth draft (maybe more) and I’d written a TON of short works in college in addition to journals, blogs and all manner of other stuff. It takes a while to start hitting the rhythm and feeling satisfied with your work (for most of us; if you’ve knocked it out of the park already, then you are a rare and masterful talent!) and even some of the writers I think are the best think their work is still crap. Writers are not really known for their confidence…
Q: I’m in the process of writing my own book (and have been for a couple of years) but am struggling to juggle it with work commitments.
How did you plan the Girl in the Box series?
How long did each book take you to write?
Have you planned them individually or was the series planned as a whole entity?
A:
Here’s the thing – every writer is going to have a different process. The Girl in the Box series was the second series I wrote, and by that time I’d somewhat refined my ideas and process for doing things. So I’m going to just tell you how I did things once I’d figured it out a little, and hopefully it’ll help.
When I plan a series, I like to know what emotional high/low points to look forward to. For example (don’t know how far you’ve gotten yet) but in the end of Girl in the Box #5, there’s a massive emotional low point, one that was a gut punch that I looked forward to as I wrote towards it. I also knew vaguely how the series would end, who the big bad guy was, though it wasn’t entirely clear before I started. Some people like to have all of this planned out. Some writers like to have none of it planned and just write. Which is the best way? The one that works for you.
With each book, I started with a theme that influenced the title – Alone, the protagonist starts out alone, isolated from others, not sure who to trust. With Untouched, she’s trying to cope with the revelation at the end of book 1 that she can’t touch people, so now she’s gone from merely isolated by herself to completely unable to touch the world around her. A useful idea is to write out your idea for a book in a simple form like this: “When (protagonist) encounters (situation that has changed the status quo), he/she sets forth to (right the situation). But will he/she succeed when (antagonist) tries to stop him/her?” As Jim Butcher says in a wonderful talk from FaerieCon in 2013, if you’re a new writer and can’t boil your story down to this simplest form, you need to work with it until you can, because it’s probably too complex to execute as a new writer.
As for time to complete the books…I’ll be honest, this answer won’t help you at all. I was a full-time professional writer before I started writing book 2 of this series, and was a stay at home dad for book 1, so the truth wouldn’t be all that enlightening and might even be somewhat discouraging as I write very quickly – much, much more quickly than 99% of authors. Even when I was working 60-80 hours a week I managed to write 180,000 words of fiction in the course of about three months when the idea seized me. That’s very unusual for most writers, especially those with full time jobs and family commitments. I would urge you to focus on trying to write 1,000 words per day, every day, and either getting up early or staying up late in order to do that. If you held to that schedule for three months, you’d have a reasonably long book done by the end of that 90 day timeframe.
While I did mostly plan out Girl in the Box before starting, down to the theme of each book in the series and a general idea of where the plot for each would go, I would caution you that trying to carry a whole series on your back as a new writer is the quickest path to madness. I don’t want to discourage you if you have a vision for a ten book series, because that’s certainly how I’ve always approached my fiction by nature, but a standalone volume would put a lot less pressure on you starting out.