Steps to writing a book.
How to write a book? It is a question that many novice writers struggle with. Often you start, but you soon run out of inspiration. Or the story gets bogged down in long-winded thoughts, instead of powerful page turners.
The tip we give to every novice writer: Divide the task and work in steps. We will list these steps for you here:
Step 1: Write, write, write.
You’ve been looking forward to writing a book for a while.
You imagine that it should be quite comfortable: at least one day a week you look for a pleasant place to write. Away from work and home. There you completely surrender to writing. You may even have written something already. And you want to finish it as soon as possible, to eventually print your own book.
But in reality … you hardly have time. There is always something more important to do.
So this means that you will have to make time to write a book. Grab your agenda and reserve an hour every day, half a day every week, a day every weekend … as much time as your agenda allows. But realize that you will have to sacrifice other activities for it.
It is important that you start the writing flow. And this only works by writing regularly. With writing books quality comes from quantity. And you can only develop quality by writing and rewriting.
How to start writing a book in 2020?
You start a book with loose writing.
You do that as follows:
- Take a nice notebook and a pen that writes fine.
- Set an alarm for twenty minutes.
- Put your pen on the first line and start writing.
- Write down everything that comes to mind. Bad thoughts. Bad sentence structure. Incorrect spelling. Idle thoughts. Protest against this exercise.
- Write them down. Do not cross out anything. Everything is allowed, as long as you keep your pen moving.
- When the alarm goes off you stop. By practicing this loose writing regularly, you will gain more confidence in what logs into your mind. You will listen better to all kinds of thoughts, better than ever before.
Step 2: Come up with a story line.
The story line is the sequence of events a character goes through on the way to a solution or answer to a question, problem, or loss.
What comes first? Thinking up a story line in advance or discovering by writing what your story should be about?
There is no clear answer to this. As a writer you often have a preference for either working method when you are creating a book yourself.
The emotional writer prefers to start writing a first scene. As he writes, he discovers what his story should be about. The ideas for his storyline emerge more or less playfully.
The schematic writer prefers to work from an idea. He first works out a story line, makes schedules, decides on the main points that his story revolves around and only when he knows where the story is going, he will start writing.
Step 3: Do research.
Where do you get the information that you process in your book?
In general, it is advisable to stay close to your own experience. Especially as a starting writer.
But an unknown world can fascinate or appeal to you so much that you have to write about it. In that case you will have to consult the knowledge and experiences of others.
Where can you find that unknown information?
In the world’s largest knowledge base: Internet.
You will map this out more clearly for yourself by answering the following questions:
- Which of your own experiences belong to the world of experience you want to write about?
- Which of these experiences are still mysterious to you?
Of course it’s not mandatory to ask yourself these questions. But, the answers may help you with your research on the internet and also with the next step.
Step 4: The right perspective.
Your choice of perspective for your story is closely related to the story you want to tell. Often you choose the right perspective in a natural way. You probably know from which character and from what point of view you will tell the story.
Many chapters have been written by writing manuals about the technical aspects of book writing perspectives. However, the most important thing is that you, as an author, must be able to empathize fully with your main character. It’s the same as acting: as an actor you have to become the character you represent. It’s the only way to make your book credible in the eyes of its readers.
The perspective you choose influences the personal form in which you write, but does not determine it exclusively. You can write your story of the main character in both the I-form and the third person.
Step 5: Apply structure.
Throughout the writing process, you are consciously or unconsciously concerned with the sequence of the fragments and thus with the structure of your book.
In a story, structure and time are logically closely intertwined.
You can choose to tell the story chronologically. In that case it is important that your entire story is written in the same grammatical time.
However, you can also go back and forth in time. For example, start at the end and then jump to the past. If you choose to do this, you should thoroughly study grammatical times and apply them correctly.
In this step you will also help your reader. You will distribute the text correctly on the pages by a logical chapter layout, clear headings, blank lines, paragraphs and new pages.
Step 6: Rewriting and preparing for editing.
Most books are only created during the rewriting process.
Your book continues to grow and change, because you will keep reconsidering it sentence by sentence. You will work from small to large.
In the initial phase of rewriting you often encounter new substantive finds. As you have worked through your text more often, you will notice that the changes are getting smaller and more detailed.
Tip to start writing your book.
You can already guess it: The best tip we can give you is to just start writing. Because you should not fantasize about books, you just write them.
By following above steps in the right order you will be on your way writing your very first book. As you will notice during the creation of your masterpiece, things will have a much more natural flow compared to those not following the steps. You will spend less time, less energy and you’ll be able to finish your book earlier than expected. If you prefer to get some more information before starting we recommend this excellent article on book writing by top-writer Chandler Bolt.