Writing a Book is Scary-You Can do it Anyway
A lot of people have a desire to write a book, but relatively few people actually get around to it. I want to address a few of the main problems that have gotten in my way as I’ve pursued writing and give a few tips for how to get through them.
One, it’s absolutely daunting. Writing a book is a huge task that often takes years to complete, and so looking at the craft from the outside can be overwhelming. The only real way to overcome this hurdle is to just start writing. I know that is cliché advice, but in this case that’s because it’s good advice. Unlike with swimming, with writing, if you just dive into the deep end it won’t hurt you, and you will start to develop the skills you need to get through as you go.
Two, it sometimes feels presumptuous for us to think that we can write anything like our favorite authors. This is one of my biggest problems in writing. I read a book that changes my life and then I think that my own writing is crap. The way that I get over this is by recognizing that I am not reading their first draft. I am reading something that has been pored over, often for years, and edited meticulously by professionals over the course of many drafts before I ever read it. Your first draft will fall far short of your visions for the story, but accepting that fact makes it far more likely that you will end up with a first draft at all.
Three, I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know where to start. This harkens back to problem one, but for me this part stems from the countless hours of Writing Excuses I’ve listened to and the books I’ve read about how to write, and every bit of advice is different and often contradictory. The solution for this is much the same as the solution for beginning in any other creative hobby: set yourself a goal, and then don’t worry about figuring out things that don’t directly help you progress to that goal. In woodworking that means only learning how to use the tools and materials to make the project you’re currently working on, in writing that means focusing on the advice that directly influences the book you are writing. If you don’t like Stephen King’s books, then don’t listen to his advice because you don’t want to write like him, but if you love him then get his book and learn about how he writes like he does.
Four, I don’t like this book anymore. There is a phenomenon known as the 75% slump where three quarters of the way through a long project people get discouraged and finishing the project feels impossible. For beginners this slump tends to happen sooner (often far sooner) than the 75% mark and it manifests itself in two main ways. There is the eternal re-writer who gets to a certain point and then goes back and revises everything when they get discouraged, and there is the project hopper who starts on their next shiny new idea once their old project gets too hard. The solution to both of those problems is to not allow yourself to give up on or edit a project until you have finished the entire first draft. As you become more and more advanced you will be able to see which books are doomed from the start, but as a beginner it is far more important to have a crappy book’s worth of experience under your belt than to have one chapter of experience over and over again.
These are only a few of the problems that I’ve faced as a writer, but they are the ones that plagued me the most right when I was starting out. Writing is a valuable thing, but like all valuable things, it isn’t easy, so stick to it and you will find that you get better and better as you flesh out your skills to suit your needs. If I were to put all this advice together I would tell you: “do what keeps you excited about your writing, but also finish your projects.”
