How to Write a Book

I have two college degrees: a science degree and a management degree. Neither of those, you’ll notice, is a writing degree. But for more than twenty years I made my living as a freelance writer in the business-to-business market. During that time, I also wrote seven or eight self-published nonfiction books, published seven or eight short stories (I’m better at words than numbers…), and in January, 2022, I published my first novel.  

So obviously this is what one does if one wishes to become a writer: get a degree in something completely unrelated.

That sounds like a joke. Actually, it’s not, and here’s why: beyond a certain point, which an attentive student can reach by about 10^th grade, ‘writing’ is largely self-taught. Lots of people do go on to study writing as undergraduates, or in graduate school – but relatively few of the people who hold degrees in writing actually go on to successful careers as writers (journalism is perhaps an exception). There are lots of reasons for this, but I think the main one is that if you’re going to make a living as a writer, you need to know about something that’s not writing at all.

Danica McKellar, who was a child actor in The Wonder Years, grew up and got a degree from UCLA in mathematics and has written three wildly popular books for teens about algebra and geometry (really). Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park fame, started out as a medical doctor, and Scott Turow went to Harvard Law School and then gave it up to write legal thrillers. Anne McCaffrey trained as an opera singer and lived on a horse farm. Jack London was a blue-collar boy who went prospecting in the Klondike, but who longed to escape the grind of factory labor and work instead with his mind. My point, and feel free to investigate and see whether it is truly valid, is that all of these people started out intending to do something else, and then ended up writing about the something else. If Jack London had never gone to the Klondike, Buck the dog who heard the call of the wild probably would not exist.

So when it comes to college degrees and career ambitions, I recommend (and many other successful writers do as well) that you go to school and study something you find endlessly fascinating that is not writing. Because, just like medical students need cadavers and culinary students need vegetables and welding students need pieces of metal, you need something to write on, and no amount of training in the ephemera of gerunds and subtext can give you that. As a bonus, maybe instead of starting out as a starving writer, you start out as a high-powered lawyer, getting paid quite well to spend your days unearthing even more cadav – er – interesting people and events that you can practice writing about. 

But that’s high-level advice. Here’s some slightly more nuts-and-bolts advice about what it takes to write a book.

Have something you want to say. If you don’t have something you want to say, why try to write a book? And per the earlier discussion about college, there’s no amount of learning about writing that will teach you about your subject matter, whether it’s Tolkien’s mythology or Beverley Cleary’s close observation of young people. That has to come from somewhere else.

If what you want to say isn’t long enough for a book, write it down anyway. There are lots of places to publish shorter work, and if you write enough shorter works, you may end up with a longer work before you’re finished!

Look for teachers who can teach you the next thing you need to master, and take their advice. Writing is a skill set, just like any other profession, and as a writer you need strong language skills, so work on those. Learn to use a writer’s most valuable tools to get the words down in usable form – learn to type, or dictate, or both. And learn the specific structures of the type of writing you want to do. Writing a children’s picture book is different from writing a script is different from writing a how-to manual. Whatever you want to write, learn how it’s structured and formatted. Your teachers can be teachers at school (I took a typing class in high school) or books or other writers who are doing what you want to do. When I wanted to learn self-publishing, I both read about it online and found a local writer who was self-publishing successfully who was willing to teach me.

Get a feel for what kind of writer you are. On a basketball team, you might be a point guard or power forward. On a baseball team, you might be a first baseman or a catcher or a pitcher. As a fiction writer, you might be a pantser, or a planner. Believe it or not, these are terms of art. Planners outline their books; they have detailed notes and they know before they begin writing where the book begins and ends and what the major plot points are. Pantsers have a beginning in mind, and they start writing that first scene without really knowing how it’s all going to work out; for them, the journey is only exciting if they don’t know what’s coming next. Both ways of writing fiction are valid and workable, but most fiction writers are one or the other. I’m a planner. I have writer friends who are pantsers. We are all quite happy. You just have to know yourself.

Get comfortable with other people reading your work. That is, after all, the goal. If you can’t hand your work to other people and accept their feedback without distress, you will be miserable as a writer. When someone reads what you’ve written, they’re going to have an opinion of some kind about it, and their opinion can range from “This is the best thing I’ve ever read I loved it” to “This is awful, I hated it, you should do something else.” You have to be able to accept the whole range of opinion and critique without letting it go to your head or your heart and get up the next morning and write some more. Some people will offer you advice or criticism that makes your writing better; figure out how to sift out that information from all of the rest and learn from it. I have, over the years, developed a pretty reliable instinct for useful advice and not-useful advice; it comes with experience and practice, and with learning to trust yourself.

Learn to edit or revise your work. When you write a first draft of anything, you’re focused on specific things that usually are not grammar, spelling, and punctuation. So, if your first draft is a mess, don’t worry about it. Just write it down. Then go back through and focus on those other things. Get comfortable with the idea of first drafts, second drafts, final drafts. If you can’t bear to change or rewrite your work, you may find that you develop a need for it to be perfect the first time, and that can be paralyzing. There are writers who work that way, but for most of us, letting go of the idea of the perfect first draft and learning to edit and revise our first drafts is liberating. That said, with practice your first drafts will probably get cleaner and cleaner. My biggest first-draft problem these days is unfinished sentences; I’ll start a thought, decide it’s not quite right, and just drop it and go on to the next thought. I usually don’t realize until I’m editing that I left an incomplete sentence hanging in a very awkward place. But I just fix it and go on.

So, there you have it, from someone who has written and published short fiction, long fiction, nonfiction, articles, training guides and books for more than twenty years. This is what I have learned. This is how you write a book.

Now: go write something.