[0:00]So you want to write a book. I know the feeling. I've been writing books for more than 40 years. Now, there's a lot of people out there on the Internet and elsewhere that will try to tell you that writing a book is easy. You can do it fast. They've got five steps to writing a bestseller. I'm not promising you a bestseller. But I do have 13 foundational steps that you're going to need to follow if you're going to write a book. Speed is not the point. Quality is the point. So the first thing you're going to want to do is establish your writing space. When I first started, I was a young father and I had no space. I had to take a plank and put it between two kitchen chairs which I set in front of the couch in the living room. And then I sat on that couch in front of a manual typewriter, and that's how I worked. That was my space. Wherever it is, establish it. It could be in a Starbucks, it could be in your car if you have to. You should never say that you don't have a place to write. I can remember being in the newspaper business, there were 40 of us in the same room and back in those days, people smoked in that room. So we had smoke, we had noise, we had clacking typewriters. A writer can write anywhere. But you want to establish what you need. So if you need solitude, make sure you find a place in your house where you can shut the door, where you can turn off media and you can have privacy and silence and whatever you need to write. And the more you can afford, the better you'll do as far as equipment and space. The second important step is to assemble your writing tools. And really, you don't need too many. Say you're writing in a restaurant, all you need is your laptop and a comfortable chair. Now, you may have to take whatever chair they've got, but learn how that works for you. Do you need to take a cushion from home so you can sit up straight? Your back and your neck are important to your writing. You're going to be spending a lot of hours in front of that computer. So don't scrimp on your computer, and when you're home, don't scrimp on your chair. And then make a list of all the things you're going to need while you're writing, especially at home. If you need paper clips or a stapler or whatever, make sure you have all those within arm's length, so you don't get distracted by having to look for things when you need them. Okay, the third important thing you want to do is to break the project into small pieces. The reason that writing a book seems so colossal is because it is. Writing a book is akin to eating an elephant. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So break the task into as many small pieces as you can. You have to realize, yes, it's a four or five hundred page manuscript in the end, but that's made up of sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Just do them one at a time. That's the way to get a handle on it. Step number four is to settle on your big idea, and it needs to be a big idea. If it's bookworthy, it's going to be big concept. We don't have any room in the marketplace anymore for small concept book ideas. If it's small, use it for a blog or an article. But think, How to Win Friends and Influence People, if you're thinking non-fiction, think Harry Potter if you're thinking fiction. It has to be big. I can't overstate the importance of this. If you try to write a book before and you ran into a road block at the 20 or 30-day mark or maybe the 20 or 30-page mark, it could be because your idea wasn't big enough. How do you know if your idea is big enough and if it has legs? If it stays with you, if you tell your spouse or your friend what your book is about, and every time you tell them it gets bigger, that's a book that's going to last in the marketplace too. Step five is to construct your outline, and as you can see, I've done that on my whiteboard here for you. Now, this might sound surprising for me to talk about outlining when I'm known as a panser, one who writes by the seat of his pants. Stephen King is the best known writer who's a panser. He says put interesting characters in difficult situations and write to find out what happens. I like to do that. So people think I don't outline at all. But even we fiction writers who are pansers have to have some sort of idea where we're going. Even if it's on one side of one sheet of paper, give yourself some direction of where you're going. Now, some people, especially if you're a beginning writer, your editor or your agent may need to see an entire synopsis of your novel idea, so you'll have to do more of an outline than you might have to do later. And agents and editors demand outlines for non-fiction. There's no writing a non-fiction book without an outline. They want to know what you're going to say, how you're going to say it, where you're getting your information and what your points are going to be. Now, we often talk in fiction about the marathon of the middle and how that stops everybody. That's one of the places that I stopped too. I mean, I've written over 190 books and I every time get to the halfway or three-quarter point and I wonder, why did I ever think I could do this? That's the marathon of the middle and you can't just survive it or endure it. You have to thrive in it because the reader is right with you. If it's boring to you, your reader is asleep. So, and this happens to be true of non-fiction as well. Now, you'll take care of that with your outline in non-fiction, you'll know that your middle has enough good stuff in it. In fiction, especially if you're a panser, you better be sure you're saving a lot of big setups and payoffs for that marathon of the middle. And you can do the same in non-fiction that the same structure works for non-fiction as fiction. You don't have the same number of elements as far as tension and conflict and dialogue and that type of thing, but you still need the setup and payoff. Make your non-fiction book, say you're writing a non-fiction book about how to build a a modeled ship. You need to set it up so that it looks impossible until your specific solution comes through. That's your setup and payoff. And remember, don't be intimidated by an outline. Your outline serves you, not the other way around. If you've got an outline and you find yourself drifting from it or you think the book is working in a different way better, change the outline. Don't change the book. Make your outline work for you. Okay, I'm back to my desk for point number six, and that is to set a firm writing schedule that includes a firm deadline that you keep sacred. This is the thing that hangs up too many beginning writers. They don't have a publisher's deadline, so they have to set their own. And sometimes we tend to fudge on our own deadlines. Make sure you don't do that. Keep your deadline sacred. Now the way you do that is you figure out roughly how many pages you're going to be writing for your book. If it's 300, 400, 500, divide that into the number of days you're alloting yourself to write. Now, this may change once you get started and realize how many or how few pages you can write per day. If you schedule yourself for 10 pages a day and find that you're really not comfortable with more than four or five, change your schedule. Change your deadline, but once you get it locked in, keep it sacred. When I was a publisher, I found that only about one in 100 writers literally meet their deadlines. If you just do that, you set yourself apart from 99 out of 100 writers. Don't make the mistake of thinking you're going to find the time to write. When I have to write, I have to have something sacrificed from my schedule. Is it an hour or two of sleep a night? Is it a concert? Is it a ball game? Is it a movie? Is it a favorite TV show? How bad do you want this? I schedule my days right on my calendar on my computer. I have it color coded, it's in pink, and you've caught me on when tomorrow I have to reach the 70,000 word mark. I have that target there. I'm at the 67,500 mark now, so I'm going to have to write 2500 words tomorrow. And if I do that for five more days, I'm going to make my deadline because I keep that deadline sacred. Point number seven is to conduct your research. Now everybody knows that you need to do that automatically for non-fiction. You have to be an expert in what you're writing in and not just draw on your own experience, but also show that you've immersed yourself in all the writing in your field. But a lot of people miss the fact that research is just as important for fiction. In fact, I think it could be even more important. If you miss a small detail of history or aircraft or weaponry, you can be sure readers are going to point this out. Specificity lends credibility to fiction and fiction needs to be believable. Now, once you've done your research, you're going to be tempted to show that off to the reader. You want to resist that urge. Your research is not your main course. The story is the main course. Research is the seasoning that adds that specificity that gives you credibility and believability. I'm using a world history chart for my current project because I'm covering from 2000 BC to the present day. I need to know when the patriarchs were born and when they died and how they overlapped. So make sure your research becomes seasoning and that it's right because readers notice. Step number eight is to write a compelling, reader-first opener. Give it the time it deserves because if you can pull off an important, compelling first line, it will set the tone for your entire book. You probably won't write a more important line than that first one. Now, most first lines fall into one of these categories. Surprising, dramatic statement, philosophical, or poetic. I'm not going to give you examples of all of them, but let me just do that for the first two. For surprising opening in fiction, George Orwell's 1984 begins, It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. Would that keep you reading? It would me. In non-fiction, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote The Last American Man. Her first line was, By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. For dramatic statement, I'm sure you've read Toni Morrison's Paradise. Remember that first line? They shoot the white girl first. That's a dramatic statement. Now let me read you the opener to my work in progress. I'm not putting it in the category of these classics, but here's how I start. It's your mother, Nicole Berman's father said over the phone. She rose from her desk at the sound of his voice. What happened? Hopefully, that'll keep you reading. Now what do I mean by reader first? Every decision you make in your manuscript should go through that filter of reader first. Not you first, not editor first, not agent first, not reviewer first, not critic first, reader first. Whenever I have readers tell me that they really liked a book of mine, I think back to that motto, think reader first. That I often will tack right to my screen on a sticky note. I want it to be the best, most compelling, most moving, most emotional experience they've ever had because I'm thinking reader first. Not anybody else's first, so think reader first, last and always. Step number nine is to fill your story with conflict and tension. Readers crave tension and yes, this applies to non-fiction as well. Almost every time a writer shows me their manuscript and says, I don't know where to go from here, it's because they got to a point where the people on the page are agreeing with each other too much. Now, we like that in real life. It's nice to have pleasant conversations. Talk with your spouse over a meal, you're talking about how nice a day it is and what you're going to do. There's nothing more boring in fiction than that. So what you want to do is inject that conflict. Have one of those characters say something totally off the wall. Maybe one says, isn't it a beautiful day? And the other one says, oh sure you would say that. All of a sudden, the reader and that character are going, what was that about? Where did that come from? That's conflict. What's the problem in their relationship? What's the underlying tension that caused that conflict? That will keep people turning the pages. And you want to do that on every page, even if it's just a matter of someone setting up an appointment that they need to see the doctor tomorrow. There's an implication there that something's coming up otherwise, why would the author put it in there? Now, in non-fiction, how do you do that? You don't want unpleasantness. It doesn't have to be something negative. It doesn't have to be a battle or a war or a fight. Conflict and tension come up in non-fiction simply by promising and then delivering, setting up and paying off. Some of the best non-fiction writers are ones who'll spend the first several chapters promising you what you're going to get when you finish reading this book and then they deliver. Step number 10 is to turn off your internal editor while you're writing your first draft. Most writers I know are perfectionists. I happen to be one too. And so we have that inner critic sitting on our shoulder telling us what's wrong with every word we write. That inner critic is just you or me. And that critic needs to be told to shut up. Now is not the time to be criticizing your own work. Always save your editing until the next day at least, and the longer you can wait between when you write it and when you edit it, the better for the end product. This is the opening pages of my work in progress, Dead Sea Rising, my next novel. I wouldn't show this first draft to my worst enemy. I don't worry about cliches, redundancies, lacks of logic. I need to get the story down. So turn off that internal editor, get your story down, and then tell yourself that the next day you can put your perfectionist cap back on and have at it. Remember in point number five, when I mentioned the marathon of the middle, I want to make that point 11 and hit that again because if there's any place you're going to quit, it's going to be during the marathon of the middle. This is the toughest spot for me as well. I've written over 190 books in 40 years. I hit the marathon of the middle every time and I wonder, why did I get into this business? The problem with the marathon of the middle is, we've all got great ideas to start and we can't wait to get to that big finish. But now we've got a couple hundred pages in the middle to fill, and if you just start padding it in fiction with extra scenes or in non-fiction with extra points, your reader is going to drop off the page. This is where you don't just survive, you thrive. For instance, in my current work in progress, Dead Sea Rising. This is a long novel, 80,000 words, so the marathon of the middle is a good stretch. How I solve the problem of not letting it flag in the middle is to alternate from 2000 BC to present day and even back to Vietnam. And I'm setting up my payoffs so well in the middle that I can hardly wait to get to the ending. And the ending will work better because I didn't just persevere through the marathon. I thrived.
[18:46]Step number 12 is to write a resounding ending. You want your book to end the way a Broadway play ends when that curtain comes down with a satisfying thud. I'm working on my 195th book, so I've got over 190 books here that all had to have endings that worked. Two-thirds of my books are novels, one-third are non-fiction. So even non-fiction has to have that great ending. How do you make sure your ending doesn't fizzle? You give it the time it deserves. I have talked to a lot of writers who've written their entire manuscript, they get to the end, and they rush it. Or they say, I just don't know how to make it work. Don't settle for second best. If it takes longer to write your ending than the rest of the novel put together or the non-fiction book put together, do it. Do whatever it takes to make it work. And if you've got several ideas for how what might be best, go for the one that is the most emotional. Because readers remember what moves them.
[20:15]My last and most important point, step 13, is that you need to become a ferocious self-editor. What does it mean to be ferocious? You know what it means. It means to be aggressive. Everything else is for naught if you don't polish your manuscript to the point where you're happy with every word. That doesn't mean it's going to be perfect or that you don't need an editor, if you should place it with a publisher. But you need to polish that thing until it's sings. Why? Because agents and editors can tell within two minutes whether your manuscript is going to be worth reading or rejecting. That doesn't sound fair, and maybe it isn't fair. But they have so many things to read. The competition is so vast. They've learned to be able to tell within a page or two whether this has potential or not. That puts all the onus on you to self-edit. People say, should I pay an editor? If you pay an editor, what is the publisher buying? Your work or someone else's? Learn to edit yourself.
[21:54]Cut to add power. I have a list of 21 self-editing tips. You can find them at Jerry Jenkins.com. I've been so blessed in my career that I love to pay it forward. So I'm sending out free writing tips and writing blogs. You can find all that at that website. And you'll be ready to go.
