1. WRITE FOR YOU. Before you put pen to paper, err....start typing, get real clear that you are writing this book for you. What I mean is that you are writing a book that YOU would want to read, not anybody else. Absolutely, 100% get it out of your head that you need to write a book that will sell to the masses. As soon as you do that you will fail. You are unable to understand what millions of people would want to read and it takes all of the passion, drive and fun out of writing if you do that. Imagine the book you want to write has not been written already so you need to take it upon yourself to keep you HAPPY. That's it.
2. FEAR & DOUBT WILL OCCUR. Before you get started, I want you to understand that there are going to be moments when you will think that everything you have wrote will be complete and utter shit. "Shit" may not cover the words you will use to describe how you feel. You will think that your work needs to go into the trash, set on fire, while tears run down your face as your dreams burn along with it, and you should never attempt to write again. If you don't go through that? You're just a badass. I personally had that happen to me quite a bit during my first book. It happened so much that it took me a little over 2 years to actually write the damn thing to completion. So, it is normal. Completely and totally normal. Ignore that and keep going.
3. WRITERS BLOCK. Again, normal. This is going to happen, just accept it now. However, also know that the answers on how to proceed will come to you. They. Always. Do. I promise. For example, there was a time when I needed to understand a quantum physics principle about separate universes when I wrote Memoirs of a Dreamer. I could barely pass algebra in school and here I needed to understand how different universes are born in order for me to describe an alien race that has been around for millions of years, how they found this universe, and where we all come from. You can't write about things that you don't know, right? I was pretty frustrated and felt a little beat down by it and as a novice (and still am in a lot of ways), I wanted to hit that trash can I talk about in #2, but instead I told myself the answers will come. Two days later, I am lying on my couch watching Through the Wormhole and sure enough, the episode was about black holes and the theory that they are the birth place of other universes. The theory stating that the ultimate reality we live in is actually a living organism and it births new universes through black holes. I remember shooting up off of the couch to an upright position saying "oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Shut up!". I knew without a doubt that I was sitting there at that moment, watching that show, on purpose and that he universe sent me the answers that I needed. I just knew it!
4. START WITH 3. What does that mean you crazy person writing this blog? It means, before you start digging into writing, give yourself three major points in the story, the beginning, the climax and the end. Try not to get too hung up on the details of how you will get there. When I wrote Memoirs, I knew that I wanted to start with a war of the worlds type picture at the beginning, her children would be stolen in the middle, and she would have to embrace who she is in order to go and get them back by any means necessary at the end. That was all I knew. I then wrote to get to those points. So, do not get too hung up on the details before you start writing, only know that you are writing towards that next point. As you write, you will start to see that the story will take form. Yes, you can know a few of the characters ahead of time, as well. However, I noticed that when I started getting into the chapters some of the characters appeared on their own given the scene I was writing.
5. USE YOUR SENSES. Make sure to use your 5 senses when writing in order to visualize what a scene looks like and explain who is in it. What does the apartment smell like when the character walks in? What color is your best friends hair? How does it feel when the main character ran off the road? Etc. If you fall short on being descriptive, don't worry. That is what the 2nd and 3rd drafts are for. If it helps, and it's what I did, I devised characters based around people that I already knew in my life, which then in turn made it much easier to describe them when I wrote about them.
6. DON'T EDIT. When you write your first draft do NOT under any circumstances edit your work to within an inch of itself. You will never get anywhere. Trust me. The first draft is literally all about you sitting down, writing, writing, writing until it is done. Imagine the world you are writing in has no need for spelling, punctuation or grammar. That's the world you live in. You are the slayer of correct English in this world. If they are minor things that you catch right away? Fine. Fix them. For instance, if auto correct in Word corrects a word to one that you didn't mean to be there, and you catch it right away, fix it. But under no circumstances write a paragraph or chapter, and then go back and edit the hell out of it. You will never finish and it will cause #2 followed by #3, and you will loop in that cycle.
7. WAIT. When you finish the first draft, put it down for a week or two and do other things before you go back in and work on the 2nd draft. You need to be able to clear your head from the material you have been visualizing and writing for the last however long you were immersed in it. If you give yourself that time away, when you finally go back in there, you can look at it from a fresher perspective and set of eyes. That second draft is when you will go in and clean up spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, and add in more detail, and/or edit up a scene better than the first time around. Understand that the second draft will be a little bit better than the first in terms of cleaning up as much as you can. I usually will use the editing tools in Word first, because that is the easiest thing to do in terms of correcting spelling and punctuation, and then reread the entire book and clean up more as I go.
8. GIVE IT TO A FRIEND. If you have a friend who is an avid reader? You're in luck. Send them your 2nd draft and ask them to give you honest to goodness feedback. Tell them to be brutal and treat your work like prey that they have stalked, and now have in their jaws. You WANT that and I'll tell you why. There may be scenes that you write that seem to make perfect sense to you, but not to them. They may need more detail in the form of sentences to explain how you got to where you were, OR they may not understand completely who you are trying to describe. They may want the love interest to have more detail. Things like that and they are big deals. If they can't understand it, nobody else will either. And truthfully? It will help you to become a better writer all around should you decide to write another book, which I know I wanted to do. Writing a book is like a tattoo to me; you can't just have one. So, to have that feedback is crucial to help you the next time around. If you don't have a friend who you feel could be honest with you like this? Use Social Media to post a status asking for someone who can read that first draft for you. I wrote the status like this, "I finished the second draft of my first book and I need someone who can read it for me and give me honest feedback. Can you please share this status on your walls to help me get that one, spectacular reader that will help a sista out?" Yup, that's what I wrote. And I wasn't disappointed, because within a few minutes I had offers out the whazoo from people that I knew and messages in my inbox from people that I didn't know offering to help me. You then use their feedback to change it or not, and then use that as your third and final draft, and then make it so. Finish it. You can loop into an endless pit of editing upon editing, upon, you guessed it, more editing. That is going to get you nowhere. Take their feedback, make the changes or not, and then let it be finished.
9. PROTECT. Make sure that you can access your work from multiple places with the use of a file sharing service. I use DropBox so I know that, no matter what, I can get to my work from any computer anywhere. If my tower dies? I know that I can get to it from my laptop. If my laptop crashed and my tower crashed at the same time? I can go to any computer anywhere log into DropBox and get to my work. It is never lost. Be sure to find a way to always have access to that work. I learned that lesson the hard way. I started my original set of books years ago and I only had them on a tower I owned at the time. That tower crashed and burned, and I was not able to recover the work that I had started on those books. A few years later when I took the tower to a friend to try and save other files, he recovered the work I had done, but by then it had more symbols and junk in it than actual words when it was recovered. So be sure to do that. Once it is gone, more than likely it is GONE.
I hope that this helps to give you helpful information and tools to use to start that novel that you have always wanted to write, but didn't know what to expect or how to get started. These are the exact things that I do and I am now going into book 3. Does that make me an expert? Definitely not, but it has helped me to refine the process as I go and when I do just this, get my mind straight and use these tips, I tend to write much easier and with more confidence than I did when I started with book 1.
Good luck!! Happy writing.
