It seems an obvious thing, but if you’re interested in writing something, what do you write?
The obvious answer should be similar to everything else regarding you as a person: Write what you like.
If you’re into science fiction, write science fiction. If you’re into mystery, write mysteries. Ditto with romances, biographies, young adult, children, or how-to tomes.
Having said that, I suspect there are those who pursue genres or book types which are popular, as well. I’m hopeful they’re a minority, but who knows.
So you want to be a writer of, say, mysteries, and you wonder what you need to do to come up with your story.
The first step in the process, should you have reached the point where you want to write mystery novels, is to read plenty of mystery novels. You see what works and, sometimes even more importantly, what does not work in other mystery novels/stories.
You analyze what excites you about them, what, for lack of a better term, “tickles your fancy”.
The next step is to start writing. And you write and write and write and, eventually –hopefully!– you’ve written that first novel.
Then what?
There is a story, very likely apocryphal, that upon writing his first novel Ernest Hemingway threw it in the trash and got to work on his next book.
The fact of the matter is that whatever you write first, whatever it may be, is likely not going to be all that great.
Understand, there certainly is a possibility the novel or story you write is a good one.
But let’s be real here: Just because you decide to go to the track one day and run a lap or two, it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly the heavy favorite to win the 500 meter race in the next Olympics.
So write that first novel as best as you can. Pour your heart into it and revise it and polish it and try to make it the very best thing you can.
Then, you have to find the moment to abandon it.
I’m not saying you should throw it away and use the experience gained to write your second novel. What I’m saying is that as important as starting a novel is, it is almost just as important to find the time to finish your work on it.
I know what I talk of!
Haze, wasn’t the first story I wrote but it was my first attempt at an honest to goodness novel.
Writing the book proved a brutal but ultimately very rewarding experience.
Of all the books I’ve written since, one of the biggest lessons learned from writing Haze is that you need to focus on what is important in the story and not get too consumed with page or word counts.
In the book’s early incarnations, there was an awful lot of stuff going on in the book’s first act, stuff that over time I realized didn’t add much to the story and, worse, kept readers from getting to the good stuff.
The writing of this novel turned from my finding how to create a story to my learning what was important in telling that story versus what was extraneous.
It took me years to figure this out.
In between, I left the book for a while and devoted time to writing other stories and plotting other novels. I worked and worked while Haze sat in a drawer and on my hard drive. Now and again I would return to it, having gained more experience over time, and revise it.
I can’t say how many times I’ve revised that book, but I suspect it was far more than my usual 10-12 revisions of a novel.
And that’s another thing that experience teaches you. I’ve come to realize that my first 1-3rd draft of a novel is usually where I’m putting ideas down, sometimes out of order or presented in a word salad. If I have a notion for a scene and I’m not certain about where it will go in the book, I may just write a description and highlight it and go about writing whatever else needs to be written.
In time, I have that first “full” draft of the book and from that point on the polishing starts. I go over the novel to make sure I’ve accounted for every action, that I’ve explained why things occur and how. I make sure everything is clear.
The last three or four drafts of my latest novel are inevitably devoted to grammar and syntax. I make sure everything is spelled right and that there be as few typos as possible.
And once I’m done, it’s off to the next book.
I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again: Writing is not an easy thing to do. It requires considerable work and, as should be obvious by what I wrote above, considerable patience and effort.
But if I can do it, anyone can! 😉
