If you want to write a book, you need to establish clear discipline and be ready for everything that could happen. But you can do it.
During November–National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo–400,000 people dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words toward a novel. Participants get together in bookstores, church basements, coffee shops, classrooms to feed off each others’ energy and write an average of 1,666 words a day. Of course, people also write alone, at kitchen tables, on sofas, in candle-lit garrets, and more.
If they can do it, you can do it.
The important thing is that they write. Every day. On schedule. And at the end of the process, they have 50,000 words.
Here are seven simple tips for getting your manuscript done.
Go Inside the Character
Getting into characters’ heads means embracing all of them, including their misunderstandings, says Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, The Kingdom and the Power, and other nonfiction narrative works. Leave it to the story–and the reader—to judge the characters. “I try to see people as they see themselves,” Talese says. “Bill Bonanno was a murderer, as was his father, as were those bodyguards I used to hang out with in restaurants along First Avenue in lower Manhattan. But I didn’t think they were so different from soldiers who are praised by their government as patriotic for committing murder. Protecting your buddies, that’s all it’s about.”
Listen for the Sounds You Create
John McPhee says the ultimate test for a piece of writing comes when you read it aloud: “Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit. I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.”
Gossip!
Be a snoop and take notes voraciously, says Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres. “Eavesdrop and write it down from memory–gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.”
Give yourself to love
All good writing begins with the heart, says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man and Eat, Pray, Love (pictured). Of course, the heart is hard to figure out, but at least try. “I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith.”
Don’t Just Summarize
Too often, writers rush to summarize rather than paying close attention to what actually happens, said Ernest Hemingway. “The greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action–what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” Daily journalism is easy because it’s so disposable. “In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”
Explore different worlds
Ultimately, writing is about translating someone else’s life and work to an audience with no real knowledge of either, said John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run and other books. “A man whose life is spent in biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way,” he said. “There is a thinness in contemporary fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try, especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw’s plays have a wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw’s sense of economic process, I guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.”
Get physical
If a story does not affect you physically, something’s missing, said Susan Sontag, author of As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. “The story must strike a nerve — in me,” she says. “My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”
Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes, agrees. “I want my books or articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader,” he said. “Something has to happen to the character during which an emotional truth is revealed.”
Give it to ’em
Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, advised against holding back information. No need to be too cute withholding information, he said. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
Before you go . . .
• Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.
• For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here.
• To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.