Those of you who have never tried it may think being a
writer is an easy way to make a living. Unfortunately you could not be more
wrong.
Let’s start with the basics first, unless you are Stephen
King, James Patterson, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling or one of perhaps a couple of
dozen others you are not going to make your fortune by writing. In fact you
probably won’t make enough to live on and most of the writers I know either
have some additional form of income or, like me, do a full time job.
So, nine till five, five days a week you’re working to keep
a roof over your family and food on your table but all the time you have this
idea for the great American novel going around in your head. You can’t wait to
get home, you eat so fast you give yourself heartburn and then you sit down at
your laptop, typewriter of word processor ready to begin, but where do you
start? You have your idea, you may have your hero, heroine or both pictured in
your mind and you may even have an image of the bad guys, if there are any. You
know what is going to happen to them but how are you going to get them from the
first word to the moment you write “the end”?
Well, if you want to do it properly you close your laptop,
pick up a pencil and notepad and start to make notes.
Your notes should be concise, they should cover all aspects of
your characters and you should add to them constantly, after all, you may be
eighty thousand words into your story and the next chapter could depend on
whether Aunt Matilda’s eyes are blue or brown but you can’t remember. Where did
you mention it? Chapter four? Maybe chapter sixteen, or did you forget to
mention it at all? This is where your notes come in.
Okay, now you’ve written pencil sketches of your major
characters and are ready to start – or are you? Say your hero is a soldier, a historical
figure, a spy or maybe an overworked detective. He or she is going to need some
place to work from, some equipment, maybe a weapon for disposing of bad guys,
some form of transport, even historical transport if your novel is set in the
past, something to wear and many other things. If you are lucky and you are
following the old adage about writing about what you know, then some of this
information will already be available to you but not all of it.
So this is where you start your research and believe me you
need to do it. Your potential readers out there are smart people, some of them
are already going to know the things you need to look up and, if you get them
wrong, they will tell you, perhaps in a review on Amazon and that can be deadly
for book sales.
Not so many years ago researching this stuff meant taking a trip to the local library and
browsing through an infinity of books to try to find some obscure fact. You may
need to know if Iroquois war axes were double or single headed or, like I did
for one of my novels, the height of an F16’s cockpit above the ground. Luckily
today we have the internet and details like this are readily available. Google,
Bing and Wikipedia are the writer’s friend when it comes to garnering facts but
be careful, they can be too friendly and may lure you into spending precious
writing time following ever more tangled webs of knowledge.
Speaking of time, you now have your notes, you have as many
facts as you think you may need and you are now ready to start writing. You
will need many more facts before you are done but you’ve been at this for a
while now and you still haven’t written a word so you start.
An average novel is more than 80,000 words and takes a while
to complete. I like to aim to write an average of a thousand words a day.
Sometimes I do three times that, sometimes only a small portion, but I try to
write every day. I also have a system where I start each day’s writing by
reading what I wrote the day before, I find it gets me back into the rhythm of the
story and it helps with later editing because you can catch errors as you read.
You’re writing 1000 words a day, in a week you will have a
first chapter but is it any good? I guess I am lucky, my wife is a talented
writer and a dedicated proofreader who wields a mighty red pen. She helps me
tremendously with the tedious job of editing. Usually though there is only so
much “Is this any good?” that spouses can take and they also tend to be too
kind, they want to encourage you so they aren’t as critical as a stranger might
be.
What you need is a peer group who will support, encourage
and help you while pointing out holes in the plot you may have missed and
offering suggestions to aid you in your task.
I’m very lucky, we have two excellent writing support groups
near where I live, one for novels and the other for short stories and poems. I
have been to both groups and would encourage any one else who feels the urge to
write to try similar groups. At the very least you’ll get the encouragement of
knowing you are not alone.
