Is Writing a Book All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

It seems most beginning writers want to write a book. Some of them start out doing that without ever having written anything else for publication. Why is that? It could be that “authors” seem to get the most exposure. When was the last time you remember the name of the writer of an article or short story?  Probably never. But readers tend to remember and talk about those who write books. Remember, not all writers are authors but all authors are writers.

Perhaps it’s the title of author that seems to get more respect. Have you ever been at an event where someone asked you what you did? If you said that you’re a writer, they probably asked what you’ve written. If you only had written a short article on tips for winterizing your home, they probably wouldn’t be impressed. But turn that into a book on whole house maintenance and their ears will probably perk up.

So before you dive into writing your first book, think about the mistakes lots of beginning writers make.

First and foremost, don’t start out writing a book. It’s a huge project that will use every once of writing skill you have. Start out small writing articles or short stories. Get used to writing, itself, and improve your writing and thinking skills. Remember, an average non-fiction book equals perhaps 10-25 articles. A novel equals even more short stories. A book is so big that you may forget the beginning before you get to the end. So you’ve got to develop your planning skills as well.

Some people say not to tell anyone about your book. That’s rubbish. Discuss your idea with close friends or family members. Listen to what they have to say about it, but don’t necessarily take their advice. What you decide to do is totally up to you. However, too many beginning writers think that if they talk about what they’re doing, someone will steal their idea. As a writer, you should have lots of ideas and variations on them. But your friends and family aren’t about to steal them. Talking about your book idea may firm it up in your mind, but don’t talk about it to strangers.

Stay objective while working on your book. This is hard to do. Some writers fall in love with parts of their book. This doesn’t help when it comes to editing later on. And editing doesn’t just mean looking out for mistakes in grammar and such. Editing for continuity and length is an important part of the process. If you’re objective, you’ll be able to delete parts that don’t belong.

If you haven’t done any writing for publication before starting your book, you’re in for a big surprise. Beginning writers often think that the words will just pour out and the book will write itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

No matter what kind of book you’re going to write, you must set some realistic goals. Writing a book takes months of hard work, beginning with thinking about it, then intensive research, planning it out, writing the first draft, revising and re-writing, and finally editing. The idea of writing a book in a month, itself is unrealistic. So don’t follow the crowd in NaNoWriMo and plan to write your book come November.

You need to set some long-term goals for your book project and some short-term ones. Know where you want to be on the project in say six months. For short-term goals, set them to write each chapter. Consider each chapter a unit by itself. Also, set time goals. Figure how much time you’ll have to write each day and plan to write for that amount of time, no matter how many words you put down. Even if you write a little each day, it will all add up. Above all, don’t go on writing binges and work for hours on end. Limit the time you write.

Get organized from the start. Create a folder for your book in your computer, then create subfolders for each of the chapters within that. You’ll also need folders for your research within the main folder. Number your drafts to keep them separate from each other. And save your work often. Some word processors, such as Corel WordPerfect, automatically save your work after a certain number of minutes, say 10, that you specify. That means that even if your program crashes, your work is backed up. Otherwise, set a timer to go off on your smartphone every so often to remind you to save your work. At the end of each writing session, also save your book draft on a thumb or external hard drive or to the Cloud if you have that available.

Writing a book is hard work, so make sure you enjoy doing it. Pick an idea that you love and really get into it. Remind yourself why you why you decided to write a book in the first place.

Seeking Perfection

All writers strive for perfection. Some achieve it easily while others struggle to obtain it. For a writer, perfection can take many forms. For some it takes the form of perfect grammar. For others it takes the form of English usage. And for still others it takes the form of content.

The reading public believes that all writers should practice perfect grammar. People are almost unforgiving in this respect. If a doctor slips up on a diagnosis or treatment, the patient doesn’t go back to him or her and correct them. In fact, most patients probably wouldn’t know if their doctor had made a mistake unless he or she said so or something unusual happened.

But with grammar—that thing that everyone studies in school—it’s different. Everyone either uses good or atrocious grammar. For many who perhaps didn’t finish high school or perhaps stopped their education after graduating, daily grammatical mistakes are forgiven—“They don’t know any better.” If a person is college educated, that forgiveness is less forthcoming—“They should know better.” But for writers, for which grammar is a tool of the trade—“They ought to know better.”

Yes, writers ought to know better, but they’re also human. And in conversation, perhaps in the heat of the moment, they may occasionally make a grammatical mistake.

English usage is right behind grammar. Writers seek to practice correct English usage, but with styles changing every five years or so, it’s hard to keep up with what’s acceptable or not. Readers forget that today’s writing style is vastly different from say that of the early 20th century.

Unfortunately, a lot of writers, stylistically speaking, are still back in the mid-20th century. Some will tell you that’s the way they learned to write in school, and so they continue using outdated English usage. A good example is the use of dashes. Today, readers are more visual, therefore writers use dashes more often to visually separate information from the main body of the text.

Another example is the semi-colon. While businesspeople and academics still hold on to using this form of punctuation, many of today’s writers opt to forgo using semicolons. Instead of joining two thoughts with them, they create two separate sentences whose similar content joins them automatically.

Lastly, writers strive for perfection in their content. Not only should sentences be complete and logical, but thoughts and ideas need to be, also. In a shorter piece, that’s usually not a problem. But when a writer is working on a book, a play, or a screenplay, he or she can lose sight of where they’re going. And if they don’t check for consistency once in a while, they may lose their readers as well.

Perfection for most writers comes during the revising and rewriting process, after they’ve finished writing a piece. But going over and over a piece, constantly revising it, can do more harm than good. Too much revising is as bad as too little. Trying to be too perfect can ruin a good piece of writing.

For many writers, perfection comes after working on many pieces. Each one adds to a writer’s overall sense of perfection. To be a perfectionist too early on can stifle not only a writer’s creativity but his or her ability to write.

It’s All in the Edit

Next to writing the actual words, your most important job as a writer is to edit your work. Good editing makes all the difference between writing and really good writing. However, many writers find it tedious—they like only the buzz they get from the actual process of writing. Also, just as many writers don’t really know what editing is all about. They think they know based on corrections made by English teachers when they were in school, but this is far from the editing needed to make a writer’s work look professional.

First and foremost, before doing any editing, step away from your work. Let it sit idle for at least a day or several. The longer you refrain from looking at it, the better. Your mind will forget about it eventually, so when you do look at it again, you’ll see it in a new light.

Editing is much more than just correcting mechanical errors—spelling, punctuation, verb tense, pronoun agreement, and general sentence structure. Editing deals with the content of your piece. Does it make sense? Is the flow logical? Are your words familiar enough for all readers? (See my previous blog on using $20 words).

Whatever you’ve written, you’ve done so to express yourself on a particular topic. Have you done that? Will that be clear to your reader? Clarity is the number one problem with most poorly edited writing. Remember, your reader can’t phone you or send you an E-mail to ask what something means.

Generally, editing consists of four jobs:  deleting, rearranging, rewriting, and correcting.

First read through your work and delete any word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph that doesn’t belong. If you can eliminate the word and there's no loss of meaning, then eliminate it.

If you haven’t looked at your work for a while, you may notice that some parts need to be rearranged for better continuity. Readers won’t make the leap, so don’t expect them to figure out what you mean. Make your writing logical. If you’re not telling your story chronologically, make sure you won’t lose your reader in the process.

After you delete parts or whole sections and rearrange others, you’ll most likely have holes to fill, so you’ll have to rewrite some parts to make sure they read well and make sense. In this editing phase, you may also want to check for smooth paragraph transitions. These help your writing to flow effortlessly from paragraph to paragraph.

Lastly, and only then, correct any errors in spelling, punctuation, verb tenses, and pronoun agreement.

Once you’ve edited your article, short story, or book, it may be time to let someone else have a crack at it, especially if it’s a book. Find someone who is a serious reader to go over it in detail. Better yet, hire a professional book editor. With the ease of self-publishing for Kindle or Nook, too many writers today are trying to sell what amounts to writing trash. Make sure whatever you sell is the best it can be before you put it on the market.