How to write a book.  That’s a question asked by over 135,000 people online every month if you can believe the reports.

How hard can it be to write a book?  Don’t you just site down in front of your computer, typewriter, voice recorder, desk or wherever you feel comfortable and just start?

Then you keep going until it’s done and that is all there is.  After that you find a publisher and sell squillions of them don’t you?

In real life, not that BS above, writing a book just isn’t that easy.

If you are one of those who do search for how to write a book and you have found this page then you are in the right place.  I will walk you through the process, as an overview, of how you can write a book and point you to some resources which can help you get started in a supportive environment and help you self publish after you have written your book.

How good is that?  You will even learn how to publish your book.  Self publishing can be easy if you have some help.

Ready to get started writing your book?  Fantastic. 

The first step is to begin with an idea.  Audrey Niffenegger, author of “The Time Traveller’s Wife”, wrote recently on the subject of where ideas come from that ...they come from nowhere.  Once the idea has arrived the writers job is to interrogate it, to continue to ask questions of it.  At the beginning the idea is feeble and the answers to the questions seem arbitrary. But as the questioning goes on, and the story builds, it begins to have a certain inevitable quality.

So how do you get the beginning germ of an idea?  This post, where do you get ideas write about, should get you started.  Opens in a new window so you can keep reading this.

The second step is to “interrogate the idea”.  You do this by researching it in the libraby, talking to people who know about the subject, researching on the internet and brainstorming it.  More information about developing ideas for writing.

The third step in writing your book is to develop the characters and background to the story.  Some of your characters will need more development than others.  Obviously your main character will have the most development and for some further information on this have a look at this post on researching the story background.

By this stage you probably have a fairly solid idea of how your characters will behave and where your story is heading.  This then makes the fourth step one of storyboarding your whole story.  There are several ways of doing this but one quite effective way is to write snippets of story for each chaper or stage of the story which you’ll expand later but for now is just the main idea for the section.  One example of this method is this post, time to draft the storyline. Another way is to use a whiteboard and lay it all out.  Still a different way is to draw up a time line for the events in your, now inevitable, book.

Finally you begin by writing the last chapter, well you could do it that way or you could just take each of those snippets you wrote earlier and expand them.  By the time you have finished all of them you probably have a completed manuscript on your hands.

One more tip.  Don’t edit your book as you write.  Just get the first draft down from beginning to end.  When you’ve done that, put it aside for a day or so and then re-read it and begin the editing process by tidying up the spelling and grammar.

Ready to publish your new book?  Self publish with Bearly Books.  Share your work with us.  I promise we’ll be gentle.