Building up to a book
Writing a book is a major accomplishment that few people can claim. Taking the next step and trad publishing or self-publishing is an even bigger accomplishment, because so much more is required. It’s a long, long road that can take many years to traverse.
Bird by bird
Building the confidence that you can complete such a long journey is step one. When I wrote my first nonfiction book, Email Marketing Rules (1st edition), I’d already written more than a thousand articles and blog posts. It was no coincidence that I modelled that first edition after Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, which is essentially a collection of short blog posts.
I knew I could write what turned out to be 108 rules and put a nice wrapper on it, because I’d already written 10 times that number of articles. In fact, like many nonfiction authors, I mined some of those articles to create the content for the book. Beyond that, the challenge was how to organize the content into sections that created a logical flow from topic to topic. I spent more than a year collecting notes, and then an intense 3 or so months to write and edit it.
In Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, she talks about working your way through big projects bit by bit … or rather, bird by bird. That was absolutely my experience with all five of my nonfiction books. However, the experience with the two novels I’ve written so far was different.
Flight by flight
If I can expand on Lamott’s analogy, I wasn’t just describing each bird. I had to create several birds, harness them all, and fly them in different combinations from one place to another. And not just any place, but to pre-determined destinations.
Admittedly, in a number of cases, the birds took me to some places near where I’d planned to go, and often took detours or otherwise improvised. It turns out, directing a gaggle of birds is tough. They often have ideas of their own.
So, while writing nonfiction books first absolutely gave me the confidence I needed, novel-writing is nowhere near as straightforward. It’s no exaggeration to say that a novel involves a hundred times more variables and therefore decisions than a nonfiction book. For me, investing a lot of time in plotting was key, even if my birds introduced a bunch of wrinkles to the plot that I hadn’t planned from the beginning.
Related posts:
Why are we trying to discourage aspiring novelists from publishing?
Recommended reading on novel writing from my developmental editor—and what I’d already read
How to generate writing momentum
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