Write Your First Book in Six Easy Steps

If you want to consider yourself an author, you’ve got to write that first book. This is the stumbling bock that separates the authors from the rest. Most of the people I talk to have made numerous attempts at their first book and just never get finished. You may find yourself fitting in this category. I know I sat there for almost twenty years. It doesn’t have to be that way and I will show you the simple tricks to finishing your first book. If you really want to be an author, read this article and follow the simple steps. I think you will see a link to a self publishing firm along side this article, if you do click on it and take down the information as soon as you finish reading this article. You will need it because you are going to be an author in a very short time. When you finish your first book, please return to this article and let me and all my readers know.

Step one, choose a topic. This can be frustrating, because you probably have many topics that you have already worked on. I recommend starting fresh and I’ll tell you why in just a moment. Your first book needs to be simple and easy to put together. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece; it just needs to be your first completed work. I chose to write my first book about my own life. Don’t get me wrong I don’t have an amazing life that people would pay to hear about. I do, however have a life and that is a good enough start. I took my normal life added a few eccentric characters and made everyday events a little more interesting. After all creativity is what makes us want to become a writer in the first place which takes us to the next step.

Step two, start with the end. I know this sounds stupid but keep reading. Look back at your life and find something you wish was different. Figure out exactly what you wanted that part of you life to be and write it down. I looked back at my life and kept seeing a friendship I had in my teen years. It was a friendship with an amazing young lady who was precious in every way. I wondered what it would have been like to have had a relationship with her. I didn’t speculate on what it would be like I just wrote down that we got together against all odds. Now I didn’t just tell you the end of my book. It took a few turns and ended much differently than I had ever expected, but it got me started and I had a direction and nothing is more important than that.

Step three don’t work on anything else until this book is finished and don’t change the end you just wrote until you get there. I think when you finally arrive at the end you just wrote, you will simply fix it up and go with it. Now that you have the end look at your life and try to figure out how far you have to go back to set off the chain of events necessary to make your wish come true. I went back two years. I could have made it work in just a few days, but I thought of The Thorn Birds. I’m not a romantic so I wanted to do some research. Don’t make the mistake a lot of people do. This I cannot stress enough. DO NOT go read a book that you liked or that you think is similar to what you just wrote down. This needs to be your own story and if you try to do what someone else has done it won’t be and you will probably fail. The only thing I remembered about the Thorn Birds was it was very, very long, but that is what made it work. So I decided instead of making this happen in two days I would play it out over a two year period. In the end my first book stretched out into a twenty year story and only totaled about a hundred pages.

Step four; don’t do rewrites until you have a complete rough draft. Get the blood and guts down on paper. Remember this is not supposed to be your best work. It is supposed to be your first completed work. In the end I think you will find that it is an amazing work and with some rewrites it might be among your best, but for now just get it finished. The blood and guts can be difficult at first, but I found a story is a long list of stories leading up to a final outcome. I couldn’t figure out how to make this thing last two years at first, so I started screwing around and writing funny things with the characters I had created and some that I barrowed from real people in my life. This was the discovery of a lifetime.

Step five, Play with your characters. Put them in situations that don’t have anything to do with the story you are writing. This does a number of things. Number one it helps you develop your characters. Even if you are using people you know as your characters you will not be duplicating that person. No matter how well you know them you just can’t always guess how they will react, so it is important to play with them. Number two it can give your story the body it needs. Not everything you write at this point will end up in your book, but some will and they will take your story in new directions and give it depth that it might not have had.

Step six, don’t worry about the rules. I think it was Aristotle who put together a list of ten elements a story needs in order to be complete. You can worry about living inside the box when you’re old and dyeing. Right now you have to be yourself and do things your way. Every person God creates is unique and interesting. That will come out in your writing. Just write and let the critics worry about the rules.

This is a short list and I will go into more depth in a future article, but for now you have everything you need to write your first book. If you want to read my first book to see how it all came together you can find it at www.lulu.com/548casey but be warned I stuck to a bit of advise from a professor I had in college twenty years ago. Write it exactly like you would tell it to your best friend. I found out that I use a lot of profanities when I talk to my best friend. If you don’t like foul language you might not want to read my first book. If you can see past it long enough, when you get to the end you will see it a little different. That’s not to say profanities are okay, but people who use them might be struggling to find a better way. I happen to think profanities are used so much in society today they have just become slang at best and no longer carry the offensive edge they were once associated with.

I almost forgot one of the most important things, don’t tell anybody what your story is about and don’t let anybody read it until it is complete. You will understand why when it is all said and done.