GET WRITING!
How Anyone Can Write A Novel!
(An Inspirational and Practical Guide to achieving your dream of writing a book!)
By
IAN C.P. IRVINE
Copyright 2019 © IAN C.P. IRVINE
Copyright 2019 © The IRVINE METHOD
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright observed above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the copyright owner.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people with the explicit permission of the author. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedicated to
Douglas McKell,
Sue Alexander,
Martin, Al Guthrie
And to my Parents
who taught me how to spel.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: A good title
Chapter 3: Having an idea
Chapter 4: Book Length
Chapter 5: Plotter or Pantser: How to write the book (Part One)
Chapter 6: Learn to Touch-Type
Chapter 7: Author or Writer?
Chapter 8: The shape of the book: The Beginning, The End, The Middle
Chapter 9: Motivate yourself to write (with an incredibly powerful Visualisation Technique!)
Chapter 10: Making a start
Chapter 11: Writing each chapter as a mini-book
Chapter 12: Plotter or Pantser: How to write the book (Part Two)
Chapter 13: Building colour and detail into the book: use the power of visualisation!
Chapter 14: Overcoming problems by looking backwards not forwards
Chapter 15: Editing (Part One): Edit as you go!
Chapter 16: Build a pile and watch it grow!
Chapter 17: Tying up loose ends
Chapter 18: Two Magic Words– ‘THE END’
Chapter 19: Editing (Part Two): Editing what you’ve written using Enemies, Friends and an Electronic Partner
Chapter 20: Your are a WINNER!
Chapter 21: Time to decide: Publish or Self-Publish?
Chapter 22: Doing research for your books
Chapter 23: How many pages should I write each day?
Chapter 24: Celebrate! The End is nigh!
Chapter 25: BONUS CHAPTER: Useful resources for Indie Authors
Chapter 26: Other books by IAN C.P. IRVINE
Chapter 1
Introduction
It's said that everyone has a book within them. I don't know who said that, but I've heard it said several times and I think it's probably true. Today, more than ever, people are deciding to look inside themselves to try to find that book, to ‘extract it’ and then give it to others.
Some people are doing it because they dream of making vast fortunes from their literary prowess, and are hoping to retire from their work and move to a Caribbean Island where they sip cocktails all day and spin out another best-selling thriller on their laptop in the shade of a coconut tree.
Others are doing it because it’s on their bucket list, and having climbed Everest, or more likely swum with dolphins or jumped out of an airplane with a large piece of cloth attached to their back - and survived - then writing a best-seller is next on the list.
And why not? In theory, writing a book has never been easier. Thanks to the new and exciting worldwide ‘Indie Publisher’ movement, almost anyone can write a book and publish it. And perhaps even sell a few copies. Or a few million.
In the old days, and we’re talking less than ten years ago here, if you wrote a book, either it had to be incredibly good, or you had to have a contact in the publishing world who was willing to take a chance on you. For most people, the fear of rejection put them off ever trying. In fact, rejection and publishing were, until quite recently, almost the same word. First you would get rejected by your friends, for writing about them, then you would get rejected from all the agents you wrote to. If you did find an agent, then your book would almost definitely be rejected by all the publishers to whom it was sent. Even if it wasn’t, and it was published, if it didn’t sell enough, your book was promptly dropped and you’d probably never be published again.
Today, however, that’s all different. Anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish it. And anyone can buy it. Even better, if no one buys the book, nothing bad happens. But, and this is the best part, it’s highly likely that if your book is any good whatsoever, you will sell anything from at least one to your mum, to perhaps hundreds, thousands or millions, depending upon a combination of luck, how enjoyable the book is, how good the front cover is, and how proficient you become at doing your own advertising.
Also, on the plus side, is the fact that there are now possibly hundreds of books out there that tell you how you can join this publishing revolution, and how you too can become a successful Indie Author. Most of these books tell you about the mechanics of how to use the technology that’s out there to support you in your Indie Adventure. They explain how Amazon KDP works, for example, or how to run adverts for your books on Facebook or Instagram, or even Amazon itself.
Unfortunately, however, there are few books or courses which help you overcome that same problem which has dogged would-be authors for hundreds of years: how to ‘extract’ that first book out of you. And then the next. And possibly even a third.
You might have heard a rumour that writing should be fun. Most writers write because they feel they have to write. They feel compelled to write. So, if you want to write too, but fear the process of ‘book extraction’, how can we change your attitude, so the process no longer feels so daunting? How can we make book writing fun? How can we change your viewpoint and remove the trepidation and help you to really WANT to write, and look forward to it? How can you arrange it so that your writing flows easily, that there is little effort spent on making yourself write, and that all your effort is spent on the actual writing itself?
How can you motivate yourself to write so that it’s the number one thing you want to do, and that not writing now becomes the abnormal? How can you transform your wish to write a book, into a compulsion that drives you to write during every possible moment where you can put pen to paper? In other words, how can you become – a ‘writer’?
Hopefully that’s one of the things you will learn here, today.
In this short but informative book my goal is to quickly share with you a new method which I have developed specifically for authors, which anyone can use to motivate themselves to write a book. For the sake of this book, let’s call it the Irvine Method™. I’m not going to spend a lot of time teaching you things which you can read about in any of the other books you can already buy. Instead I’m going to try to teach you two or three key things that I had to learn for myself when I started out my writing career and which I don’t think you can learn elsewhere.
Since then I’ve had almost two million books downloaded from Amazon, and have written twenty-two books, all thrillers, many which are considered not bad. (I’ll leave it to you to check them out if you want, and to formulate your own opinion on whether they are any good or not – www.iancpirvine.com.)
In general, using the Irvine Method™ I’ll share in this book, it takes me between two to six months
to write a two-book series, and then about fifteen minutes to publish them on Amazon. During that time, I also have a full-time job and a family to bring up.
The main point here is, that I am MOTIVATED to write. I want to. I look forward to it. And in general, there is no need to ‘extract’ a book from my creative mind… it just flows. In the process I will share with you in this book, one of the first things I do before I start a book is to do a mental exercise which enlivens my brain and plants the seeds of motivation into my subconscious. Once this is done, my subconscious becomes hard-wired into producing the next book. And from there on in, I’m on autopilot until the words ‘The End’ appear on the blank page in front of me, and I realise I have just finished the first draft.
Don’t worry, I won’t abandon you there. As well as sharing with you how to set up the process of writing a book and motivating yourself to do it, I will also share with you some tips on the writing process. I’ll follow this with some general guidance on how to edit it and get it into a place where it’s ready to send to a publisher or self-publish.
The interesting thing about this process is that although I’ve applied it to writing a book, key parts of the process can also be applied to many other aspects of life. One of the tips I’ll share with you is a good trick on how to overcome those sometimes seemingly impossible problems you may encounter in your daily life.
For the price of a cup of coffee, you really have nothing to lose, but everything to gain.
So, let’s recap what this book will be about: it’s not only about how to write a book, it also tries to answer the question of how to get that book out of you, onto paper/or into a Word document and then printed for others to read.
So how do you start?
The simple answer is you start at the beginning.
Chapter 2
Step1: A Good Title
In the Irvine Method, Step 1 and Step 2 can be interchangeable, and are flexible, depending on whether or not you already have an idea for the book. Let’s assume just now that you don’t have an idea.
That you literally have no idea what you are going to write about, only that you do want to write a novel.
This is the situation that I have often found myself in: I’ve just finished a book, and I want to write another one, but I don’t know what it will be about. I just know that I want to start it as soon as possible!
When this is the case, the approach I adopt is to try to come up with a name for the book first, and then to write the book based around the name.
At first, this may sound crazy, but actually it’s not.
It’s all part of the Irvine Method, which, as you will discover as you read this book, is all about letting your imagination and your subconscious do the work for you.
With the Irvine Method, the basic idea is to first think of a good title. Something that catches your imagination, and will look good on a front cover. It has to be snappy, to the point and if possible, to immediately capture the interest of your future readers. (‘This book sounds good. I wonder what it will be about?’).
Part of this step is to try to visualise for the first time, in a simple way, what the title will look like on a book cover. You don’t have to go into too much detail at this stage in terms of cover design. Just basically, does the title sound good, and do you think it will fit easily into the confines of the small thumbnail that all books are now judged by on the product pages of Amazon?
A good exercise at this point is to sit down at your laptop and go to the Top 100 Paid books in your country and spend an hour just going through the charts, looking at what types of covers you can see. In particular, look at the titles of the books, and absorb any trends you see for that genre. Different charts have different types of covers and titles. For example, a Crime Thriller book cover and title, exudes criminality and mystery. A cookery book makes your mouth water.
When you begin to feel in your writer’s bones the sort of snappy titles that are being created and published, then you can move on to the next step, which is to think of your own title.
Before doing that though, I just want to say something else about the other aspect of a good title, which is particularly important to the Irvine Method. This is to let the title act as a trigger to your subconscious which then sparks your mind into generating a story based around that title.
In other words, you choose a title that sounds interesting, and then you write the whole book based around that title!
This is how I have written half of my books:
e.g.
Haunted From Within
Haunted From Without
I Spy, I Saw Her Die
The Assassin’s Gift
The Messiah Conspiracy
Taking Haunted From Within, for example, my wife and I were throwing around what we thought could be catchy titles, in different genres, and she suggested, “Haunted From Within”.
I immediately latched on to the idea and decided that was it!
Personally, I thought it sounded really intriguing.
I thought the title sounded catchy, and that readers may be attracted to the book, based upon the title.
In my mind’s eye, I could easily see how just those three words would fit on the thumbnail cover of a book appearing on Amazon.
So, I decided that I would write a book based on that name.
At this point I knew it was important to move on to the next step in the process and to decide what type of book it was going to be. Deciding this quickly, would then influence your subconscious and guide it to start formulating what the book would be about.
So, onto Chapter 3.
Chapter 3
Step 2: Having an Idea: What’s the Book About?
Sometimes Step 2 comes before Step 1, but today let’s just assume we’ve already come up with a title – we’ll talk about the other way around shortly afterwards.
So, the big question is now, ‘What’s the book going to be about?’
In your mind’s eye, is this book a thriller, or a romance? Or a book about flowers, or cooking? (i.e. Fiction or Non-Fiction)
At this point, perhaps you actually don’t mind what type of book you’re going to write, or in which genre. Or maybe you’re already a crime thriller writer, or a romantic author, and you know the next book is going to be in that genre again.
In this case, you will invite the name of the book to conjure up ideas in your mind which are already guided by the genre you are interested in.
Alternatively, you may let the title guide you in a completely new direction.
For example, returning to the example of Haunted From Within, I was intrigued by the way the title suggested to me that a person was being haunted, but from within, and not from without.
How could that be possible?
That was interesting.
So, my mind started thinking about how that could possibly work.
However, I also wanted to write a crime thriller. It was just an inkling I had. Something that I wanted to try to do.
So now I had a small problem, potentially.
The word ‘Haunted’ suggested something paranormal. Something to do with ghosts.
I didn’t particularly like that idea.
So, I didn’t pursue it.
At this point I have an idea of a genre, and a title, but no plot.
The next step is to come up with an idea of what the book should be about.
How do you do this?
Before we move forward, I think we should take a side-step and consider something else.
The Irvine Method of writing a book relies heavily upon your subconscious doing the work for you. It consists of visualisation, listening to your thoughts, asking questions of your subconscious and believing that your subconscious mind will work out an answer and pop that answer back into your conscious mind.
For the Irvine Method to work, it will require you to believe in yourself and your own mind. So, before we move forward, I would like us all to consider a few e
xamples which can demonstrate how powerful your subconscious mind is.
One of the points I want to illustrate here is that your subconscious mind is working ALL the time. Continuously thinking. Evaluating. Solving problems. Finding answers to challenges that you may set it. You may be totally unaware of all the work your mind is doing, but you can trust that it is doing it.
To illustrate this, I would like to suggest you do the following experiment. It may not work for everyone, but it should work for most of you.
And if it does work, you’ll probably be amazed.
The trick I am going to teach you now comes from something I learned while travelling frequently with my work, and staying in lots of hotels in different time-zones.
The scenario is this: you’re going to bed at night, and you know you have to get up at 7.00 a.m. in the morning. You set your alarm clock for 7.00 a.m.
For some of you reading this, you will perhaps already be familiar with the experience that just before the alarm goes off, you awake at 6.59 a.m., turn over and switch the alarm off just before it rings.
How does that happen?
If this hasn’t happened to you, I would like to suggest you try the following: tonight when you go to bed, lie down on your back, tuck yourself in, make yourself comfortable, and switch off the light.
Now look upwards, into the darkness above your bed.
In your mind’s eye, I want you to imagine a black rectangle with illuminated glowing red edges hovering above the bed just below the ceiling of your room.
Within the red-edged rectangle I want you to imagine in bright, glowing, red numbers, the time which you want to get up at.
6.58 a.m.
Imagine you can see the glowing letters.
Just like the display on a digital alarm clock normally found bedside your bed.
Get Writing! How ANYONE can write a Novel! Page 1
