But perhaps, all to be expected, if you trust your subconscious and understand the truly amazing power it has.
I think that what I have written in this chapter is really worth emphasising.
The most important part about writing a book, is starting.
The next most important part is - continuing.
Words appear. Characters come to say hello.
Things happen.
Interesting things. Surprising things.
Unplanned things.
In another of my books, ‘The Messiah Conspiracy’ the main character of the book was shot and killed one evening as I wrote a chapter.
I was shocked.
It was completely unexpected.
What should I do now?
The book was about the experiences of that character. He was the hero.
But now he was dead, with a bullet hole through this head…
Gulp!
By this time, I had written hundreds of pages… was it all a mistake? Had I wasted months of my life?
I took the rest of the day off.
Went for a walk.
A swim.
Had a beer.
Got even more nervous.
Yet, the next day I came back to my keyboard, sat down, and started to write again.
It turned out that another character soon evolved, took over the main role, and the book carried on.
In the end, looking back, the main character’s death was not such a bad thing after all.
In fact, it was brilliant.
Completely refreshing.
I would like to claim no responsibility for that development in the story, but I suppose I should, because it was my subconscious that wrote that part of the book and which suddenly changed the direction of the plot, but then brought it all back on track later, to a successful conclusion.
I will today perhaps admit that maybe ‘The Messiah Conspiracy’ is not my best book, but I should say in its defence that it was my first commercial novel. The one I wrote after the ‘300,000 word Top-Drawer Novel’ which I mentioned before.
However, the reason I bring this up, is because it was during ‘The Messiah Conspiracy’ that I developed the Irvine Method that this book is about.
At the time, I didn’t call it that, in fact it was only during Chapter One of this book that I realised that I would have to give the process a name for the purpose of this book.
In the many books that have come since ‘The Messiah Conspiracy’, I have tried to repeat the experiences which drove me to write ‘The Messiah Conspiracy’, and I’ve discovered that it wasn’t just a fluke. It was repeatable and work over and over again. That’s why I am now writing about it and sharing it with you and others.
The process works.
It’s incredible.
And life-changing, if you will allow it to be.
I can hear some of you saying, ‘That’s impossible! … you must have done some planning.’
And perhaps you are a little correct… but just a little… and I will cover that in the second part of this chapter later – ‘Plotter or Pantser Part Two’.
The summary of this chapter is that you should just start the book as soon as you can.
Allow your subconscious to do the planning and plotting.
But TRUST that your subconscious will do it.
Another, perhaps more clever way of saying this, is, that once you’ve started, the book will write itself.
Which is not completely true, because books can’t write.
You have to do the writing.
Which is the topic of the next chapter: Learn to Touch-Type.
Chapter 6
Learn to Touch-Type
Probably the most useful skill that any author or writer can learn is to touch-type,
Why?
Simply because, as you will learn throughout this book, it’s all about getting your subconscious to write the book for you, through your conscious self.
The idea is that you sit down at your keyboard, start to type, and the text begins to appear on the page in front of you, fluidly, swiftly, as your subconscious-self flows through you, down your fingers, onto the keys, into your laptop and onto the ‘page’.
Once you open up your creative channel, you want the words to flow as fast as you can think of them.
If you can successfully ‘tap into’ your creative flow, then your fingers become the conduit through which your book materialises, and your eyes and conscious brain provide the managerial oversight which ensures that you correct mistakes, don’t skip lines, or that the text looks good on the page.
The last thing you want to do at this point is to continuously have to go back and correct mistakes. You want the writing to fllllllllooooooowwwwww.
Also, you don’t want to continuously have to stop the creative flow while you fix the mistakes your conscious self has made.
Lastly, once the text begins to flow, you don’t want to have to throttle it down or slow it up to the point that a big bottleneck of text, ideas and brilliant inspiration develops in your mind.
If that happens, you may get frustrated. Agitated. Annoyed. Fed-up.
And your finger that continuously pounds the ‘backspace’ and the ‘delete’ key will get worn out.
No.
That is not a good idea.
So, if I may, I would like to suggest that if you are serious about wanting to write a novel, then in the evenings or lunchtimes or mornings when you are not working on your book, then you start and continue to develop and work on ‘touch-typing’ skills for writing on a keyboard.
I could suggest that before you even start to write, that you spend some time training and raising your touch-typing skills to a decent level, but I’m worried that if I suggest that, some of the procrastinators and perfectionists in the audience will use this as an excuse to put off starting the book.
Hopefully, once you’ve read Chapter 9 below on visualisation and motivation, this won’t be a problem. However, just in case, I would suggest that you do both in parallel.
Start the book.
And learn to type.
The good news is, obviously, that as you write your book, you will get better and better at it. Practice makes perfect, after all!
I won’t recommend any particular course to you, simply because I haven’t tried any out.
My uncle taught me how to touch-type when I was a child. He said it would be a life-skill and he was completely correct. I would perhaps recommend any parents among you to encourage your children to touch-type at some point. It will save them hours or days during their time as a student if they go to college, and will be a significant positive skill in their future workplace, wherever that is.
If you need help in choosing a way to learn then you can simply go online and type in ‘Learn to Touch-Type’ into your favourite internet browser, and then browse through the results you find.
Or, if you don’t want to learn online, the method my uncle taught me years ago, was to draw four rows of circles on a piece of paper, and then fill in the letters within the circles in the same layout and format of your local keyboard to make a ‘pretend’ practice keyboard -different countries and languages have different layouts and symbols!
Once you’ve done this, memorise the layout of the letters row by row.
Position your fingers above the paper, and start practicing set lines of text, slowly instructing your fingers where to move to hit different letters.
The perfect sentence to use in most English-speaking countries is:
‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’
Why?
Because it contains every letter of the English alphabet.
So, if you practice typing this on the piece of paper, at first with your eyes open, then with your eyes closed, you will learn where all the letters are on the keyboard.
Once this is done, perhaps even whilst you are watching TV, you can put your pretend paper keyboard on your lap on a tray, and pra
ctice typing words that the person on the television says. Or any word that comes into your mind.
Get your fingers moving.
When you are on a train, or a bus, or commuting to work, you can close your eyes and imagine the keyboard, and practice ‘typing’ in your mind’s eye, moving your fingers in sympathy to your thoughts, perhaps tapping the fingers against your leg as you ‘type’ the words you imagine.
Once you’ve learned the position of the letters on the keyboard, you can then migrate to a real keyboard.
Perhaps sit in front of the TV with the keyboard on your lap.
I think you get the picture here… Practice makes perfect.
Slowly, over time, build up your speed.
L----e----a----r----n t---o t--y--p--e f-a-s-t-e-r!
A last word of advice on this would be to make sure you use a keyboard which is big enough for your hand and your fingers.
If the keyboard on your device of choice is too small, buy a bigger keyboard and plug it into your device.
In order to type fast and correctly, your fingers must be comfortable and not fighting for space or banging into each other.
Otherwse youll continuiaonsly be making lotts of missstakees.
Sorry.
Chapter 7
Author or Writer?
Some of you will love this chapter. For others it will make your head spin.
Did you know you could become an author without ever writing a book?
Or that some of the most famous authors you may have heard of don’t write the books which make them famous?
When I first found this out, I can remember having arguments with my literary agent that it wasn’t true… I insisted that authors were the people who wrote books.
It was only when I realised that the word author in some other languages literally equates to the concept of ‘producer’ that the penny dropped.
Basically, what this means is that whoever pulls together the content of a book, formats it and presents it as a book worthy of publication, then that person can be defined as the author. He/she creates the book, produces it and makes it happen.
And this is the interesting part: the author can take unpublished work written by other people, put it into a book, and then publish it, and then become the person whose name appears on the cover of the book.
Quite often the author will credit the writer or writers by including their name on the front cover somehow, but not always.
Recently I read a very well-known book where towards the end the author explained that most of the chapters were in fact written by an assistant.
That assistant’s name was mentioned.
But it wasn’t on the front cover, or in any way associated with the publication of the book.
This sounds unfair!
However, it is accepted practice.
Today, perhaps, it’s even becoming more common, because the world of Independent Publishing has spawned a revolution in the way books are created, published and read.
You may not have realised it, but a growing number of authors are paying other people to write the contents of books for them. The model is that the ‘author’ commissions the work from ‘writers’ and pays them a set sum. The author then publishes and promotes the book, and pockets the money, or pays the debts that hence ensue.
So, why is this relevant to you?
Because, if becoming an author is your dream or is on your bucket list, then this approach provides another avenue you may not previously have thought about.
Personally, I think that you if follow the Irvine Method outlined in this book, you will want to write the book yourself. However, if following this process your head fills with ideas, which you then discover you can’t do justice to in the actual writing, you could potentially consider paying someone else to turn your ideas into written text or content, which you then publish under your name.
The writer is happy because they were paid to write something – and writers love to write! – and you are happy because you have finally become an author!
It sounds crazy, but actually it isn’t. It’s just a different approach you may not be used to.
You may be surprised to learn that this isn’t really a new thing, either.
In the past, many famous artists, some truly household names, often set up painting factories, where they paid other artists to paint works-of-art in a particular style, and when a painting was complete, the commissioning artist (the author of the painting) then picked up a paintbrush and painted his name in the corner of the canvas.
It’s been happening for hundreds of years!
Just to be clear, I don’t particularly like this model, but then again, I am a writer: I love to write.
I’ve been a writer for over twenty years.
I’ve only been an author for the past eight since my first book was published on Amazon.
Chapter 8
The Shape of the Book:
The Beginning, the End, the Middle.
We’re close, very close, to being able to start your book. We’ve only two more things to sort out, perhaps three, and then you are ready to sit down, take a deep breath and start writing. Before that, you’ve got this chapter and the next to go through.
Which are perhaps two of the most important.
(Have I said that before?)
In this chapter we will look at the importance of asking your subconscious to give you the beginning, the end, and the middle of the book.
Key to this is that you ask your subconscious mind to do this, and that you don’t try to do it yourself, consciously.
Before we move on though, for ease of reference and when referring to your subconscious, let’s give it a name. How about SC? (Sub-Conscious?)
In the Irvine Method we trust ‘SC’ to come up with a brilliant story, of which, two of the most important parts are the beginning and the end.
I suggest you don’t ‘consciously’ try to come up with something which you ‘consciously’ think is brilliant, but that you let SC do it for you.
What you must do, however, is to go through the exercise of asking SC to come up with a catchy beginning to the story that you have outlined in Chapter 3, and wait for this beginning to pop into your mind.
You should stress to yourself and SC that this beginning needs to be immediately interesting. It has to ‘catch’ your readers quickly, and compel them to read on. In many ways, the first few paragraphs and pages have to be the best part of the book. They rank second only in importance to those last few pages at the end of the book which must leave the reader begging for more.
It may be that SC gives you a couple of different suggested beginnings to the book, each of which pop into your head whilst walking, or swimming, or sleeping and dreaming… or in the bath, causing you to jump up and shout ‘Eureka!’ before slipping on the soap and falling back down into the tub!
Wherever that inspired beginning is revealed to you, once you’re happy with it, nod to yourself, accept it, and then ask the next question.
“How does the book finish?”
For poor old SC, I think this is the hardest question of all. For SC to be able to answer it, SC has to have a very vague idea of how the story will weave its way to the ending. At this stage your conscious self may not be informed of that part, but that will come in due course.
For now, all you need to ask SC to provide you with, is a target ending.
A way in which you feel that the book and its story will end.
In my latest thriller book, which I am just writing at the moment, I started off with the idea that a character would be pushed off the top of a tall building. It would be a fairly dramatic opening scene.
I imagined that at the end of the book, the serial killer responsible for the murder described in the first chapter would be surrounded by police, and he would then blow himself up.
A fairly dramatic ending.
In other words, I now had a beginning – an opening scene – and an ending, the final sc
ene.
Once these were available, I now had all the tools necessary that would permit me to sit down and start writing: I had a title, a theme, a high-level description of the story and plot, a beginning scene, and an ending, and the name and profession of the main character.
Putting all of these together gives the writer the skeleton of the book. Admittedly, there is quite a lot to flesh out, but that’s the fun part. And that’s what SC will help you to do every day when you sit down to write the next chapter.
Perhaps, at this stage, I should suggest a few more rules to the Irvine Method:
1: You are allowed to change your mind about the opening scene.
2: You are allowed to change your mind about the closing scene.
Generally, once you’ve made up your mind, you’ll find you won’t have to, but I think that if you feel that you must, you can.
The other purpose of having a good opening scene that I haven’t mentioned yet, is that it’s not just for your readers, it’s also for you!
I believe that you really should be excited about starting to write the book.
When a writer sits down to cast those first few words onto the empty canvas where he will come to toil and sweat (sounds dramatic) day after day for the next couple of months (not years!), he/she should be excited, enthused, full of adrenaline.
Starting a book is a big thing!
(Finishing it is even bigger…)
So, I suggest that once SC has popped a suggested beginning into your mind which you really like and have accepted… then you take a few more days to walk around, go swimming, … whatever it is you do to relax… and use that time to ponder just how you feel about that beginning.
It may be that after the initial excitement dies down, you decide that the beginning is not strong enough.
Get Writing! How ANYONE can write a Novel! Page 3
