The Fastest Way to Write Your Book

by Dave Haslett

  Books that write themselves

  I know you’re itching to discover the secrets of fast writing so you can get on with your book. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of that to come. But here’s a little something to whet your appetite. Some books can write themselves. Here’s an example:

  All you have to do is to come up with an idea for a book, then contact your local newspaper and tell them about your plans. See if they’d be interested in running a story about you and your project.

  Invite their readers to send in details of their personal experiences, memories, family histories, ideas, successes, failures, or whatever you’re writing about. Most people will gladly share their knowledge and experiences, and they’ll be delighted to see their words in print.

  They’ll also buy your book and tell their friends about it when it’s published.

  Go through the contributions they send you, pick out the best ones, and group contributions on similar topics together to form chapters. You’ll probably need to edit them quite a lot. Don’t change their words, but take out the parts that aren’t relevant or are already covered in other people’s contributions. Write a brief introduction to the book and a few sentences to introduce each chapter or topic. And that’s it – your book is done.

  Remember to contact the newspaper again shortly before the book is published, because they’ll almost certainly want to run another feature on how their wonderful readers helped to write it. This, of course, is fantastic free advertising for your book!

  If none of the newspapers in your area are interested in your project, try taking out a small advertisementin one of them, and ask readers to send in contributions. Or you could post a message in a Facebook group that relates to your town or city.

  History books are ideal for this kind of project. Most towns and cities also have a history group onFacebook, and they’re usually full of helpful folks with a wealth of information and memories to share. You could even create a series of books with titles such as Exeter Remembers the Great War, Exeter Remembers World War Two, Exeter Remembers the 1970s, and so on.

  You should be able to come up with lots of other ideas for books that could be formed from readers’ contributions. Recipe collections should do well. If the first book is a success, you could create more books in the series for the different seasons, as well as Christmas, Thanksgiving, picnics, children’s meals, comfort foods, healthy eating, dieting, and so on. Other books might include readers’ favourite walking and cycling routes, buildings past and present, shops and businesses past and present, famous local people, and so on.

  Editing can wait

  Don’t even think about editing your book while you’re writing the first draft. Wait until the whole thing is finished, and then edit it. Writing and editing are different disciplines that use separate parts of your brain. If you keep switching from one to the other, it will slow you down.

  There’s a problem here though. Stopping yourself from editing as you go takes a huge amount of willpower. You have to force yourself to ignore the urge to fix every tiny detail. And your brain will fight back every time it spots a mistake. Keep ignoring it and keep writing. Eventually it will give in and keep quiet – and your productivity will soar.

  Most writers can’t – or won’t – do this. They correct and revise everything as they write, and they can’t stop themselves from doing it. Modern word processors even encourage it, as they underline every mistake and make them impossible to ignore.

  Fixing the errors as you write might seem like a good idea. After all, if you get the words right now, it’ll save editing time later, won’t it? Well, no actually. Once you switch to dedicated editing mode, you’ll fly through the corrections in no time. But if you try to correct and edit as you go, it’ll slow you down, interrupt your train of thought, and kill your creativity. It’s one of the most common reasons why books never get finished.

  My lovely partner Lorraine once went for a job interview where she had to take a typing test. The word processing software she used would only accept what she typed first time. It wouldn’t let her go back or fix errors. I’d love to know what that software was, as it would be perfect for writers. It would, of course, need to let you save your work so you could open it in a regular word processor afterwards. If you come across it, or if you can create something similar, please let me know.

  Editing can make you highly critical of your work. That’s a good thing when you’re editing your book, but, as we’ve just seen, it can kill your creativity while you’re writing it. The best practice is to keep on writing until you reach the end of your book. Don’t go back over what you’ve written, and don’t change anything or start polishing the text until the whole thing is done.

  Once you’ve finished the first draft, it’s best to set it aside for a few weeks. I usually leave mine for around three months while I write the first drafts of my next three books.

  Once this waiting period has passed, you’ll be able to edit it with a fresh eye. The mistakes will be easier to spot because you’ll see what’s actually on the page, not what you think you wrote.

  In the companion book, The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book, we’ll look at how to speed up the editing process so you can edit your entire book in a week or so.

  Characters sometimes develop minds of their own and try to do things you didn’t put in your outline. If what they want to do is better than what you’d planned, you might have to rewrite some of the earlier chapters to accommodate the changes to the storyline. If you’d already edited those chapters as you went along, instead of waiting until the end, all of that editing time would have been wasted.

  Organising your book

  Here’s how I manage and back up my books on my computer. My main laptop runs Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word, but if you use a different sort of computer or word processor you should still be able to follow the process.

  In the Documents folder I create a new folder and give it a name: either the title of the book or its initials, or a keyword or two. The folder for this book (The Fastest Way to Write Your Book, Second Edition) is called FWWB2.

  I create a Word document for each chapter and save them in the folder I just created. The individual chapter files will load quickly, and it will be much easier to move around inside them than to scroll through the hundreds of pages in the full book.

  I name each chapter with its number and a keyword to remind me what it’s about. For example:

  01 intro.docx

  02 why.docx

  03 before start.docx

  16 writers block.docx

  I use leading zeros in the file names so they display in the right order. If I don’t do this, my computer thinks 2.docx comes after 11.docx.

  When I’ve created the chapter files, I close the folder, right-click on it, and select “Send To…” and then “Desktop as shortcut”. I now have a handy link to the folder on my desktop, which is useful, as I’ll be using it a lot over the next month.

  This is just a shortcut to the folder, not the folder itself. Once the book is finished, I’ll delete the shortcut from my desktop. But the actual folder and all the chapter files will still be in my Documents folder.

  When I want to work on the book, I double-click on the shortcut on my desktop to open the folder, and then double-click on the chapter file I want to work on. The chapter opens in Word.

  Once the book is finished, I open each chapter, select all the text by pressing Ctrl+A (Command+A on Macs), copy it using Ctrl+C (or Command+C) and paste it using Ctrl+V (or Command+V) into a single document that contains the entire manuscript. This sorts out the page numbering and makes it easier to add a table of contents and an index. If you’re going to send your manuscript to an editor, publisher or agent, or publish it as an e-book, the whole thing needs to be in a single document.

  When I publish print versions of my books, I leave the chapters as separate documents. My desktop publishing software treats the whole book as a single documen
t so the formatting remains consistent, page numbers run consecutively, and I can easily create a table of contents and an index.

  Always keep a back up

  It’s important to keep back-up copies of your word processing documents in case anything happens to the originals. You’ve probably heard of writers who lost all their files when their hard drive failed, or they had their computers stolen, or they left their only copy of their manuscript on a train. Replacing a computer is relatively easy – if you have back-up copies of your work – but rewriting your entire book from scratch is not.

  Your word processor will save a copy of your current document every few minutes if you turn on theAutosave feature. Check the Help pages if you aren’t sure how to do this. If your computer locks up, or the power fails, your word processor should recover the document automatically next time you start it. The most you’ll ever lose is the last few minutes of writing time. (The default setting is ten minutes.)

  At the end of each writing session, copy the files you’ve been working on to another location or device. You could use a plug-in memory stick or SD card, or an online back-up service such as Dropbox, Google Backup and Sync, Apple’s iCloud or Microsoft’s OneDrive. These services all give you plenty of secure storage space for free.

  They also provide additional space for a small monthly fee. You might need the extra space if you have a large collection of photos and videos you want to keep back-up copies of.

  Most online back-up services can synchronise your files between different devices. This means you can work on your book on your desktop computer, save the file, and carry on working on it on your laptop, tablet or phone, without needing to physically copy the file from one device to another. The next time you open the file on your desktop computer, any changes you made on the other devices will be there.

  If you don’t want to use a back-up service, you could simply email your documents to yourself. It’s less convenient, but if you use an email service such as Gmail or Yahoo!, where all your messages are stored online, you’ll always have a back-up copy of your work in case anything goes wrong.

  If you’re worried about other people being able to access your documents, you can password-protect them. Most word processors let you to do this. Check the Help pages for details. (Press the F1 key to access Help.)

  Computer hard drives have a nasty habit of failing at the worst possible moment, even if they’ve worked faultlessly for years. Don’t trust them with your only copy of important documents, photos, videos, music files, and so on. Always keep a second copy on another device or use an online backup service – just in case.

  The next step

  In the next chapter we’ll look at the fastest ways to find great ideas.

  4. The fastest ways to find great ideas for your book

  If you want to write a book every month, you’ll need tons of great ideas. So let’s head straight down into the idea mines and start digging for gold!

  Ideas find you

  The good news is that ideas seek you out. You just can’t stop them. They turn up when you’re writing, when you’re in the shower, when you’re shopping, when you’re walking the dog, when you’re chatting with your friends … and just as you’re about to drop off to sleep. Everyone gets ideas, but most people forget them again within a minute or two – they don’t hang around for long.

  Write them down immediately

  Writing down a new idea is easy enough if you’re sitting at your computer or you have a notepad and pen nearby. But what if you’re doing something else when your great idea arrives? Think about how you’ll record it or remember it if it occurs at the most awkward moment, such as when you’re driving or in the shower.

  I have notepads, pens and pencils scattered all over the house.

  Most of us always have our phones with us, so we can easily write ourselves a note, or jot it down in an email or text message. (You don’t need to send the message.) Most phones also have cameras so you can snap a picture if you see something interesting. And you can install a voice recorder app so you can talk about your idea or record the sound of something you want to remember.

  iPhones come with the Notes app pre-installed but Android phones don’t have a built-in notes app. There are plenty available in the Play Store though, and it’s well worth installing one.

  If you don’t often carry a phone, you could get a pocket notebook or diary with a small pencil that slips into the spine. I’ve also seen tiny notebooks that clip onto your key ring – though I’m not sure how practical they’d be to write in.

  If you’re desperate, you could look for a public phone, or borrow someone else’s, and call home to leave a message, or phone a friend and ask him to write your idea down for you.

  It’s best to keep all your ideas in one place. If they’re scattered around on various notebooks and devices you’ll soon lose track of them and forget about them. I transfer all of my ideas to Evernote, which I can access from any of my computers and electronic devices. There are lots of other notetaking applications available, including Microsoft OneNote. Search online for “best note taking software” for more.

  Now that we’ve worked out how we’re going to record and keep track of our ideas, let’s look at some ways of encouraging more of them.

  A child’s point of view

  Look at what’s happening around you right now. What if you didn’t understand any of it? How could you make sense of it?

  A child who’s never seen smoke coming from a chimney before might think the house is on fire. He might become distressed and want to rescue the people – and pets and toys – inside. There’s some terrific story potential there.

  What other aspects of life might he misunderstand? Wander around your town for an hour or two and try to see things from a young child’s perspective. What might he misunderstand? How might he come up with a rational explanation for those things, based on his limited knowledge of the world?

  A dog without a lead. Has it escaped? Should we try to catch it?

  A man up a ladder. Is he looking into people’s bedrooms and bathrooms? Shouldn’t someone stop him?

  A lady running. Is someone chasing her? Is it a monster? Does she need help? Should we run away too?

  It’s worth spending some time talking to young children and finding out what they think and know about various things. If you don’t know any children of the right age, see if you can arrange to visit a nursery or pre-school. Show the children some pictures and ask them to explain what’s happening in them. You’ll receive some fascinating responses.

  You’ll need to get a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check before you’ll be allowed to interact with the children at the nursery or school.

  You could offer to visit a primary school and to listen to the youngest children reading. You could talk to them about writing, and help them put their own stories together. And of course you’ll have the opportunity to talk to them about other things while you’re there.

  The website I Used To Believe is worth a visit too. People post messages about the bizarre things they used to believe when they were children. It’s a fantastic source of ideas.

  Art

  Art galleries are terrific sources of ideas too. Have a look at the paintings of street scenes for example.

  What’s happening in the background?

  What are the buildings like?

  Could you set your story there?

  What are the people doing?

  What can you imagine them getting up to?

  Why do you think the artist decided to paint this particular scene?

  Is he famous?

  Did he have an interesting life?

  How did the painting come to be in this gallery?

  Did the gallery buy it from the artist?

  Is the painting for sale?

  Did it once belong to someone else?

  If so, what happened to him?

  Why doesn’t his family own it any more?

  Could i
t be cursed?

  Is it valuable?

  What if someone tried to steal it?

  Has it ever been stolen?

  If it was stolen, how did it happen and how did the gallery or previous owner get it back again?

  Which paintings in the gallery are the most valuable?

  If you wanted to steal one, how would you go about it?

  Can you see any security systems?

  What about the security systems you can’t see?

  What would you do with the painting if you stole it?

  There are plenty of other places where you can find and study paintings. You can find art books in libraries, bookshops, second-hand bookshops and online. You can get DVDs that feature the works of great artists, paintings and galleries. Some galleries and museums let you browse their collections online.

  It’s worth going to local art exhibitions too. The works on display will probably have been created by artists and students from your area. They’re terrific sources of ideas, and you might get to speak to the artists themselves and be able to ask them about their inspiration for their work.

  You might also meet the perfect artist to paint a cover for your book.

  Ask questions

  “I’m writing a book about cycling. What would you most like to know about cycling?”

  Replace cycling with the subject of your choice. Ask lots of people the same question, compile a list of the most popular responses, and make sure your book covers all of them. The more people you ask, the more comprehensive your book will be.