How?

I’ve been to enough writer’s conferences, read enough books about writing, and been part of enough conversations about writing, to know the question, “How do I write a book?” comes up more than frequently.

It’s a question with a simple answer, one that seems almost rude to say to someone: you just have to sit down and do it.

I can’t tell you how to write a book. I can only tell you what I’ve done. Which will probably not help you much because you and I are not the same person. But like I said in the intro to this writing blog, maybe there’s a nugget of truth or wisdom in this somewhere that makes sense to you as you’re putting it all together.

What’s changed my writing is routine. I work on a computer all day long and have for decades, and the last thing I want to do is spend more time in the evening starting at an empty Word document. For the first several books i wrote, the unpublished ones, I actually wrote them in notebooks. Longhand. Yes, it took longer, and I had to eventually transcibe the notebooks into an electronic document. It worked for me at the time, though. A notebook was portable and didn’t require two minutes to boot up.I’m a fast typist and naturally the move to writing on a laptop eventually became my preferred method.

One thing that’s really helped is the flexibility of writing on a computer. By that, I mean if I need to move around chapters or sections, I can do it easily. If I need to refer to a scene earlier in the book, I can search easily. I can keep multiple drafts and history for later reference. And when I go down a rabbit trail or decide that the book is going in the wrong direction, I can easily delete a block of text and pick up where I want to. There’s nothing quite like highlighting 10,000 words and hitting the ‘Delete’ button. Trust me: it happens.

What about the routine part I mentioned above? That’s for the next post.