Everyone has a book of some nature in the back of their mind. Indeed, given today's educated baby boom generation so uniquely rich with life experience, there are perhaps more novels waiting to be written by first time authors than ever before in history. And I mean more legitimately great books that probably should be written.
The problem is that many of us may have the idea that is the rich promise of our book, but that idea rarely gets beyond a few initial pages created on a rainy day. Or the idea may linger for years in the back of your mind haunting you with the potential of perspectives on life and flights of imagination that could and likely should be shared with a bigger public.
Everyone has their own advice on how to complete the novel you have in the back of your mind, but I'd like to share the one thing that worked for me. Oddly enough, it's the same exact advice I got when coming out of college and first exploring opportunities to start a career as an advertising copywriter.
The first creative director I met at an ad agency to discuss possibilities for a job as a copywriter gave me this valuable, honest, obvious advice. He noted that I had walked into his office with resume in hand, but no creative samples of my writing. I had fully expected I might get an assignment or talk my way into a job as a junior copywriter straight out of college. I'd never had a job in advertising, and I had gotten a degree in Political Science. So I was totally unprepared for advertising. I just knew that I wanted to write. Well, the creative director looked at me as if I had totally wasted his time. He leaned back in his squeaky old wooden office chair and said, "Listen, no need for us to go further. If you want to write ads, then write ads. Just write, and come back to me when you can put a book filled with big ideas on my desk. I don't want to talk. I want to read your work."
The thing I heard loudest in that first, brief job interview was "just write". So, I went away and wrote a bunch of speculative ad campaigns. I then returned to his office and he was very complimentary. He told me I should and would work as a copywriter in the ad business. He didn't hire me that day, but I found work just a week later. I ended up working in advertising for 30 years, and enjoyed great success. That fellow remained a friend, even though he had only met me twice when I was 21 years old and clueless about how to get a job. I will never forget him.
So here's my advice to you about writing a book. Just write. Discipline yourself to write just one page of your novel each and every day. Force yourself to make time to write, even if you create just one lousy page of text that day. But write. Write every single day.
As my advertising career progressed, I became a creative director myself and I gave that same advice to the countless aspiring copywriters who would find their way into my office with absolutely no portfolio. I modified my advice just a little, and advised them to write one ad per day for the next full month. And, if they couldn't find five great ads out of the 30 pieces of work created, then maybe they were pursuing the wrong career.
In terms of your book, just write one page of your book each and every day. After 30 to 60 days, you can go back and read what you've created over the past month or two. If you find yourself bored by your own writing, then maybe the book isn't as great as you envisioned. Or perhaps you're not the writer you imagined. But, if you see seeds of greatness in just a few pages -- even one or two pages that put a smile on your face, or touch you to feel something, or cause you to stop and think -- then what you've found is the start of that great novel.
No book is written without being rewritten many times. So just write your first draft of that book of your dreams. Accept that some pages will be great and most of them will fall short. Such is the life of a writer. I promise you one thing. After you have your first draft of that novel, you will not be able to quit. You will rewrite and revise with passion and furious intent. There is something magical about a completed draft of a novel or script. It draws you back to complete the missing parts. It pulls you like gravity to find the rough edges and smooth them with new thinking. It becomes a driving force in your life that demands your attention until it is complete and you sit back in wonder realizing, "My God...it's finished."
That's clearly a long way from the day you write that very first page. But you will never see the finished first draft unless you write at least one page per day. Of course, what really happens when you start out to write one page per day is that you end up increasing the number of pages you write, and you become a professional writer even before you've been paid a dime.
Just remember that Ernest Hemingway once told F. Scott Fitzgerald, "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket." But Hemingway wrote daily. Being prolific is good. So make that one big decision. Are you going to write your book or not?
If so, then write. Just write. Worry about rewrites when you can proudly tell your friends, "I've finished my novel. I'm just doing some rewrites." That's a whole different place from "I've been thinking about a writing novel." In the next post, we'll discuss some writing techniques used by other authors. I personally prefer to simply write and let structure and characters come alive in my mind. But there are countless techniques and structural devices many advocate strongly. So we'll discuss a few.
But, for now, just write. Just write.
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