How I write a book, part 1
Happy new year everybody! Here’s how I write a book.
Tools
Macbook Pro
Pages app
Reminders app
Apple Watch
Start with What If
Every book I write starts with a what if. Sometimes, the what if doesn’t wind up having much to do with the final story. It just has to feel personal and meaningful.
For Frankly In Love, it was: What if I could love and accept my parents the way they were without asking them to change?
For Super Fake Love Song, it was: What if I could write a slapstick comedy in the middle of a miserable global pandemic?
Version Zero was What if I could re-make the internet and fix all its problems?
My upcoming novel City of Orange began with: What if the absolute worst thing happened to me, and how would I survive it?
I’m currently working on another novel, which began with What if took a beloved popular fairy tale and set it in the modern dystopia of today?
Characters first
Once I have my what if, I come up with characters. Characters make a story, not grand ideas or settings or plot twists. Like most people, I’m mostly interested in people.
It’s crucial to detail out characters as much as possible: what they want, what their internal struggle (their “problem”) is, what kinds of mistakes they keep making and why. Well-defined characters will wind up deciding where to take the story all on their own, which is funny and magical.
It’s similar to making video games (a hobby of mine), where the player is defined by certain abilities, limitations, and a goal. Literally, because otherwise there’d be no game to play.
Here’s my workflow:
In the Pages app, I freewrite as much as I can about a particular protagonist. Anything and everything goes onto the page. It’s very sloppy, and I won’t use half of it, but the point is to get it all out.
I do the same for their allies and enemies.
When I’m not in front of my computer, I dictate to the Reminders app via my Apple Watch: “Remind me that Jack loves his best friend even though his best friend isn’t very nice to him, because Jack never had a dad to look up to.”
Later, I take all the notes in Reminders and copy them into my master Pages doc.
After a while, the character motivations will become clearer and clearer. I know this because this is when grand ideas, settings, and plot twists start to creep in.
When I find myself beginning to write actual lines of dialogue, I know it’s time to start outlining.
Love the formula
I’m a story structure junkie. I love the three act structure and all its sub-parts: Intro, Inciting, Fun & Games, All Is Lost, all that. Readers of Save The Cat will recognize those. I love Save The Cat. I even have stickers on my TV to mark act breaks in movies.
You might think structure is formulaic and limiting, but artistic limitations make me more creative. I love arbitrary rules. Playing a piano sonata for the left hand alone. Or making a video game using only three colors at a time.
With characters somewhat defined, I now very roughly outline the entire book. Same process: write in Pages, add using Reminders dictated to my Watch. Making a story outline isn’t trivial, and probably deserves its own email. Hey Siri, remind me to write up a newsletter about story structure.
My good colleague, author David Arnold (Mosquitoland, The Electric Kingdom) likened a good story outline to a road trip at night, where you know what cities you’re going to hit but don’t know exactly what route you’re going to take, since you can only see as far as your headlights. Structured, but at the same time loose.
It’s important to keep your outline loose, to give your characters room to improvise and be spontaneous. The outline is where I usually begin introducing grand ideas and setting and blablabla. But never at the expense of characters.
Dump the characters into the sandbox
It’s now a couple months in with a book idea, and only now do I begin actually writing the manuscript itself. This is where I take my protagonist, place them at the beginning of the story outline, and see where they go. I like to do it this way:
Wake up super early, like 5am. My inner editor is still asleep, so I wind up writing unfiltered stuff that is weird and funny.
Write in almost total darkness.
Write in total silence.
Get up every 20-30 minutes and walk around for 5. I like the Pomodoro method a lot.
Use emotional intelligence as your guide.
That last point is the most important. My wife and favorite author Nicola Yoon (Everything, Everything, The Sun Is Also A Star, Instructions for Dancing) hates it when characters do things that make no sense; her emotional intelligence is off the charts.
So when I put my character in front of a problem, I channel Nicola and ask myself what that character would do to overcome that problem. Not what I would do, but them. I am not my characters and I don’t always agree with them. It takes a certain amount of courage to let go, watch them make mistakes, and suffer consequences.
Parents understand this feeling. Good parents intervene when their children are about to do something dangerous. Good writers, on the other hand, do not intervene. Writers are bad parents.
This is getting long, so I’ll stop here for now. In the next installment, I think I’ll talk about the long march of the first draft, revisions, and what happens after the book is published.
But for now, I hope you enjoy this first day of 2022!
— Dave