Writing a whole, real book

Anybody done this for serious, or considered it?

How do you do it? Quit your job or just type fast in the off hours? Outline rigorously first or feel your way in? Special software to deal with structure and timing? Index cards? Just good old Word?

Bit of a commitment, eh? What did you write about?

I just started doing this. Had been doing a lot of freelance writing on the topic the last few years, when I became a stay-at-home dad I decided to take the opportunity to put the time into a big definitive volume. So far so good, but a lot of research still ahead.

research is key but the looming danger for first-time non-fiction authors is getting lost in your data and losing all perspective. I know this happened to me until a (great) editor helped me find & extract a narrative thread. So many books I've read/reviewed have suffered from this TMI syndrome.

i wrote one, which came out sort of ok, i mean, it was a good experience. but i didn't have the time or focus to do it really well. made me realize that if i ever do it again (which i'd like to), i need to make sure i have a dedicated block of time to work on it. trying to write anything that involved late at night after work and putting the kids to bed, it's just not really a good way to do it.

(mine was made easier by being a sort of survey book, so each chapter was discrete. it was more like writing a series of related articles. still, it was a bear.)

what are you writing, some dude?

if he's been writing freelance on it the last few years maybe the whiney vs. deej beef.

hi, i'm working on my third novel (and first to be published, if all continues to go well...) and i'd like to recommend Scrivener for writing/organizing/editing on a Mac

I am so resisting obvious jokes as to what that program's error messages must be like.

I took the easy way out and wrote a book that I was all primed to write, on a subject I was already the master of, in the full knowledge that it probably wasn't commercially viable. So, no worries, mate.

It took me about 10 weeks to write and another 4 weeks to do the book design.

BTW, if you plan on taking more than 1000 hours to write a book, you should probably check out the commercial viability angle a bit more than I did, or else consider it a deed of charity or of penance.

haha, ned

loooooool

a (great) editor helped me find & extract a narrative thread

Praises be. It is urgent & key for any non-fiction author to pare, shape and unify an unruly heap of facts into the semblance of a story. Anything less just qualifies as a research paper, not a book.

what are you writing, some dude?

― teflon donk (samosa gibreel), Saturday, June 5, 2010 1:24 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this. and like i said, i have like half a book's worth of previously published material on the subject, so basically the big task right now is just filling in the blanks and tying it together as a cohesive narrative. i may find out the hard way what the commercial viability of it all is, but i figure it never hurts to have the first/only book on a subject.

wr

Awesome - wishing you the very best of luck

that's cool, some dude, will listen to u on maryland morning

yeah that is excellent, alex!

sometimes i think i wanna write a book because there is something i know a lot about and am interested in enough to read about all the time but i feel too intimidated/ashamed of lack of skill. could just blog but then i'd be a blogger.

thx y'all, just announced it a week or so back so i'm pretty excited right now. i probably won't go out of my way to talk about it on ilx, unless it gets close to the kickstarter deadline and there's still a ways to go, in which case i will start begging and being obnoxious about it.

would read all this harbl-penned books

some dude, will it be on Amazon & stuff when it's finished?

yeah definitely

awesome, will be buying this then

it never hurts to have the first/only book on a subject.

OTM

Dads be writing!

I've played with Scrivener a little bit but I can't quite tell what it promises to do for me that I'm not doing for myself. Its fans are certainly fans.

I used to want to write a book but I think my heart was in the wrong place, i.e. I wanted to write a book for the sake of writing a book & being someone literary. nowadays I think I'd only want to write a book if I felt there was something I wanted to express and I could only do it in book form. I guess that time hasn't come yet.

i'm gonna write a memoir abt my first year on ilx & sell a billion copies

i like scrivener

great for this big sprawling documentary project i'm working on where i have like 5,000 scraps, documents, pieces of research and whatnot

cool project some dude. the $200 reward is awesome!

ha i know, right?

is that just some producers doing it cuz they want to see the book happen?

I once started to write The Great American Novel, I was a paragraph in when it was pointed out that I wasn't American.

were you writing it in feces on the side of a wall or something

like most of us i have a major yearn to write a novel, but am a grammar spazzo.

so have been instead trying to 'draw' stories in graphic novel form. due to laziness, this hasn't happened yet.

Drawing takes a lot more work than writing, in a way...nothing in writing is as tedious as cross hatching.

ya but trying WRITING that

I don't know what you mean.

"there was a little line, and then another one crossing it diagonally, sitting next to another little line..."

hahaha I see

i'd even plump for a very rough sketched graphic novel really, something that at least you can grasp a story from, don't know why i haven't done this yet.

Yeah, I've written at least 3 "proper" novels (well, as proper as anything unpublished is ever going to be) and one graphic novel. The graphic novel took waaaaaaayyyyy more time and effort. Never doing anything like that ever again, even if I had the time and the inspiration.

what did you find was the most time consuming part of your gn kate?

Inking. Inking inking inking till you see little tiny circles in your dreams...

This was before there was really photoshop and scanning for corrections, as well, so any mistakes I made I'd end up layering the paper with white-out. Discovered that the corrective film used for typewriter mistakes is actually way better than white-out from a bottle. Smoother finish and also reproduced better. But the last time I got them out, the paper had all yellowed and the white-out was still as the white it was put down, it looked terrible. Some pages were more white-out than ink, honestly.

btw abbott u may be interested to learn i am working on a graphic novel version of my "smoking" idea

is that just some producers doing it cuz they want to see the book happen?

― NUDE. MAYNE. (s1ocki), Monday, June 7, 2010 10:05 AM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, i just got the idea for that because a DJ and I just did a radio segment for the local NPR station, and at the end of the bit they had the DJ chop up the host's outro to a beat, which i thought was really cool. i basically have a lot of weird ideas like that in the works, will figure out who wants to work on that part of the project when it's all coming together.

slocki, that is a great idea whose pictorial time has come! I am fully stoked to hear this.

GULP I'm writing two books at the moment: one fiction, and one I might just make some money on (but the fiction idea is really cool, never done before etc). More I cannot say.

transformers novelization?

I don't think my agent could sell that, s1ocki.

then u need a new agent!

No, I really don't. Again, more I cannot say.

question: been working on an ideas and comprehensive notes for a fiction novel. it's the first time i've ever written anything of any massive length though, seems intimidating. i've got a load of scenes, characters, plots, ideas, etc all sketched out but haven't started writing it yet. i'm wondering if to switch it to a screenplay, or script for radio? or even a series of short stories. sounds kinda dumb but i'm stuck at the moment wondering which is the best route to go down, for a couple of reasons: time (radio thing would be done in a fraction of the time, plus my subject matter lends itself well to sound) and market forces (i understand a one off radio play is more likely to be picked up than a novel).

anyone else been in this position? sounds silly but is there some kind of checklist i can run through to help decide or is it a case of just picking one and going at it?

Not sure I'm in a position to advise, because I still haven't finished one, but I'd say they're very different things. If you want to do internal lives, it has to be a novel; if it's one-on-one relationships, then drama; protagonist-in-society might be more screenplay; that kind of thing.

If your instinct says 'play', write it like that.

that's actually quite helpful. thanks IK