If you’ve ever stared at a blank page, wondering how to begin your book, you’re not alone. The daunting question of “How do you start writing a book?” is one that every author still struggles with.
It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve written before, the nagging thoughts of how to start writing a new book will always arise.
In this article here’re the following things you’ll learn about:
- How to Determine What to Write
- What to Consider Before Writing a Book
- How do You Start Writing a Book
Let’s dive in…..
How to Determine What to Write
Many aspiring writers don’t know how to start writing a book because they can’t determine what to write.
Your ability to determine what to write matters a lot and here’re 4 ways to go about this:
- Consider your skill set : What is your skill set? You can pick a topic that centers around it and come up with a book.
- Experience: Many authors were able to write books based on their experiences. Our experiences as authors play a pivotal role in shaping our journey as writers.
- Passion: Passion is a strong feeling for something. There’re things, or topics you could be passionate about, these things or topics could be your source of inspiration for writing a book.
- Job: This is another factor to consider. The kind of job you do can help you figure out what to write.
What To Consider Before Writing A Book
1. The Genre of Your Book
A genre is the style or category of your book. You need to figure out what genre or category your book falls into.
Here’re some book genres to guide you:
- Science fiction
- Historical fiction
- Fantasy
- Horror
- Romance
- Adventure
- Mystery
- Young adult
- Graphic novel
- Memoir
When writing, you can combine more than one genre, however you’ve to be careful not to go over the board. Whatever combination you make, ensure that in the end it can be clearly assigned to a single genre.
2. Target audience (Readers)
A target audience is the group of people you are writing for. Is your book for young men, women, young adult or children? You need to identify your reader so that you would be able to get to them.
Describing your audience as specific as possible will not only help you to market your book but will make writing much easier.
3. Research
Research is the systematic study of materials and sources to establish facts. Before setting out to write a book, you must carry out research to learn more about your book idea. Research produces a good book. Readers have difficulty forgiving factual errors. That’s why it’s better to check details once too often.
Visit places like YouTube, consult Atlases and world Almanacs to confirm geography and cultural norms. Online and hard copy Encyclopedias are good sources of information. A thesaurus can help you come up with common words.
Important Tip- But don’t get lost in the research. If you wade through numerous specialist books on a topic, it will hardly help you and your book and, in the worst case, will lead you to writer’s block.
How Do You Start Writing A Book?
1. Choose a writing material
If you’re like me, I prefer starting a book making use of pen and a notebook. This helps me to get connected. At this stage, I like writing things like my outline. You can decide on what material to write with. Do you want to write with a pen and a notebook or you want to make use of your laptop? Decide and get connected!
2. Choose a writing space
A writing space is a place you set outside in or outside your home to write. If you’re going to start writing a book, you must decide your space.
Writing on a messy table, uncomfortable position or in a noisy environment will overwhelm you and make it difficult to start your story.
Create a good space, make use of a desk and sit in a comfortable chair. A conducive writing environment boosts your creativity, and helps you to avoid distractions.
Also remember that you don’t have to have a dedicated writing space. Changing your environment from time to time can aid your creativity. You can write from home, in a library, or even in the park and enjoy the sun.
3. Plan ahead
As an aspiring author, writing a book without a plan will result in a big mess, especially if you’re writing longer books. A clear plan will allow you to create a good framework for the story, which you can then change as often as you want. When making a plan, there are a few things you should focus on:
- A perspective: A big part of how you start a book lies on the perspective from which you want to tell your story. I recommend you pick a perspective and stick with it throughout the story so as not to confuse readers. Although it is possible to combine multiple perspectives, however this must be done in a very clear and concise manner.
- Develop characters: This step is decided in the planning stage. Your characters will make or break your story. A deep knowledge of them will be key to developing a fascinating story around them.
- Set goals: Of course, it’s not always easy to plan everything in advance. There will be days in the future when everyday life gets in the way or other tasks overwhelms you, this is why you need to set achievable goals.
4. Outline
A book outline is often described as a roadmap or blueprint for your story. It helps you see the big picture and plan the sequence of chapters, characters and ideas that will become your book. You form your outline (chapters) from what you gathered from your research.
5. Plot your book (optional)
Plotting refers to the sequence of events that makes up your story, while an outline gives the vivid picture of what should come into the story.
Some writers think plotting and outlining are the same concept, they are different and you have to come up with an outline to be able to create a plot for your book.
In addition an outline can stand in place of a plot. Plotting is optional, but there are writers who are plotters, they can’t write without plotting the course of events.
6. Write
What happens after you have written your outline or plot? You write, and write till you get to the end. Writing is a difficult task, but with persistent you can get to your goal.
As you write ensure your are doing activities like listening to music, going for walks and taking meaningful breaks. These activities, will help you stay focus and energized.
7. Edit
Editing is the last stage, you can begin editing your book after two days or three days of completion. This will help you come back to it with a fresh eyes. While you can easily outsource editing to an editor, it’s good to always edit your book before giving out the manuscript to a second party. This will help to cut down errors and make you see areas you would need to rewrite.
Let’s wrap up
Writing a book is a very lucrative adventure, it improves your writing skills, helps you to communicate better and most importantly, writing a book establishes your credibility and authority.
On this note, I believe your question; how do you start writing a book has been answered. And I am certain that at this moment you can write your book. And if you’re still skeptical and not certain on how to start, I encourage you to take a leap of faith and start writing. Above all I wish you success.
