How To Write A Book? A Guide For Aspiring Writers.

What are the tips about writing a good book? How shall I start a book? What topic to choose for my book?

Writing skills are in demand in many areas - journalism, copywriting, fiction and non-fiction literature, blogging. If you want to write your own novel, create any kind of writing creatively and freely, use these ten tips we've collected from cool books on writing.

1. Write in small portions (from the book "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott)

It often happens like this: you are plotting an autobiographical novel about your own childhood, or a play from the life of immigrants, or a treatise on ... well, let's say, the role of women in history. But tackling it right away is like climbing the side of a glacier. Your legs slip, your fingers turn red and freeze, blood oozes from wounds. Then, from the depths of the subconscious, all your nervous disorders come to visit and sit around the table. Don't give them power.

“I breathe slowly and deeply - and finally I notice a photo frame of five by eight centimeters, which I put on my table in order to remember small doses. The frame reminds me to write a piece. A small one, like a picture five by eight. That's all for today. Now, for example, I will write only one paragraph about the place and time of the action.” Anne Lamotte.

Tell yourself gently and affectionately: “My sweetie, now we will just write about the river at sunset or about the first date. That's all".

2. Make sure that your topic is interesting to the reader (from the book "Author, scissors, paper")

“What can I say? Who am I? Why should someone waste his time and even more, his money on me?" Any author asks these questions. First you need to realize: each person has a story to tell.

First, determine what kind of topic you have: popular or specialized, for an amateur or a person in the topic. Who do you want to tell your story to? Who will benefit from it? Do you want to educate a wide range of readers or improve the lives of professionals in a particular field? It is impossible to please both at the same time.

A cool story is always there. There is a rhyme somewhere inside your fate, your personal history: a meeting, an event that you just need to remember - and the process of creating a story starts in your imagination.

• And even personal experience is not always needed. There are simple criteria for selecting and analyzing whether your topic is suitable for showing in public:
• - the text should communicate something very important,
• - explain important processes in a non-trivial way,
• - be acutely useful to the reader,
• - substantiate a fresh pattern that concerns the reader and give it a name,
• - tell the story of a bright hero.

The reader expects you to take him out of his routine into an unknown world for a long time. So create this world in such a way that you want to stay in it.

3. Make a checklist for a "good novel" (from the book "Literary Marathon")

If you have desire to create your own novel, the first step is to understand what a "good novel" means to you. Please answer this question in writing.

You can answer vaguely, but you can answer in great detail: a first-person narrative, superheroes, the Alps, massive invasions of evil elves.

How is this list useful? The point is, if something is your reading preference, then you can probably do well as a writer. It is when language, color and style solutions resonate with you the most for some reason. These are the things that you understand.

You can make such checklists for what you have to write most often - articles, reviews, reports.

4. Use "catchies" in the text (from the book "Living Text")

There are many ways to get started. Some work great with one book, but don't work at all in another one. You have to choose. Be able to choose.

For example, the "False Prologue" technique. Here the climactic scene is removed from the middle / end of the book and placed at the beginning.

This way the reader immediately "tastes" the main and dramatic event of the whole story.

This technique is popular with filmmakers: it allows a film to start with a tense, spectacular scene. Examples of books with a "false prologue": Gabriel Garcia Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude; Stephenie Meyer The Twilight Saga (Book 1), Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

5. Use a board with cards (from the book "Save the cat!")

The technique that screenwriter Blake Snyder uses is a corkboard and cards. Hang a large corkboard on the wall, take cards with episodes, blocks, excerpts of your future text (novel, article, report) and use the pins to attach these cards to the board wherever you want. You don't have to part with the cards at all. Hustle a pack of cards in your pocket, go to the nearest coffee shop, take out a pack and sit for hours shuffling your deck, laying out episodes, thinking over the sequence, looking for good and bad moments.

The board allows you to “see” the big picture even before you start writing.

It's a good way to test the twists, ideas, dialogue, and rhythm of a story, and how well they fit together. It is a way to render text with good structure. This is great!

6. Write the way you think (from the book "Accidental genius ")

Freewriting helps you discover your personality and improve your writing skills. During a freewriting session, you need to get to your primary thoughts before the well-behaved side of the mind "clears" them, negating their effectiveness. So write not the way you speak, but the way you think.

What's the best idea you've heard in the last seventy-two hours? Write about it in five minutes, incorporating everything you learn into your work. When five minutes are over, review what you have written. If you can read it out loud and others can understand it, you have suppressed your most sincere thinking. Take another 5-minute writing session and try to get your primary thoughts down to paper.

“The writing process is enjoyable. When you create a phrase that sounds exactly the way you intended it, there is an amazing sense of power. ”Susan Orlin, journalist.

7. Train in the short story genre (from the book "642 Ideas to Write about")

1. The short story genre requires clarity of thought and the ability to put a lot of meaning into a small number of words. This is a great creativity trainer - take an absurd or funny scene and describe it. In general, train your brevity, the sister of the talent:
2. You are building a castle on the sand and suddenly you notice that the waves have thrown a bottle with a message on the shore. It is written there ...
3. Researchers land on a distant planet. An amazing sight opens in front of them! Tell us about their adventures.
4. You are sitting in a cafe - and suddenly time stops. Describe everything you see.

8. Show, do not tell (from the book "Literary Master Class")

Don't write “it was wonderful,” but make us say “amazing” after reading the passage. The fact is that all these words (terrifying, beautiful, disgusting, exquisite) tell the reader only one thing: "Do my work for me!" - Clive Lewis advised.

Mark Twain taught the same thing: “Don't say, 'The old woman screamed.' Take her to the stage and make her scream."

And one more remark on the same occasion, from Chekhov:

... you will get a moonlit night if you write that a glass from a broken bottle flashed like a bright star on the mill dam ...

It is necessary to show, not tell, selecting bright, specific details.

9. Find visual assistants (from “How to Write a Movie in 21 Days”)

Have you ever tried to tell someone about your awful or terrific experience, but couldn't find the words? It all ended with something like "I can't explain this to you" or "if you were in my shoes, you would understand." The point is, first you need to rekindle this feeling inside, and then find the right words to describe it.

Find an item that is related to any of your experiences, evokes feelings, such as a lucky coin or a stone from the beach.

If this is a story about your grandfather, you can take his hat from an old chest. If you're writing a story about your grandmother, find a candlestick that belonged to her. If you came up with your own story when you heard a song in a restaurant, grab a napkin from that restaurant and listen to that melody again.

Help your feelings reappear, find helpers for this. Maybe some color will spark an emotion in you.

10. Ready! Steady! Verbal Sprint! (from the book "Start Writing")

This technique teaches you to write without waiting for inspiration. Pick a topic, set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and write. If there are problems with the topic, open any book on page 17 and find line 6. This will be your theme.

As time goes on, it is important not to hesitate. Let your thoughts rush at the speed of a hound. Write with a sense of urgency.

Skip the inhibitions, light up every lost, lonely thought in your head and let it break free.

The verbal sprint helps turn off value judgment by stepping into the intuitive stream to which high-speed writing connects.