15 Excellent Tips for Writing a Book

Ran across this list recently from The Atlantic online. For those of you writing a novel or non-fiction book, it’s worth reading all the tips. For screenwriters and playwrights, I’ve excerpted some of the most relevant ones:

“I tried, not always successfully, to start each day with some discrete goal I wanted to accomplish: write 200 words, or get through a certain amount of research, or conduct two interviews, or whatever. If I set out to spend a day “writing,” that would be so overwhelming I’d end up just farting around online all day instead of starting the climb the mountain.” — Seth Mnookin (The Panic Virus)

“When I’m writing a book I only read other books that somehow inform my book. If it doesn’t serve my process — no matter how much I want to read it — I don’t. I suspect there are a lot of people who will give the opposite opinion (take a break from reading about your subject matter, etc.), but I’m not one of them. This is your time to be completely and justifiably obsessed. So go ahead — bask in the madness.” — Peter Conners (Growing Up Dead)

“Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.” — Josh Shenk (Lincoln’s Melancholy)

“Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.” — Cory Doctorow (Makers)

“Develop a very serious plan for dealing with internet distractions. I use an app called Self-Control on my Mac.” — Ben Casnocha (My Start-Up Life)

“I find it helpful sometimes — and still to my surprise — trying to explain to someone what it is I’m trying to write about, usually someone bright but in a different intellectual zone, and not a writer. Or, likewise, in a letter or email to such a person.” — August Kleinzahler ( Cutty, One Rock)

“The process of lining the book up, giving it a bedside manner, asking ‘Is this what it is about? But what is it really about’ was a plunge. I had to explain the work to myself in more and more elementary language. I came to enjoy doing this. It helped when I realized that the discovery process was part of the writing and I didn’t have to be through it already.” — John Tarrant (Life Inside the Dark)

For more of the article, go here.