Archive - August 19, 2015

The #4 Key Step: You need to set a schedule of how much time you have in each day to write and how many words you want to write. You don’t have to write a lot. Ernest Hemingway wrote his first book, The Sun Also Rises in seven weeks—that’s approximately 1,500 words a day, but for more of his life he averaged 50 words a day when, as he would say, “the going was good.” Set a goal for yourself. For example. There are approximately 250 words on a printed page. So your goal is to write 1,000 words. Or four pages. Some days you’ll only manage to produce one page, other days you may write 15 pages. If you maintain this routine, you will have a 240-page book at the end of 60 days. That’s your first draft. Now, you start to rewrite. And that is what writing a . . .

The # 3 Key Step: Choose your characters first as they are harder to imagine than the plot, and they are the keystone to your book. As you write, your plot may or may not change, but your characters will develop and have a life of their own. As the characters develop, they’ll take on distinct personalities, and, as with good friends, you will know in certain situations what they will or will not do. Listen to your characters. Listen to their demand, who if they were to come to live, would have a different fate than what you are planning. They will tell their own story, and if the story they tell surprises you, will it will surprise the reader, too.  As Somerset Maugham says, “you can never know too much about your characters.” In writing my last novel Long Ago and Far Away, I started the book thinking . . .