Discover Top Posts Tagged with #blither

No one:

Absolutely no one:

My brain: 🎶 We are allll. JUST. FRAgile things soft and SMallll. and. HAVEn’t been here BEFORE 🎶

#another day another song from the Centaurworld soundtrack stuck in my head #Centaurworld #blither

Henlo firemps it tis the Migraine Times and I am rtyign to write my thiesis this can onlty do well

Far be it from mea to do things the easy way

*WAILS ABOUT TRANSFORMERS*

#Lost Light 24 #ALL MY FEELS ARE SPOILERS #blither #one more issue til it's over #there are posts I want to reblog but will have to wait #because spoilers

How To Write A Book: Part One: How To Write A Book

That's a shit title, isn't it? What a stupid thing to write an article about; how to write a book. You already know how to write a book. It's like writing anything, only longer. You get some ideas and you write them down. Start with chapter one, write down all your ideas and when you run out of ideas, write “The End” and that's your book. That's all there is to it. There you go; that's the whole article. How to write a book: Step One, write a book. What a waste of everybody's time that was.

Obviously, I'm joking. This isn't how to write a book. You already know how to do that. You've read books before, right? If you haven't, stop reading this and go read a book. Read lots of books. You'll figure out how to write a book by reading them. They're all the same. A front cover, a load of chapters with words in them, then a back cover. That's all there is to it.

No, I'm not going to teach you how to write a book. I'm going to teach you two other things that are far more important. Firstly, I'm going to teach you how to write a good book. That's the tricky part, especially considering that what a good book is, is up for debate. There are people out there – nobody I know, but people just the same – there are people out there who think Dan Brown is a good writer who writes interesting books. Dan Brown once wrote the sentence “The famous man looked at the blue cup” so I disagree, but that's just, like, my opinion. There are no set rules as to what makes a good book. If you write something and somebody enjoys it, even if that somebody is you, then you've written a good book for that person.

What qualifies me to teach how to write a good book? Simple; I've done it. I've written nine books so far, and seven of them have been good. One of them is great. Of course, I'm judging that by what I think a makes for a good book, but that's what I was talking about in the previous paragraph. There is at least one person out there who thinks seven of my books are good. In truth, there are lots of people who think my books are good. In fact, over a million people read my book Sand, and the vast majority of them thought it was good. They told me so. Mostly, they were strangers, too, so it's not like they said it to make me feel better or anything. If there's one thing the Internet is good for, it's making strangers feel like shit, so if someone goes out of their way to tell you they enjoy your book, you should listen to them.

Secondly, I'm going to teach you how to write a successful book. This is less open to debate. A successful book is one which makes you money. If you're a successful writer, and you write successful books, then you can do it full time. That's kind of the end-goal for most writers; to be so good at writing people pay you to do it, and pay you so much you don't have to work a shitty day job to make ends meet. I've met writers who have been published and critically well received, but who work in niche markets that don't make any money. This is called literature. Your great-great-grandkids will benefit from you writing literature, but you, personally, will live in squalor for your whole life, you'll die alone and you'll be buried in a pauper's grave. If you want to write literature, then go ahead. Good literature can improve the world in distinct and unimaginable ways. You'll make the world a better place by writing good literature, but you are going to die of scurvy.

What qualified me to teach how to write a successful book? Absolutely fuck all. I've never done it. I've only ever had one book published, and it was one of the not-good ones. It was a book about vampires and some people liked it. I am not one of those people. It was a noisy, messy book. The pacing was all over the place, the characters were unlikeable and unrealistic and the ending was rushed and a complete cop-out. Why this was the only book I've ever attempted to make money from is beyond me. I'm guessing it's because it's my least-favourite thing I've ever written. It love it, because it's one of my babies, but I don't like it. I don't really care about it, despite the fact I love it. So, that was the one I chose to send out in to the world to fend for itself. I self-published it, which is a tricky thing to do. It's possible to self-publish a successful book, but I never managed it. I think I made something like £28 in total with that book. It took me six months to write. If we're going to be completely mercenary about it, I earned about 15p a day writing that book. There are children in sweatshops that make more than that.

See, I read a lot of How To Write articles. I always feel like there's a magical ingredient I'm missing. I read articles from other writers about how they achieved success and it always feels like there's a paragraph or a chapter than just isn't there. They always read something like this:

“I was working as a waiter in a restaurant when writing my first book. I would get up at six in the morning and write for three hours, then go wait tables for nine hours. When I got home, I'd spend an hour editing what I'd written that morning, then repeat the process the next day. I did this every day for two years. My agent sent the manuscript out to over a hundred publishing houses and they all rejected my book as books about Trolls falling in love wasn't 'in' right then. However, the head of Flibbertigibbet Inc. just happened to come across my book and he understood what we could do with it. After meeting with him, he signed me on to a three-book contract and that's when Fox Entertainment became interested in turning my little book in to a movie!”

Which, I mean, hey, great for you. But there's a few holes in the tale. And they're all like this. Every single success story I've read goes along these lines. First of all, how did you manage to get up at six every morning? How did you manage to find a job where they didn't care that you were half-asleep for your whole shift? Most importantly, where the fuck did you get an agent from!? How did you meet the head of a publishing house? How did Fox hear about your book!? WHAT AM I MISSING?

There's a whole bunch of other stuff I don't know. Some of it, I've learned “on the job” as it were. For example, when I first started writing, I had no idea you were supposed to edit your own book. I thought editors did that. But, no, you have to edit a thousand times before your book gets anywhere near an “editor”. What do you put in a synopsis? How do you figure out what agents you're supposed to approach, and how do you approach them? Where do you draw the line between buttering them up and completely whoring yourself out? What's the difference between an agent and a manager? Once again, how do you find the time to write while also working and having a life? What is the secret? How the fuck do you even get started?

That's what this is for. See, I haven't written a successful book. I haven't even gotten close. I've never had an agent or a manager or the head of a movie company ringing me up asking how many sequels I've got planned. I'm a complete novice. Nine books under my belt and I still haven't got a clue what I'm doing. But I'm learning, and I'm going to share what I've learned in this little articles. All the little bits that are a mystery to me right now, I'm going to figure out.

I'm going to share everything I do, the successful bits and the (I'm guessing far more numerous) failures. I wish somebody had already done this, so I don't have to. But, if there is a magic formula to writing a successful book, I'm going to find it and I'm going to share it with you cunts.

In between, I'm going to be teaching you about the first bit; making your book as good as it can be. It's going to be quite an adventure, probably. Or, I'm going to get frustrated and give up in a month. Either way, it should be fun. Join me, why not?