So you want to write a book...

[bizzy]

Setting a daily word count goal was the only way I could ever finish my first manuscript. Working full time plus home responsibilities made it hard to mentally crank out 1, 000 a day, so I made my goal 500 and if I went over then it was a bonus. I took weekends off or else I would have suffered burnout. It took me several months to complete a 90, 000 word book, but I eventually did it!

[tb]

I'm a visual artist and not a writer at all, but I spend a lot of time THINKING about stories. Maybe I'll try writing outlines for if I ever seriously get into writing fiction. Sounds better to spend a week on a complete outline than a week on a meandering story that doesn't go anywhere.

[Jared_Wignall]

I make sure to have an overall story and major characters before anything else. From there, I go to write and ensure to go from beginning to end and once I’m done, I’ll go through it and revise whatever needs to be changed or added in order for the book to be the best it can be. Great video David, have a great day!

[vaboston]

The publishing series is excellent material. It's the kind of stuff that you'd usually have to pay for or search each step as you reach it, like I had to do at first, and even then there were things that I missed. Keys to Prolific Creativity is also great, full of practical advice and one of the few books on writing I care to keep on my shelf. I'm very grateful for your excellent work.

[karel]

Thanks for the video. I'll dare to add my own experience:

Planning: I usually do a lot of planning but with my current project, I went overboard. I planned and researched for about a year before I started writing. The problem is, there's so much notes and research material now that I'm getting lost in it. Some things end up duplicated and slightly different each time.
Then I put a stop to it and wrote the first chapter before doing more planning and research.

Drafting and revision: I always end up mixing these two up in incremental iterations. That means I continuously revise previous chapters to make sure everything is consistent. Consistency is very important to me.

Publishing: By this time, I'm already drafting next project. And before I do final revision, I'm already planning that next project. No wonder it all gets jumbled in my head :)

As for 500 (or 1000) words a day - I manage only a few lines a week. But I do a lot of planning and revision.

[tuppybrill]

I have a short story. It started as a concept based on an inversion of an existing type of story, little ideas would come into my head, then just before Christmas I was absorbed for a couple of days drafting it as a kind of one act play with key characters. In style it is arguably quite cinematic. Then over the next few weeks I refined it and let family read it and thought about their feedback. At the same time additional bits began to form in my mind around characters I had become attached to of what would have led up to it and what would happen after so I find myself now drafting more of it!

[BBassistChrist]

When I was a teenager, I wrote a book, and even created the cover for it. I loved that cover, -it captured some of the most unique elements of the world and looked very curious. But several years later, I am now revising the book and starting from scratch, and the scene that the cover depicts doesn't make sense in the story anymore. A part of me wanted to keep the scene in the book just because of the cover, but I decided that for the quality of the book, it is best to just change the cover when I'm done.

[camreese]

I wrote a book called Jupiter Blue in 3 weeks and all I did was having the beginning and the ending in mind and let it flow working whenever I felt inspired and quitting tobacco until I finished. It was 35, 000 words written in the first person voice of a my dead friend with the attempt in mind to bring him back to life in a sense and it was easy only because it was inspired. Dont write if you are not inspired otherwise youre trying to lay an egg when all you gotta do is shit

[funky_dude]

Thanks for this video! I have been world building/planning for a couple years (in my free time) and have been trying to learn the process/structure of creating a book. I have a lot to learn and I plan to check out your books and other vids on here.

[Zerobob]

I'm planning a fantasy book, and I've got what I consider to be a simple and strong central concept, but I'm currently in planning purgatory trying to find the best angle and story to extract the maximum potential from my idea... I come up with new potential stories almost daily, which doesn't help.

One thing I struggle with is something you touched on in this video... character goals and conflict. The more I attempt to apply the rules around character goals and conflict, the more generic my story ideas become, which you may argue is to be expected, as I'm applying a well-established concepts to formulate my ideas.

However, when I think of some of my favourite stories, the rules of character goals and conflict don't necessarily apply, or at least not to the protagonist. Take Jurassic Park, for example... Alan Grant is the protagonist, and his initial goal is to fund his dig, or to simply discover more about dinosaurs. However, both these goals are met in spectacular fashion within the first 30 minutes of the film.

You may also argue his goal is to be a better person towards children, although the character doesn't demonstrate this desire until much later in the film, when Grant gets a new goal... protect the children and survive. Of course, he achieves this goal, and his arc of becoming a "father" is complete.

So, our protagonist Alan Grant isn't given a classic setup of character goals and conflict. What's interesting is that it's our ANTAGONIST John Hammond that's given all the meaningful, story-related goals and conflict... open a dinosaur theme park, but everybody around him (bar the lawyer) is against him. You could argue that Hammond should be the protagonist, as it's his tragedy to tell.

I may have already answered my own question, but is it okay to give all the meaningful, fundamental character goals and conflict to your antagonist - or indeed a secondary character - thus allowing your protagonist to simply be an everyman archetype, with more humble goals, that aren't necessarily central to the story? I find this a more interesting approach to forming a narrative, as it can twist a story of tragedy (the dinosaur theme park failing) into one of hope (Grant becomes a "father").

[harrythedirty]

I already wrote one it’s called jungle wars the radical ways but I don’t know how to market it 😢

[SoundEngraver]

Process is everything. And it may take years getting the system down. That's okay.

[Apamaru]

Planning is always very difficult for me. I've done best with practice work where I'm given a pre-set plan for a story and I get to go directly to drafting/executing on the plan. When I sit down and try to plan a story it just feels completely aimless and I tend to get nowhere. Wonder what's wrong? Am I simply not a creative personality?

[paranoyd]

I would like to write a book but I also feel that I couldn't do a good job, so I don't even bother. I know a lot of vocabulary, I understand structure, but I'm not very good at building suspense nor making it spicy to make it appealing. For example, we've all told jokes or short stories (re-tellings) to friends and I never manage to make it enticing telling a quick 5-minute re-telling so I figured what chance would I have writing a 200+ page book? I am confident I could do a lot better than many that I've read that got published, but I have standards and if I can't to a fantastic job then I don't feel that its worth doing. Or maybe I'm just overly pessimistic?

[CuFhoirthe]

So I've just gotten back into the swing of my own fantasy series yesterday. And then I've gotten a notification for this video this very morning.

The YouTube Gods approve my plans, I guess.

Love your content.

[wyattpayne]

Do you have any suggestions on how to help a 13-year-old develop her love of writing? How can I help her to be effective in her creativity when she is bad at structuring her life? (Mostly due to being young)

[aesthetic.revolt]

What about giving your ideas room to breathe?

[Calithlin]

Do you have any audiobook versions of your work? I have developed vision/migraine issues but am interested in consuming some of your written work.

[Starcraftgamer]

I think my main problem is mostly finding my starting point. I pretty much worked my way into a corner and just did world building due to a mixture of anxiety, stress, and not liking any of the starting points I created.

Pros: I have gotten a small chunk of the world figured out and even made it work for games in D&D.

Cons: Been World Building since I was a freshman in High School and still anxiously avoid trying to figure out something because I have heard too many horror stories about the editing stage. People trying to make you check off diversity boxes, people who just hate Fantasy, people who make every character voice sound like the exact same person, etc. Also I am a terrible procrastinator. Aside from that issue, the things I have heard about certain circles of editing and writing kinda scare me.

[lapointe]

10k words- the length of a two hour read?