How to Write a Book (From Great Idea to A Book That Works!)
AHA! Lightbulb moment. The air is practically sizzling around you because you, Dear Writer, have a new idea for a book.
TA-DAAA!! How completely and wonderfully awesome is that? CONGRATULATIONS!
Except, once the adrenaline wears off and you’ve maybe dashed off a few initial pages, you might be left wondering how the heck to actually write the beautiful book you’’ve imagined…
Books come to us in different ways. Some books arrive as an image, some as a character, some as a situation, and some begin with voice. Depending on what your starting point is, you’ll need to take a slightly different path to flesh out your basic book idea so that you can turn it into a full book.
When you’ve got a great idea and are wondering how to write a book now that all you have is the start of a great idea, the trick is to know what questions to ask yourself. By asking yourself key questions, you can write all the way from the start to the end of a first draft.
In each of the sections below, I’ll walk you through which questions to ask yourself depending on how your book idea came to you, and at the end, I’ll also provide a full set of questions that can take you all the way from your great idea to THE END.
HOW TO WRITE A BOOK OUTLINE WORKSHEET
In my First Book Finish program, I provide a Sketch Outline Worksheet to help writers organize the main principles of their book in a way that will help them write a complete first draft from start to finish.
Get your free copy of the SKETCH OUTLINE WORKSHEET PDF right here!
But First: The Most Important Ingredient in Writing a Book
You have to trust yourself.
Trust the idea that came to you, from wherever its origins. And trust that with enough patience and butt-in-chair writing time, you can write this book all the way to a finished first draft. Because without a finished first draft, you don’t have a book.
You can trust yourself to finish this book because you have a lifetime of reading books behind you and have developed an instinct for story as a result.
You can trust yourself to finish this book because the idea came to you and you will know what it’s really about once you spend more time with it.
You can trust yourself to finish this book because it’s just a first draft and no one ever has to see it if you don’t want them to.
You can trust yourself to finish this book because the process of writing the story will teach you what the story wants to be.
You can trust yourself to finish this book because you’ll become a better writer in the process of writing it.
Trust yourself, trust your story. This is the most important element in your ability to finish this book.
How to Write a Book That Begins with an Image
Some books arrive with the flash of an image. You can see a woman sitting alone in an airport and suddenly you’re obsessed. What’s she doing there all alone? Where is she going? Is the airport even open?
You don’t know the answers to any of these questions, you just have the image of a lone woman sitting in an airport. Now what?
The questions we ask to start shaping each book are very similar but the starting point for each situation is different. In this case, when there’s nothing but an image, the next thing we need to know is WHO is this woman?
We move from image to character. Don’t spend time describing the airport – that can come later, or can be done as you write scenes with your character taking some kind of action.
A word of warning: don’t write pages and pages of your character sitting there thinking about her life. You’ll regret that when the time comes to revise!
Just find out who this woman is and get her moving in one way or another.
Questions to Ask To Move from Image to Character
- Who is in this image?
- Why are they in this location?
- What else makes this location important?
- Is there anything about this image that suggests a theme or what might happen next?
But What If There’s No Character?
Sometimes you’ll have an image that is the perfect setting…an empty airport, let’s say, with rows and rows of empty seats, closed-up coffee kiosks and no airplanes at the gates. But the image has no people in it.
You might have started writing pages and pages of description of this empty airport because it fascinated you, but now it’s time to introduce character.
A story must have character because character development is the heart of narrative.
If faced with an image with no people, your job is to people it. Write people into the image and settle on one of them as your Main Character or MC – the character whose story you’ll now be telling. (Don’t worry, just start writing: the character will come.)
How to Write a Book That Starts as a Character
Ooh, lucky you! You’ve got a book idea about SOMEONE. This is the ideal situation for narrative because a story is always someone’s story, it must belong to a character or characters.
This is as true for memoir (a story of you and your family) – as it is for the latest paperback thriller (a story of a famous man whose daughter is kidnapped).
Character is the main ingredient for story because from one compelling character we can pull the rest of the story.
From character, you can develop setting and plot – two more elements of story.
Let’s see how that can work…
We have a woman in her early forties.
She’s conventionally pretty, slim with blonde hair in a trendy style. She’s wearing stylish, expensive clothes and carrying one small brown suitcase with the Louis Viotton logo splashed across it with tiny LVs everywhere. She has dark circles under her eyes and her skin is pale.
Now we have a wealthy woman who is fastidious about her appearance and seems to be quite tired. People are tired for a reason, right? Let’s find out why she’s so tired and what she might be prepared to do about it. (Because clearly, if the answer was a nap, she wouldn’t have packed a suitcase!)
We know something now about WHO she is, so we can explore WHY she is in the situation she’s in at this very moment, the moment when she popped into your head saying “Write a story about ME!”
Let’s put her somewhere and see what happens.
Our tired woman is at the airport, carrying one small suitcase. She’s just left her husband. Will she go back? Is there anything to go back to? (A relationship to repair, or a body to bury?) We don’t know…yet. We’ll have to keep writing to find out.
The key with starting a book with character is to write until you know who this person is and in what situation they’ve found themselves at the start of your story.
Questions to Ask When Starting a Story with Just a Character
- Who is this person?
- What do they look like, from head to toe?
- What does it feel like to be in their body right now?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- How do they make their living?
- Do they have family? If so, what does that look like?
- What do they want most in the world right now?
- What are they intending to do to get what they want?
These are some basic questions you might ask yourself about your Main Character if you’re wondering how to write a book when all you’ve got is just a Main Character. There’s more, of course…and these are the questions that we ask ourselves about any story once we have a Main Character in place.
See below for a full set of questions that can take you all the way to the end of your book!
HOW TO WRITE A BOOK OUTLINE WORKSHEET
In my First Book Finish program, I provide a Sketch Outline Worksheet to help writers organize the main principles of their book in a way that will help them write a complete first draft from start to finish.
Get your free copy of the SKETCH OUTLINE WORKSHEET PDF right here!
How to Write a Book When Starting with a Situation
What’s great about starting a book when you have just a situation is that situation is never divorced from character.
You’ll rarely have a book idea that comes to you as: Divorce.
99% of the time, a book idea that arrives as a situation also comes with a character attached: a wealthy woman leaves her husband.
And a character dealing with a situation is a fantastic way to start a book because we can begin to see what STAKES might lie at the heart of our story.
What are stakes and why do they matter?
Stakes are why the story matters to the characters involved. It is literally the answer to the question: what’s at stake here if things don’t work out?
A wealthy woman leaving her husband is not terribly interesting in and of itself, but what if the stakes are that she hasn’t worked a day in her adult life and has relied on her husband for income and he’s threatened to cut her off and completely ruin her life if she ever left him? Now THAT’S a situation.
Her stakes are suddenly high. It matters very much to her that she be able to make her own way outside the economic support system that her husband has been providing for the last 15 years of her life. The stakes might even – depending on how the husband responds – be as high as her very survival.
Now we have a Main Character and a situation with high stakes. From here, anything can happen and we can have some fun as the writer just making stuff up as we go along.
Questions to Ask When Starting a Book with a Situation
- What is the full situation?
- Who’s involved? (Cast of characters)
- Who is the Main Character in this situation?
- Why did this situation happen now?
- What matters most to my Main Character about this situation?
How to Write a Book That Begins with a Voice
Sometimes all we have is a voice when we start a book. This happens quite frequently for me when starting short stories, but voice matters for novel and memoir too.
Voice refers to the tone and attitude behind the person who’s telling the story. It might be an all-knowing (omniscient) narrator, or it might be one person, or in some cases it might be a group of people.
Voice is as specific to character as a fingerprint.
A voice always has a perspective on the story.
“She packed her suitcase that morning in a haze of doubt.”
This is a very different sentence, a different voice, a different point-of-view and therefore potentially a VERY different story, than this one…
“I stepped over the bastard’s body on my way out – Geoffrey had stood between me and freedom for the last time.”
When we’re wondering how to write a book that has come to us via voice, we’ve got something special, something that can drive the whole story along if we let it.
Questions to Ask When Starting a Book with Voice
- Who is speaking?
- What’s the personality behind this voice?
- Is the speaker optimistic about what’s next? Or are they pessimistic?
- What does the speaker think of themselves?
- Is the speaker telling their own story or someone else’s?
- If they’re telling the story of someone else, what is their relationship to that person?
- How much of the story can this speaker see? (All characters all of the time, or only from one specific point of view?)
You can follow what emerges from these questions about voice to find the answers to questions about your character, the situation they’re in and what might happen next.
How to Write a Book: From a Great Idea to a Book That Works!
You’ve got an idea for a book you’re excited about. Hold onto that feeling and feed it! You’re going to want that excitement to drive you as you finish your first full draft of the book.
Having looked at book ideas that begin from image, character, situation and voice, the truth is that all books can be drafted from beginning to end by asking a set of key questions based on these elements.
Even though it’s just a first draft, you don’t want your book to fall flat. And drafts do have a nasty tendency to do that, if you’re not asking yourself the right questions at the start.
The questions above will give you some guidance depending on how your story came to you in the first place, but here are a set of questions that can be applied to all stories and, when followed to their logical conclusions, will take you all the way to the end of your first draft.
CHARACTER + SITUATION + DESIRE + OBSTACLES = STORY
To write a first draft of your book, this is the basic equation you’ll need to keep in mind. I know, this isn’t the list of 5 classic story elements taught in your high school English class, but that’s analysis of a book after the fact, not the actual writing of a book.
Your story needs a MAIN CHARACTER the reader will care about. The surest way to accomplish this is to write a character YOU care about, and you can use the questions above as a starting point.
Then your story opens with a SITUATION that your character is in right now. (You can think of this as the inciting incident if you like, but plain old “situation” will also do just fine for our purposes – which is to finish the first draft.) For our objective of finishing a full book, the thornier or more complicated the situation, the better! Let’s give ourselves lots to work with at the start.
Now this is really important…
Your Main Character must have a burning desire. She must want something so badly that she’ll do almost anything to get it, even poison poor old Geoffrey so that he vomits all over his Gucci loafers.
Your Main Character will need an INTERNAL DESIRE, such as to finally feel competent and self-confident again after years in an abusive marriage. This is a desire that is rooted in who they are at the start of the story, and who they ultimately want to become. (TADA! Character Arc!)
Your Main Character will also have an EXTERNAL DESIRE, such as to make a living and build a life on their own terms. These are desires that are manifested in the world outside of your character and must be navigated and possibly negotiated with other people. (You can see how external desires are just ripe for the kinds of conflicts that will help move a plot along.)
Speaking of plot, your Main Character must face OBSTACLES of her own making and generated by the world of the story. If you brainstorm 4-6 key obstacles your MC might face on the way to achieving both her internal and external desires, you’ll have all the plot points you’ll need to get you from your first sentence to the last one of your first draft.
Remember: all we’re trying to do right now is take a story from “Hey. I’ve got a great idea!” to typing “The End” on a completed first draft of your book.
There’s more to be said about story when it comes to REVISING your book, but that’s weeks away and you don’t want to worry about it while you’re in first draft mode.
Take the basic story equation I’ve outlined above and just enjoy the ride.
How to Write a Book: Cut and Paste These Questions
If you’d like to cut and paste all of the questions from this blog post into a document of your own to help guide you through your draft, here they are in one section:
REMEMBER: CHARACTER + SITUATION + DESIRE + OBSTACLES = STORY
Questions About Image
- Who is in this image?
- Why are they in this location?
- What else makes this location important?
- Is there anything about this image that suggests a theme or what might happen next?
Questions About Character
- Who is this person?
- What do they look like, from head to toe?
- What does it feel like to be in their body right now?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- How do they make their living?
- Do they have family? If so, what does that look like?
- What do they want most in the world right now?
- What are they intending to do to get what they want?
Questions About Situation
- What is the full situation?
- Who’s involved? (Cast of characters)
- Who is the Main Character in this situation?
- Why did this situation happen now?
- What matters most to my Main Character about this situation?
Questions About Voice
- Who is speaking?
- What’s the personality behind this voice?
- Is the speaker optimistic about what’s next? Or are they pessimistic?
- What does the speaker think of themselves?
- Is the speaker telling their own story or someone else’s?
- If they’re telling the story of someone else, what is their relationship to that person?
