How to Write Your First Book: A Step-By-Step Guide for Aspiring Authors

Welcome readers! If you have found this blog, you have most likely seen my book, A Month Well Spent. If you haven’t read it yet, A Month Well Spent chronicles the adventure of a teenage boy and his father as they help to save a foreign planet from disaster. The story also contains important messages about love and friendship, and the classic clash between good and evil.

Writing a book is a complex, sometimes stressful journey. This statement is not meant to discourage any of you who might want to try their hand at writing, but it is true. This is all the better, because since the process is tough, it is more rewarding once you have made it to the end. Just because a task might be difficult, it is not anywhere near impossible. My goal is to provide some guidance to aspiring authors who don’t know where to begin at their writing journey. I would also like to prove to you that you do not need to be an adult to write a book, as teenagers (like me!) have finished their stories and ha them published. Although I am no Tolstoy or Hemingway, I have been through the self-publishing process, and came out with a complete story.

In today’s post, I hope to bring to light the correct attitude that is required to create a workable story. In particular, the failed attempts that I made before writing A Month Well Spent.

Before A Month Well Spent

Five years before A Month Well Spent hit the shelves, I was already dreaming about being an author. I’d scribbled short stories, but I hadn’t thought about publishing at all. By age ten I was highly curious, but I didn’t yet know the rules of the game.

My first mistake? Jumping straight into writing without a solid plan. I imagined a European teen who, after a string of mishaps, ends up stuck on an American freighter—alone, with no money, and forced to survive on his own. The idea sounded exciting, so I quickly gave this character a name, added a few other protagonists (the supporting cast; those people who help the main character on their way to success), and decided that I was ready to write. Eventually, I knew basically the entire storyline; there were no holes or missing chunks of the adventure. It seemed that I had everything I needed to dive into the writing process. However, now I realize how hurried my preparation had been. More time should have been spent on the development of characters and the plot. I believe that to write a successful book, you need to sit down and say, ‘Where should my story start, where should it end, and how should the character reach that ending?’ Those are three important questions that, in my opinion, you must be able to answer before writing the book. I had a beginning, but I did not have an end. This caused my manuscript to become rambling, and there was no clear resolution to the story.

However, the rough draft had taken so long to complete that I could not imagine spending the time to rethink my idea. That is an attitude that an author should never have. You must always be eager to make revisions, to improve your writings. If you are not willing, your story will fail, like mine did. A writer can never have a preconceived notion that they will succeed on their first attempt, as this is a very frivolous, unrealistic outlook. Thinking that way will only set you up for failure.

Instead, it is important to be levelheaded and rational, and to be prepared to make many revisions to your basic manuscript. Nothing is perfect, so be ready to tweak your story. If you are set on keeping everything in your book exactly how you imagined it (as it is very easy to do!), you need to come back down to Earth and save your story before it is too late. The following paragraphs discuss how I, preoccupied with thoughts of becoming a famous author, ruined the possibility of my book’s success. Included are tips on how to avoid this fate for yourself and your manuscript.

Tips for Budding Authors

1. Be Humble. Accept the fact that only a small percentage of authors are become household names. The majority of writers, even if they create stories for a living, are really just normal people who are adequate to very good writers. Don’t assume that you will be the next best seller, but also don’t discount your abilities. Remember that many authors are just like you, people who have an interest in writing and want to try their hand at the skill. Some of these valiant attempts succeed, but even if they don’t, writing is still not a waste of time.

2. Visions and revisions. Your original ideas won’t all make it to the print copy of your book. Keep in mind that stories are subject to change. It will only lead to disaster if you have the mindset of, ‘I really like this part of my book, although it doesn’t make sense with the rest of the story, involves a character that is never mentioned again…’

3. Writing before future. Don’t spend much time thinking about how ‘famous’ you will be once your book sells millions. ‘Hmm… Would I buy the green Ferrari or the red one?’ If these thoughts are continually filling your mind, you will never have the money to buy that dream Ferrari.

4. Don’t prolong. However much you enjoy writing your story, there comes a time when enough is enough. There is no reason to extend the plot over an extra year of the main character’s life after the real adventure is done.

5. Longer isn’t always better. Some of the great stories in history were short! Take, for instance, Walter D. Edmond’s book ‘Two Logs Crossing’. At around eighty pages, the story includes vivid description and a plot that holds the reader’s attention. Comparably, if that same book had been double the length, it would have had so much unneeded explanation that it would have become an unenjoyable read. Weed out the unnecessary words so that your story is brief but interesting.

If you catch yourself doing any of the things mentioned above, don’t worry, you are not doomed. There is still plenty of time to turn it around. Think harder about the writing of your story than anything else, and try to imagine that you are creating a story for yourself, not for the public.

I hope that this post informed you of the dangers of writing a story, and some ways that they can be prevented. In the meantime, happy writing!