How to Write a Book
You probably know by now that I’ve written a book. Here it is.
Isn’t it lovely? It’s got a beautiful cover, with pictures, and even my name right there! “Ben Pobjie” it says, and that’s me! It is a real book and you can really read it just by giving a modest sum to one of Australia’s many highly-principled booksellers, who will in accordance with their oath of office give you a “copy” (publishing jargon) of the book in return. It’s a simple process and will grant you many hours of hilarious reading pleasure.
But once you’ve read my great book, you probably want to know how to write a book of your own, right? I am committed to educating, as well as entertaining, and that’s why I wish more than anything to help you do so. Someday, I hope, we will all write our own books, and we will all buy our own books, and we’ll be a wonderful closed loop of authorial triumph.
How does one write a book? The answer is, step by step.
HOW TO WRITE A BOOK
- Have An Idea
This is incredibly important. A book, you see, has to be about something: if a book isn’t about something, there will be nothing in it, and if you’ve seen the sales figures for empty books on the current market, you’ll know that not putting anything in your book is no recipe for success.
In my case, I had an excellent idea — The Da Vinci Code meets Neighbours. But I was told this was completely unmarketable, so I had another idea: Error Australis. This is an excellent lesson: always have two ideas, in case your first one is garbage.
2. Write your idea down
Don’t let this one fool you: you don’t necessarily need a pen. You can type your idea on a computer, or on an iphone or iPad, or even say it out loud into a tape recorder. This is another excellent lesson: writing doesn’t always mean writing.
The important thing is you don’t forget your idea, which can happen if you have the idea, and you don’t record it anywhere, and then you fall asleep, and you have a dream about pterodactyls, and then when you wake up all you can think about is pterodactyls and your idea has totally disappeared, and maybe it was a great idea — like The Da Vinci Code meets Neighbours — but you’ll never know because you didn’t write it down.
3. Make your idea very very long
The idea “The Da Vinci Code meets Neighbours” is a very short idea, but a book is much, much longer. The same is true of other ideas, such as “Gone With The Wind as a Sweet Valley Twins book”; or “The Very Hungry Caterpillar from the watermelon’s point of view.
This means you need to “flesh out” your idea, which is a technical author term which means “make it much longer”. Take the words in your idea, and add a lot more. A good rule of thumb is for every word your idea has, write another 20,000 words.
Making your idea longer will sometimes mean adding other ideas to it, to pad it out a bit. These ideas are up to you, but they should “fit” with your first idea in some way. For example, if your original idea is, “a tapir falls in love with a mental health nurse”, you shouldn’t add a supplementary idea like, “a fighter pilot is shot down and falls into a black hole”. But you could add a complementary idea like, “a family of toucans try to make their new restaurant work”.
4. Send your book to a publisher
This is important because as you saw above, a book should have a cover, and the publisher is the person who puts the book inside the cover. Without a publisher, you might have to staple all the pages together yourself, which can cause cramp.
Try to choose a publisher who suits your particular style. For example, if the publisher specialises in books about how to play chess, don’t send them your manuscript about how to play backgammon. Don’t send a book about ants to a publisher that only publishes books about lizards. And so on. Do your research.
You should also send a cover letter with your book. This letter will give the publisher some crucial information, such as: who you are; what your phone number is; why you want to write books; how much money you would like to be paid.
5. Promote your book
Be careful! This does not mean, “elevate your book to a position of increased responsibility”. If you find yourself in a position where your book is now an executive account manager, you have done this step wrong.
What I mean by “promote your book” is, tell people that you have a book, and that it is good, and that they should buy it. Tell as many people as you can: if you know ten or more people, you should make sure to tell all of them, even if it takes a whole day.
You can also do things like take out ads in magazines, hire skywriters, and yell at people in the street about your book. The main thing is to increase visibility, so that lots and lots of people know there is a book which you wrote and that it is for sale and that it will be good if they buy it. Make it clear that buying it would be a very good move on their part. Saying things like, “If you don’t buy my book, you’ll regret it” and “Buy my book if you don’t want something unfortunate to happen” can be very good at drumming up business.
6. Turn your book into a movie
Eventually, after everyone has bought your book, you will want to turn your book into a movie, so everyone can buy your movie, and you can get even more money. One way of doing this is to ring a screenwriter and say, very politely, “I would like my book to be a movie, please.” Most screenwriters are very helpful people and will have a script ready for you the next morning.
The other way to do is is by writing the script yourself. It is not difficult to turn a book into a script, if you concentrate and follow a few simple rules.
First rule: dialogue. Dialogue in scripts is different to in books. Go through your book and every time it says, “Frank said, ‘I have no idea where the gin is’”, change it to:
FRANK: I have no idea where the gin is.
Second rule: action. Action in a script is much more boring than in books. If you’ve written, “Grabbing the gin, Frank hurled it at the Nazi like an ancient Greek javelin thrower, causing the Nazi to explode in a stunning shower of red and yellow sparks, reminding Frank of the time he fell in love amid the autumn leaves, the year he got over smallpox”: then you need to change it in the script to:
INT. LAUNDRY. DAY. Frank enters with bottle of gin. He nods tersely at the Nazi, who is drawing a picture of a tree. Frank smiles and leaves the room to go to the toilet.
And third and final rule: scripts are much shorter than books, so go through your book and cut out as much as you can. You should exercise discretion, but a good guide is to delete any scene in which a character has feelings, and any scene set in a dairy.
7. Become an alcoholic
Every writer dreams of reaching this stage — follow these simple steps correctly, and you’ll be an alcoholic in no time!
Now that you know how to write a book, make sure you pick up your copy of Error Australis, so you can look at it while writing and be inspired in your quest to become a real writer like me. Click here to buy my book!
