It was Mark Twain who observed that "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting, whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull." It could also be added that the poet's moon talk is also likely to be inaccurate. This is important to keep in mind when you write your book because nothing will turn off your readers faster than realizing an author has no clue what he's talking about. If you're not going to write about a subject you know intimately (and many beginning authors try to do this), you're going to have to invest a lot of time in research whether your chosen genre is fiction or nonfiction. Let's say, for instance, that you're a delivery person who has always wanted to write crime novels. Unless your delivery route is in a particularly dangerous neighborhood or you spend a lot of your free time hanging around policemen and detectives, you probably don't know the first thing about weapons, investigative techniques, evidence or how to interrogate suspects. While you can spend lots of hours at the library or on the Internet researching topics that will lend authenticity to your book, it's actually better to build your first project around things that are already familiar to you. Getting that first book out of your system is an effective way to learn just how much work goes into the process. It starts with making a list of topics that you know a lot about. These could be things you've learned in an academic environment, skills you've picked up in the workplace, or even observations you've made about relationships from your family, your friends and your neighbors. In addition, it's helpful if the backdrop of your book is a place with which you're intimately familiar; i.e., your hometown, the place you live now, or a favorite vacation spot. Buy yourself a notebook so that you can jot down memories and ideas that will lend themselves to your project.
Contrary to popular belief, books are not grabbed up by publishing houses just because they're well written; they're grabbed up because there's an audience that's hungry for them. To be a successful writer, you not only need to be a voracious reader of good, bad, and mediocre books but also have a keen handle on what your competitors have already produced and how your book idea compares to them. Furthermore, you need to (1) identify who your target demographic is (i.e., teenagers, business owners, housewives, entrepreneurs) and (2) study what they are currently buying. If, for example, you want to write a romance novel, it's imperative that you read romance novels written by authors who have a strong following in this genre. Study the structure, the tone, the language, and the development of the characters. If you want to eventually publish your work, request submission guidelines from the publishers of these novels so that you'll have an understanding of their desired word counts, themes, and sub-genres (i.e., Gothic, YA, historic, ethnic) before you start writing. If you plan to pen a nonfiction book such as a how-to guide, cookbook, or travel tips, you need to find out the slant that previous writers have taken on these topics. To use cookbooks as an example, there's no shortage of titles on how to prepare gourmet meals. There are also titles that introduce the basics of cooking to college students who are away from home for the first time. Many of these recipes, however, are of the simplistic heat-and-eat variety. Your own approach to the subject could combine these opposite ends of the spectrum in a title called "The Student Gourmet" and feature elegant looking meals that can be prepared in very little time and within the skimpy limits of a student's budget. If you want to produce a marketable product, you need to have a clear understanding of why that product is in demand and how yours can best distinguish itself. If you're strictly writing for your own enjoyment or the enjoyment of your immediate circle of friends, you're obviously not bound by anyone else's rules of what constitutes good, bad, or even remotely commercial. The fact that you're going to spend so much time, energy and emotion doing it, however, warrants the focus and concentration of putting together something that is clear, cohesive, and will communicate your ideas, thoughts and feelings to another human being.
After you have identified your topic, your target audience and how to make your book a unique commodity, the next step is to treat your project like a job instead of a hobby. This means that you have a clear set of directives which need to be accomplished by specific deadlines and, most importantly, that you also have to show up for "work" everyday. Whether or not you decide to create a detailed outline or just start writing whatever comes into your head, it's essential that you set a schedule for yourself and maintain the discipline to stick with it no matter how many distractions throw themselves at you. Let's say that you want to have your book completed a year from today. The average length of a trade paperback novel is 320 pages. If you committed to writing only one double-spaced page per day, your book would be done by your deadline with a month and a half to spare. To tell yourself that you are going to write for "x" amount of time each day isn't as smart as defining "x" amount of output, the reason being that you could spend 55 minutes of your hour-a-day promise just staring at your computer monitor and trying to get inspired.The biggest challenge, of course, is keeping to that page-a-day promise you make to yourself. The second biggest challenge is in not trying to edit as you write; if you spend too much time trying to write your very first paragraph, you're never going to move on to the next one. Save the editing portion of the process until you're all finished. If you share your living space with other people, impress upon them that you're not to be disturbed while you're working. Identify a place in your home that will provide you with privacy and try to keep to a regular schedule. Another smart strategy is to join a critique group that will not only provide you with feedback on how you're doing but also provide the necessary support and encouragement to keep going. In addition, you might want to look into events such as National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) in which participants have 30 days to write their book and are awarded prizes for meeting their goals. Websites such as The Weekend Novelist (http://www.weekendnovelist.com/) are worth checking out, too, for the variety of writing exercises and prompts they provide to get your brain cells cooking. There is also a proliferation of writing sites where aspiring authors can post their work and get feedback from their peers. Check out: www.writersintouch.com and http://www.fanstory.com to get connected. Writing is a solitary craft and it's easy to let a project fall by the wayside if you're the only one who knows you're working on it.
Thanks to technology, there's no shortage of software programs to tweak your imagination and getting your writing projects underway. These include (1) Story Craft Pro which provides you with a virtual collaborator to help determine if your plot has legs, (2) Story Base which not only helps you construct a tale from start to finish but also works as a reverse engineering tool if you already have a conclusion in mind but have no idea how to get all of your characters there, (3) Quick Story which focuses on character archetypes, (4) Dramatica Writer's DreamKit which spins multiple outcomes based on the parameters you've set for your characters, and (5) Writer's Blocks which assist in keeping track of all your moving pieces. If you're stuck coming up with names of your players, visit websites such as Muse Names (http://www.inklinksoftware.com/musenames). Stymied on proper formatting? Try The Wizard of Words (http://www.inklinksoftware.com). And if at day's end you're just too tired to type, there are lots of voice recognition software programs such as Dragon Natural Speaking and ViaVoice that can do the job for you.