Bootstrap your book

Free time and a healthy sleeping pattern is clearly something I find unbearable so I’ve started writing a book. It will try to bring together some of the various ideas mooted on Unformation over the last year or so. I’ve written and finished books before so I’m not so debilitated with fear as I might be just starting out for the first time, but the process poses questions I’ve always found difficult to answer.

What points to make? How to create a good structure? What to leave out?

When I started writing I was mostly knocking out short stories. Many people can mentally plan a 3000-word short story or an 800-word blog post without too much difficulty. I’d certainly not need more than a small bullet list to map out a decent structure.

Bloody hard work

A book of 50’000 words or more is another matter. For one thing, any book of that length is likely to be far more complex than a short piece. Self-referencing points, iterations in a plot, layers of narrative and character development; they all add nodes to an intricate network of words.

As a result, it’s less likely that your writing process will be linear. Your points may be out of logical order. You’ll probably have lots of research to process. You might be working on many sections of your work simultaneously, or out of order.

A lot of writers might find that tough to keep track of. I certainly do.

A problem

We’ve now got software packages that encourage non-linear writing and popular outlining methods such as The Snowflake Method. Here you build a skeletal outline and flesh it out with more and more detail until you have a plan, the building of which could compete with the book itself for effort required.

This scares me. It’s tempting to first plan, plan, plan and never to write. Outlining becomes just another form of procrastination. It’s worse than mere dithering because fiddling with your intentions often feels like work and so dispenses a highly addictive drug: positive reinforcement. Is it better for a writer to get their kick from thinking than writing?

But surely, the sheer difficulty of writing a book merits some sort of design? There must be a healthy balance somewhere.

I think the answer is to let the book and the plan behind it evolve without a rigid design.

In your head?

I suspect some version of an evolutionary process is churning away in the brains of most good writers, or for that matter, artists and planners too. Some people can keep it in their heads far better than other people - far better than me.

The next three posts will attempt to explain how that process works for me and how it can be applied. First, this post will explore how to bootstrap your book.

Spontaneous Generation

A story’s evolution has to begin somewhere: an idea. The idea must be recorded, but recorded in a way that equips it to evolve.

To do this, decompose the idea down to recursive elements. I find it useful to reduce an idea to a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and an object.

Take Hamlet as an example:

A young prince of Denmark (subject) takes revenge (verb) for the death of his father (object).

Now iterate on the subject, verb and object.

The young prince

Hamlet’s father is king of Denmark. When he dies, his evil uncle Claudius becomes King and marries Hamlet’s mother.

Takes revenge

Hamlet accidentally kills one of Claudius’ men, thinking him to be the king. The dead mans’s son challenges Hamlet to a duel and conspires with the King to murder Hamlet.

Death of father

Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears and tells Hamlet he was murdered by Claudius. Hamlet wants to put it to the test and arranges a play to reenact the murder and gauge Claudius’ reaction.

Taking shape

In just two iterations the idea has become richer and deeper. When writing a novel the key elements of your characters, maybe even the character’s themselves, will begin to take shape on the page.

That’s fine for fiction but it applies to non-fiction too; my book looks something like this.

An evolutionary process (subject) is behind creativity (verb) and leads to human progress (object).

The evolutionary process

Ideas have always evolved under the influence of selection pressures, the popular ideas surviving and spreading in their influence upon people’s work.

Creates creativity

Ideas reconcile in our heads, giving birth to new ideas.

Human progress

Our ideas are realised in creative output which may in turn influence other people.

By recording an initial idea like this, the core concepts of the book or story should be clearer and in a condition where they can crystalise with ease. The next post will show you to draw out these conceptual threads and weave them into a story. Stay tuned!