If you are planning to write an entire novel during the holidays, you risk being disappointed. However, a few weeks of intensive work is enough to lay a good foundation for the project. Written editor-in-chief Tobias Rangel gives you a step-by-step method that takes you over the top.
For 20 years as a magazine and book editor, I have met all kinds of writers: the barnstormers, the workhorses, the stylists, the bread writers, those who have a “case”
Everyone has their own method, and everyone succeeds differently from time to time with their reports or books. As an editor, it can be quite frustrating: “She wrote such a fantastic text last time, but this time it does not really lift.”
“When does it work best?” I asked myself recently. “Is there a pattern?” And yes, it does, I quickly realized. The all-encompassing magazine editions we have made, all books that have reached and delighted many readers, have been based on the right combination of creativity and control, of imagination and diligence, of free-flying ideas and careful implementation.
Your ideas need a framework and a plan. But the frame should leave room for the whims that come along the way. This is the dualism you should build into your book project. On top of that, you get variety in your writing life.
For me, it is also the opposites that make writing and books so exciting. You start with a blank piece of paper, all paths are open, and all seeds of thought are waiting to grow. And then at the other end: the last semicolon to be retained or removed. First you have to be receptive; humbly and unconditionally take in both the outside world and your own thoughts. Then you have to build a kind of hubris: “This is my story. This is exactly how it is. «
THE METHOD NEXT TO THIS is adapted to another kind of dualism. Almost all professional writers, and an even larger proportion of aspiring writers, cannot work on their book full time. Therefore, it is good to create a routine where you can work hard concentrated for a couple of weeks and then work more sporadically for a longer period – and then do another sprint. And so on until you reach the finish line.
All books start with one idea. If the idea is good, it grows – and in the end it is so big that it does not fit in your head. This is when you should write down the intended content chapter by chapter, preferably by hand on spacious A3 paper.
The most important thing is to try to formulate where each chapter begins and ends, this way you get handy “stops” that give you the opportunity to break down your big project into manageable parts. Chapters 12–18 are usually a good benchmark for a normal-length book – you get a good overview of your writing process and the reader gets reasonably large pieces to put into it. Try to be as specific as possible with chapter start and end. In what position are the plot and the people when the chapter ends? Do you want to stop with a cliffhanger or by putting an end to a process or a subject? (A good idea is to let some chapters “close” part of the plot, while other chapters attract further.) Will there be a good transition to the next chapter?
Try to write the very first and very last sentence of each chapter verbatim on your A3. The majority of the sentences will of course change before the book is finished, it is the stop itself that is important. Also keep in mind that starts and ends land with extra weight in the reader’s memory. If you want to introduce a new important character, chapter starts are a good place. If you want to highlight an important thought or dialogue – put it at the end of the chapter.
Other events, environments and people that you want to place in each chapter, you can in this mode throw down on the paper quite unsorted. Some A3 will be much scrawled, others almost empty. That’s all right. A book is based on an idea, but it is built from hundreds of smaller chips of ideas. Not all of these can be in your head from the beginning.
Does starting a book project with a plan like this seem deadly? Instead, think of these as actions that you must take on a regular basis. For most writers, this part of the process is actually very pleasurable. One senses which tracks are worth following and which characters are growing and want to penetrate more and more chapters.
In working on your plan, you are guaranteed to discover which parts of the book feel light and pleasurable, and which are more obscure. You have probably also noticed which ingredients are closest at hand just for you. Are the people clear but the environments diffuse? Do you have a manageable document but a lack of facts and details – or vice versa?
Take the time to refill with research and inspiration where needed. Listen, both outwards and inwards. How do people talk on the bus or on the beach? What do the environments you want to use in the book look like – and what do they smell and sound like? Which parts of those environments usually pass unnoticed – are these the ones you should include in your book? Which parts require concrete facts at all and where can you find them? Do you need to interview people with special skills?
And on an internal level – what is the basic driving force for your book project? To tell a good story? To formulate your worldview for the outside world? Glory and fame?
Let your thoughts and your tone creep closer.
Make sure you know a lot more than what you use for the central parts of your book. You can google the environments for your main character’s business trip to Moscow if it concerns two pages, but the environments that are most important you must know and really feel.
Fill in the master plan that you have already started.
Also build your own writing environment. Which books and sites will you want to use often, for research or inspiration? Keep these close at hand and put the rest a bit away, mentally and preferably also physically. It gives you another much-needed delimitation, you reduce the risk of “drifting away” in your research or your writing.
I have almost never seen a good book – or even a reportage – created by someone who “just started writing” without thinking through what to do. But there is a risk of delaying too long as well. As long as everything is plans and research, you can still write the best book in literary history. (As Charles Bukowski put it: “It’s just a matter of pressing the keys in the right order.”
Therefore: now write three chapters with the support of your plan!
Before you start, you can choose whether you want to deepen your master plan for the first three chapters, or work more intuitively at this level. Compare with a house building. You do not want to start building the house without drawing, do not let the carpenter build room by room on feel and inspiration. But if you have a well-built house with well-thought-out room layout, there is nothing to stop you from trying different furnishings.
Leave your planning self and let the text flow. Follow the lust and whim, and write longer than you thought if you think it flows on – clear up later. If you are missing a factual statement or get stuck in an event, mark with XXX and move on. This way you avoid constant interruptions and can instead look up the X-are problems when you have written the three chapters.
And why exactly three chapters? Well, the amount of text makes up maybe 15-20 percent of the imagined book, which is enough to see what flies and what may need to be rethought. Does perspective and tempus work? Has the story begun to find its focus? Have we become interested in the main characters? Also keep an eye on the text length. If three chapters according to your plan are 20 percent of the book and they are only added to 10,000 characters, you may have a good text in progress. But hardly anything that can be called a novel. You can also consult Nonfiction Ghostwriting for your book writing project.
It sounds early, and is ultimately handled by the publisher if you have or get one, but the task forces you to formulate your main tracks and the content of the book. You have already sketched the book’s plot and three chapters have already been written – but what is the book’s theme? Maybe the book also holds a purpose?
By formulating the back text (approximately 1,000 characters, as interesting as possible), you get a clearer picture of which events, environments and thoughts you should prioritize. If you then halfway into the writing process notice that your script no longer reflects the back cover text, you should stop. Has the story moved in a direction you had not really imagined? Or have you improved the idea along the way – so that it is the back text that needs to be changed? In that case, take the time to formulate a new one. Does the new one feel more attractive than the previous one?
Another way to formulate which book you are working on: imaginatively move to TV4’s morning couch. The interview with you should fill the three minutes between 07.37 and 07.40. The host asks what kind of book you have written. What is your core answer?
According to the survey, was able to answer this spring, 80 percent of you let someone else read the script along the way. Now is a good time. With your plan and your three chapters, you are so stable that outside views do not overturn your project. The best – whether it’s an editor, a classmate or a friend – is to get collective feedback on a few occasions, rather than small splashes of opinion at different times.
Give one or a couple of people your three chapters, preferably together with some questions you want answered, or areas that the reader should look extra closely at. Do not tell too much about the contents of the book and your thoughts before handing over the stack of paper. The reader must face the text like a real reader, without oral explanations and reservations. When you then receive the comments, make sure not to end up in a defensive position. Free yourself from the text: see it as a baby that lies between you, and that you both wish for the best.
Also, do not now explain ambiguities orally to your reader, focus on how the text can be made clearer and better. Remember that what feels obvious to you as a writer, in the inner book world that you stay in for several hours a day, is often not obvious to a reader.
Change in the three chapters based on the feedback you want to receive (the final plaster you can wait with). Fill the plan with new thoughts that have flowed up in the process. Also make consequential changes to the plan based on the finished form that the first three chapters have now taken. Again: the plan does not exist for its own sake, but to give your work a direction and relieve your brain. You want to use working memory for creative creation.
Now, through a few weeks of intensive work, you have laid a solid foundation for your book.
But a normal week, you may only have the opportunity to set aside an evening in the middle of the week and a half day on the weekend. Therefore, give yourself a reasonable syllabus – it is more fun to succeed week after week than to feel that you have not done what you set out to do. Also, think about what you do best when. Two half-tired hours on a weekday evening may be best suited for research, additions and replenishment of your master plan. And then you place the new writing to four uninterrupted hours every Sunday morning.
If you have set your sights on a normal-length book, 5,000-6,000 new characters a week will be enough for you to be able to sign up for a goal in about a year. Do you have the opportunity to add some new full-time weeks somewhere along the way – excellent? And in the final phase, you should definitely rake in three to four weeks when you can work concentrated on the book. Then you should marinate yourself in the content of the finished script and grasp the whole book in one context. Complete, change and polish.
But that is a later question. Right now, you should not have a more ambitious goal than to take the book from dream and idea to something that really exists and is underway.
Good luck!
For 20 years as a magazine and book editor, I have met all kinds of writers: the barnstormers, the workhorses, the stylists, the bread writers, those who have a “case”
Everyone has their own method, and everyone succeeds differently from time to time with their reports or books. As an editor, it can be quite frustrating: “She wrote such a fantastic text last time, but this time it does not really lift.”
“When does it work best?” I asked myself recently. “Is there a pattern?” And yes, it does, I quickly realized. The all-encompassing magazine editions we have made, all books that have reached and delighted many readers, have been based on the right combination of creativity and control, of imagination and diligence, of free-flying ideas and careful implementation.
Your ideas need a framework and a plan. But the frame should leave room for the whims that come along the way. This is the dualism you should build into your book project. On top of that, you get variety in your writing life.
For me, it is also the opposites that make writing and books so exciting. You start with a blank piece of paper, all paths are open, and all seeds of thought are waiting to grow. And then at the other end: the last semicolon to be retained or removed. First you have to be receptive; humbly and unconditionally take in both the outside world and your own thoughts. Then you have to build a kind of hubris: “This is my story. This is exactly how it is. «
THE METHOD NEXT TO THIS is adapted to another kind of dualism. Almost all professional writers, and an even larger proportion of aspiring writers, cannot work on their book full time. Therefore, it is good to create a routine where you can work hard concentrated for a couple of weeks and then work more sporadically for a longer period – and then do another sprint. And so on until you reach the finish line.
All books start with one idea. If the idea is good, it grows – and in the end it is so big that it does not fit in your head. This is when you should write down the intended content chapter by chapter, preferably by hand on spacious A3 paper.
The most important thing is to try to formulate where each chapter begins and ends, this way you get handy “stops” that give you the opportunity to break down your big project into manageable parts. Chapters 12–18 are usually a good benchmark for a normal-length book – you get a good overview of your writing process and the reader gets reasonably large pieces to put into it. Try to be as specific as possible with chapter start and end. In what position are the plot and the people when the chapter ends? Do you want to stop with a cliffhanger or by putting an end to a process or a subject? (A good idea is to let some chapters “close” part of the plot, while other chapters attract further.) Will there be a good transition to the next chapter?
Try to write the very first and very last sentence of each chapter verbatim on your A3. The majority of the sentences will of course change before the book is finished, it is the stop itself that is important. Also keep in mind that starts and ends land with extra weight in the reader’s memory. If you want to introduce a new important character, chapter starts are a good place. If you want to highlight an important thought or dialogue – put it at the end of the chapter.
Other events, environments and people that you want to place in each chapter, you can in this mode throw down on the paper quite unsorted. Some A3 will be much scrawled, others almost empty. That’s all right. A book is based on an idea, but it is built from hundreds of smaller chips of ideas. Not all of these can be in your head from the beginning.
Does starting a book project with a plan like this seem deadly? Instead, think of these as actions that you must take on a regular basis. For most writers, this part of the process is actually very pleasurable. One senses which tracks are worth following and which characters are growing and want to penetrate more and more chapters.
In working on your plan, you are guaranteed to discover which parts of the book feel light and pleasurable, and which are more obscure. You have probably also noticed which ingredients are closest at hand just for you. Are the people clear but the environments diffuse? Do you have a manageable document but a lack of facts and details – or vice versa?
Take the time to refill with research and inspiration where needed. Listen, both outwards and inwards. How do people talk on the bus or on the beach? What do the environments you want to use in the book look like – and what do they smell and sound like? Which parts of those environments usually pass unnoticed – are these the ones you should include in your book? Which parts require concrete facts at all and where can you find them? Do you need to interview people with special skills?
And on an internal level – what is the basic driving force for your book project? To tell a good story? To formulate your worldview for the outside world? Glory and fame?
Let your thoughts and your tone creep closer.
Make sure you know a lot more than what you use for the central parts of your book. You can google the environments for your main character’s business trip to Moscow if it concerns two pages, but the environments that are most important you must know and really feel.
Fill in the master plan that you have already started.
Also build your own writing environment. Which books and sites will you want to use often, for research or inspiration? Keep these close at hand and put the rest a bit away, mentally and preferably also physically. It gives you another much-needed delimitation, you reduce the risk of “drifting away” in your research or your writing.
I have almost never seen a good book – or even a reportage – created by someone who “just started writing” without thinking through what to do. But there is a risk of delaying too long as well. As long as everything is plans and research, you can still write the best book in literary history. (As Charles Bukowski put it: “It’s just a matter of pressing the keys in the right order.”
Therefore: now write three chapters with the support of your plan!
Before you start, you can choose whether you want to deepen your master plan for the first three chapters, or work more intuitively at this level. Compare with a house building. You do not want to start building the house without drawing, do not let the carpenter build room by room on feel and inspiration. But if you have a well-built house with well-thought-out room layout, there is nothing to stop you from trying different furnishings.
Leave your planning self and let the text flow. Follow the lust and whim, and write longer than you thought if you think it flows on – clear up later. If you are missing a factual statement or get stuck in an event, mark with XXX and move on. This way you avoid constant interruptions and can instead look up the X-are problems when you have written the three chapters.
And why exactly three chapters? Well, the amount of text makes up maybe 15-20 percent of the imagined book, which is enough to see what flies and what may need to be rethought. Does perspective and tempus work? Has the story begun to find its focus? Have we become interested in the main characters? Also keep an eye on the text length. If three chapters according to your plan are 20 percent of the book and they are only added to 10,000 characters, you may have a good text in progress. But hardly anything that can be called a novel.
It sounds early, and is ultimately handled by the publisher if you have or get one, but the task forces you to formulate your main tracks and the content of the book. You have already sketched the book’s plot and three chapters have already been written – but what is the book’s theme? Maybe the book also holds a purpose?
By formulating the back text (approximately 1,000 characters, as interesting as possible), you get a clearer picture of which events, environments and thoughts you should prioritize. If you then halfway into the writing process notice that your script no longer reflects the back cover text, you should stop. Has the story moved in a direction you had not really imagined? Or have you improved the idea along the way – so that it is the back text that needs to be changed? In that case, take the time to formulate a new one. Does the new one feel more attractive than the previous one?
Another way to formulate which book you are working on: imaginatively move to TV4’s morning couch. The interview with you should fill the three minutes between 07.37 and 07.40. The host asks what kind of book you have written. What is your core answer?
According to the survey, was able to answer this spring, 80 percent of you let someone else read the script along the way. Now is a good time. With your plan and your three chapters, you are so stable that outside views do not overturn your project. The best – whether it’s an editor, a classmate or a friend – is to get collective feedback on a few occasions, rather than small splashes of opinion at different times.
Give one or a couple of people your three chapters, preferably together with some questions you want answered, or areas that the reader should look extra closely at. Do not tell too much about the contents of the book and your thoughts before handing over the stack of paper. The reader must face the text like a real reader, without oral explanations and reservations. When you then receive the comments, make sure not to end up in a defensive position. Free yourself from the text: see it as a baby that lies between you, and that you both wish for the best.
Also, do not now explain ambiguities orally to your reader, focus on how the text can be made clearer and better. Remember that what feels obvious to you as a writer, in the inner book world that you stay in for several hours a day, is often not obvious to a reader.
Change in the three chapters based on the feedback you want to receive (the final plaster you can wait with). Fill the plan with new thoughts that have flowed up in the process. Also make consequential changes to the plan based on the finished form that the first three chapters have now taken. Again: the plan does not exist for its own sake, but to give your work a direction and relieve your brain. You want to use working memory for creative creation.
Now, through a few weeks of intensive work, you have laid a solid foundation for your book.
But a normal week, you may only have the opportunity to set aside an evening in the middle of the week and a half day on the weekend. Therefore, give yourself a reasonable syllabus – it is more fun to succeed week after week than to feel that you have not done what you set out to do. Also, think about what you do best when. Two half-tired hours on a weekday evening may be best suited for research, additions and replenishment of your master plan. And then you place the new writing to four uninterrupted hours every Sunday morning.
If you have set your sights on a normal-length book, 5,000-6,000 new characters a week will be enough for you to be able to sign up for a goal in about a year. Do you have the opportunity to add some new full-time weeks somewhere along the way – excellent? And in the final phase, you should definitely rake in three to four weeks when you can work concentrated on the book. Then you should marinate yourself in the content of the finished script and grasp the whole book in one context. Complete, change and polish.
But that is a later question. Right now, you should not have a more ambitious goal than to take the book from dream and idea to something that really exists and is underway.
Good luck!
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