All the Moving Parts

Happy 2023, everybody!

It’s a new year, and this is when nearly everybody (including me) takes at least a few minutes to think about what they want to get done in the coming year. “Write a book” is a perennial favorite. So I thought I’d try to break some of it down.

“Write a book” involves a lot of moving parts, many of which affect other parts. Thinking about what is needed, in what order, is like trying to untangle a large ball made of several pieces of yarn, some of which have gotten knotted together when the cat was playing with it. It can be hard to know where to start.

The moving parts include things like basic decisions (fiction/nonfiction; genre/topic), skills, and process types. The first basic decision is whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, and for most would-be writers, this isn’t even really a separate decision. They already have an idea; they don’t want to write any book, they want to write a book about antique stores or how to make smoothies, or they want to write about a librarian solving mysteries or a child living on a space station. It’s obvious whether the book they want to write is fiction or nonfiction, and very frequently, it is also obvious what genre it is.

If it isn’t obvious, though, the writer has to make a conscious and deliberate decision, because fiction and nonfiction have different basic structures and requirements (as do many genres and categories), which means how the writer approaches the rest of the moving parts is going to change, possibly a lot, depending on what they’re setting out to write. From here out, I’m going to be talking about writing fiction, because nonfiction isn’t in my wheelhouse.

Next come skills. There are a whole host of these, and nearly everybody gets some “for free” (that is, everybody is good at some aspect of writing). I’ve never met anyone who got all of them “for free,” though. At the very least, nobody shows up in the world with a natural gift for typing.

Yes, typing. Skills come in two varieties: general, and writing-specific. General skills include things like typing (because even if you are determined to compose your drafts with a quill dipping pen, the final manuscript is going to have to be typed up at some point if you want to publish it, and if you can’t type, you’ll have to pay somebody else to do it for you), time management, researching, planning, organization, and basic grammar/spelling/syntax in the language of your choice. (Also, pay attention to the ergonomics of your work area. I know multiple writers who have done a number on their hands, backs, necks, or vocal cords, in some cases resulting in serious medical bills at an early age, because they thought hunching over a keyboard or dictating for five hours straight every day was an OK thing to do.)

General skills are just as important for writers as they are for any other job. Lots of would-be writers ignore them, because they’ve bought in to the myth that writing fiction is all about “inspiration,” and as soon as they “get a good idea,” they’ll be able to sit down and type at top speed and just watch the pages pile up without needing to think too much about it. Yeah, no, sorry, doesn’t work that way. The Brilliant Words Fairy will not visit your computer every night and leave 4,000 Brilliant Words on it for you to polish up next day.

Which brings me to the second set of skills: the writing-specific ones. For fiction, this includes things like structure, dialog, characterization, idea development, action, viewpoint, style, setting, worldbuilding, etc. These are the areas people are usually thinking of when they talk about someone getting bits “for free.”

If you are planning (or just hoping) to write a novel, it is extremely useful to stop and figure out what skills you already have (what you got “for free” and what you have already learned from your life experience thus far) and what you still need to work on. This applies to both general and writing-specific skills.

Also, note that “having a skill” does not necessarily mean that whatever-it-is comes easily or automatically, or that it’s particularly fun. Struggling to write dialog that one is satisfied with, or to get into a particular character’s head, is not a symptom of “not having the skill” or “not being good at this.” The proof, as my grandmother used to say, is in the pudding—if the writer’s dialog or their characters or the action bits generally work well-to-brilliantly in the final draft, the writer has some level of skill.

Dialog/action/characters/etc. that still don’t work in the final draft indicate places where the writer’s skill level is not up to whatever they’re trying to pull off. This does not necessarily mean the writer has poor skills; it may merely mean that the writer has high ambitions and is doing something they haven’t got the chops for just yet. Either way, the solution is to acquire the skills via whatever method works best for the particular writer—classes, exercises, deliberately choosing stories that require writing whatever-it-is, complaining on the internet…whatever works.

The last category of moving parts is the writing process itself. This is more than the standard “planner vs. pantser” categorization, and is probably worth its own post, so the process part comes next week. For purposes of this post, though, the important thing is that every writer’s process is a bit different from every other writer’s, and the writer’s process will affect how and when all the other moving parts fit together. For instance, a pantser-writer who has trouble with consistency or structure will probably have to address the problem in the second or third draft, whereas a planner-writer would most likely have better luck dealing with it at the planning/prewriting stage.