Getting the book out of the bucket

It’s a new year, and for the last week or so, people have been talking about New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists. “Write a book” seems to turn up with enormous frequency on lists like “The Top Fifty New Year’s Resolutions of 2015/16/17/18” and “100 Things You Should Have on Your Bucket List.”

I’m not really sure why this is. In some cases, there seems to be an assumption that everyone can and should write a book, because … well, just because. In other cases it seems to be more of a fantasy, like “I’d like to visit the moon some day” or “I’d like to conduct a symphony at Carnegie Hall” – something that people aren’t really committed to doing, but have a vague notion that it would be very nice if they actually happened to do it.

You can tell by the way they talk about it. “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” one lady told me last summer. “It’s on my bucket list.” She sounded as if she didn’t really care whether she wrote a book on the fine points of cement mixing or a children’s story about talking animals in space.

But cranking out enough words on a random topic to count as “a book” by most people’s standards – which is what “I want to write a book” means – is a fantasy, like “I want to play a major sport.” It leaves too much out – a team sport, or an individual one? Fiction or nonfiction?

There’s also the question of how much time playing a sport or writing a book is going to take. I think it is pretty safe to assume that nobody wants to play a sport badly, or write a terrible book, but there is a lot of territory between there and winning the PGA tour or a Pulitzer prize. And territory takes time to cover.

Most people can pick up a golf club and smack a few balls, or sit down at a keyboard and tap out a page or two of prose on their favorite subject. Getting the ball to go where you want it reliably, or getting the prose to convey what you want to someone who isn’t you…that’s another matter. There’s also the business of specific skill requirements; tennis and golf both require swinging something at a ball, but the skills involved are quite different. Similarly, writing good nonfiction is quite a bit different from writing a children’s picture book or a mystery novel.

In other words, to get “write a book” off their bucket list, the first thing a person would have to do is think about the kind of book they want to write, in gradually increasing detail. The first choice is, obviously, fiction or nonfiction? Having decided that, look at genres. Mystery or mainstream? How-to book or inspirational memoir? Nonfiction is often a better choice for people who “want to write a book” – everyone is good at something, which gives them a topic and some tips and tricks to write about. Memoir or autobiography are equally good; most folks can talk quite a lot about themselves, and preserving family stories can provide the motivation as well as the subject matter. Or one could pick a topic one finds fascinating, but doesn’t know much about, and research it until one feels competent to write about ancient Chinese boat construction or South American textiles (this may look like more work, but if one is really interested in the subject, it isn’t).

Fiction…well, most people who want to write fiction are pretty clear that they don’t just want to write a book; they want to write a particular book. Sometimes, the particulars are still a little vague, like the gentleman I met last summer who wanted to write a picture book for his grandchildren. More often, the would-be fiction writer not only has a notion of the kind of fiction they want – mystery, mainstream, science fiction, horror, Westerns – but also a general idea of what they want it to be about. For these folks, “I want to write a book” is shorthand, a way to answer the bucket list question without boring uninterested listeners with specifics like “I want to write a book about a mermaid who wants to be an astronaut.”

Once one knows what kind of book one wants to write, one gets to the next step. No, not outlining or planning – figuring out what writing process is going to work for the would-be author and for the book they want to write. Personal taste rarely enters into this equation. You may hate doing research and pre-planning, but if you want to write a decent story set in the later part of the Roman Empire, you are almost certainly going to need to do some research in advance. Similarly,  most people know that the tried-and-true daily routine of butt in chair, fingers on pen/keyboard works for the vast majority of other writers, but very few want to give it a serious try themselves, at least, not first thing.

If you have a successful process for writing other sorts of things – college papers, reports for work…anything long, really – start with that. It might not work; sometimes your fiction process is different from your nonfiction one, or your college/work-report process won’t work even though you’re trying to write nonfiction. But don’t start from the assumption that what you know works on X absolutely won’t work on Y.

In other words, test the obvious stuff first. If you have a process that works for writing other things, see if it will also work on what you want to write. If you don’t have a current process that works, start with the one that works for the most people: a daily routine of sitting down and writing.