by Brian Klems (@BrianKlems)
When writing my book,
Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters,
I ran into a lot of roadblocks. I’d like to place the blame elsewhere,
but the truth is, they were my fault (Okay, I’ll place part of the blame
on TBS for airing all those reruns of “Scrubs” — seriously, I just
can’t get enough of that show).
Most of the roadblocks, though, were
from
avoidable mistakes I made during the writing process. Thankfully, now I know better.
To help you out, I’ve pulled together the
five things you shouldn’t do when writing a book. These are tips that I wish someone else would have told me before I started writing
Oh Boy. To save you a lot of time, do not:
1. Tell Anyone The Plot of Your Book
When you’re writing a book, occasionally someone — like a family
member, friend or that loaded guy sitting next to you at the bar — will
con you into talking about your book while you’re writing it. Wrong
move. They will offer unsolicited pieces of advice like, “You should
name your main character Booger.”
While most are honestly trying to be helpful, the majority of them — who have never written a book — will
likely be offering bad advice. Best to stay hush-hush about it until it’s finished and you can have it edited or work-shopped by other writers.
2. Get Attached to Any Part of Your Book
As
writers, we often fall in love with our own writing and plot points.
This happens to me all the time. I write an awesome first paragraph and
continue writing a chapter. As I go along, it’s clear that the chapter
has taken a decidedly different turn and that first paragraph doesn’t
quite fit. But I love that first paragraph. So I spend countless hours
rewriting the rest of the chapter, even though deep down I know the only
real solution is to cut that first graph.
It’s brutally painful, but
not cutting it is a mistake rookie writers make. And if you want to publish your book, you’ll cut anything that doesn’t quite fit — even if it’s a part you love. [
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3. Set Unreasonable Goals
I believe in goals, so no matter what you are writing — a novel, nonfiction book, memoir, poetry chapbook, an article on
how to write a blog (which I did) — you need to set some. That being said,
don’t set goals that are nearly impossible to reach.
Unreasonable goals will only cause you to get mad at yourself and will,
in fact, slow your process down rather than speed it up — after all, if
you feel like you’re letting yourself down, you’ll be less motivated to
write.
I like to
set time goals as opposed to word-count goals. For example, if you only have 30 minutes a day to write, just
sit down and write as many words as you can
in that 30 minutes. Some days you may only walk away with a couple
hundred. Others you may knock out a thousand or two. But if you walk
away with any words, you’ll feel more confident knowing you worked as
hard as you could that day to get that many words out.
And eventually,
they will add up.
4. Only Save Your Book in One Place
Like every writer, I have a very love-hate relationship with
computers — as in, I love them when they are helping me work more
efficiently and I hate them when … well … nearly all the rest of the
time. It’s not intuitive to me to continually hit “save” when writing,
especially when I’m in the zone. So
when I forget to save
(which happens all the time) and my computer crashes (which seems to
happen every time I’m finally satisfied with my work), I lose
everything.
I finally started
writing using Google Docs, where
it not only automatically saves your work but it saves it online, so you
can access it from any computer you want. After writing the first few
chapters of
Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl in
Word and losing nearly 50% of my writing, I fell in love with Google
Docs because they took away the unnecessary stress of worrying about my
computer crashing. Now my computer could reboot all it wanted and I’d
still have all those wonderful words I worked so hard to write.
5. Take the Fun Out of Writing
Too often writing a book turns into a chore. That can happen for many
reasons — stressed over a self-imposed deadline, trouble defining a
character, dealing with writer’s block,
afraid that the book just isn’t good enough so far, etc.
I once got stuck on one sentence —
one sentence – because
I didn’t think it was “funny enough” and used it as an excuse to stop
writing for days. That’s a true story.
And now, looking back, I see how
absurd that is.
The important thing to do is forget all of that — all the worries and stresses and self-induced headaches. Just focus on the
reason you wanted to write a book in the first place:
Because you’re a storyteller and you have a story to tell. Remind
yourself of that every day and you’ll have fewer roadblocks to finishing
your book.
What mistakes have you made — and learned from — when writing a book?
Brian A. Klems is the online editor for Writer’s Digest magazine and author of Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters (Adams 2013).
He’s also the editor of
The Writer’s Dig and hosts the popular parenting blog,
TheLifeOfDad.com.
You can follow him on Twitter
@BrianKlems.
As
humans, we all struggle at times to stay excited about certain tasks at
hand. We get bored; we get frustrated; we get distracted (ooh, 
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