Writing Advice:
How to Write Your First Book
Are you ready to write a book, but not sure how to get started?
When I sat down to write my first book, Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, I thought I knew. I'd been Editorial Director of a major literary publishing house in London, and I’d written lots of magazine and newspaper articles. So I was feeling pretty confident. That didn’t last more than a week.
How not to start writing your book
As a publisher, I’d read at least 100 book proposals that consisted of an outline and a few sample chapters. So I thought—like most people do who want to become authors—that I needed to “figure out” the plot and then start at the beginning.
Except I couldn't figure out where the beginning was. My first memory? No momentum. Chronologically, with my mother's story before I was born? Unfocused. In the present day? That didn't work either.
So I put the outline aside for the time being and started on the sample chapters. And I hated what I wrote. It was stiff and self-conscious and made me cringe. I felt lost and frustrated and hopeless. I thought, “I guess I’m just not a good writer.”
Have you made the mistake I made, and sat down to “write the book”? Did you find yourself thinking the thoughts I was thinking?
Some writers are gifted by the gods with the ability to just put a gripping story straight onto the page, but that isn’t the case for most of us. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver said that she has to write 300 pages before she gets to page one. Even though I’d edited hundreds of books, I didn't know how messy the writing process really is.
Tips for starting to write your book
When you first sit down, don't try to write the book. Just generate material.
When I start work on something, that's what I do: generate material. It helps if you don't even call it "writing," because when you're "writing," you probably try to write well. Now you're anxious: can I do this? You're judgmental: am I writing well? You're hypercritical. Your rational mind is in the driver's seat, and it's probably trying to make you write like what you think is good writing, which by definition was written by somebody else. So your writing doesn't sound like you. Now you've gone backward: you've lost your voice, and you need to find it. You get even more hypercritical. You suffer writer's block, because the whole thing is such an ordeal. So very often, you give up.
So, try not writing! Start by generating material.
Don’t start at the beginning. In fact, you may not even know where it is, and that’s actually a good thing. Trust that it will reveal itself—later, when you’ve got lots of material to work with. There are many good books on story structure (my favorite is John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story) that will help you. But structure is no good without fresh, original, authentic material.
How do you get your material to be fresh, original, and authentic? Don’t try to write well. Don't try to write what's in your head. Surprise yourself. Write what you don't know.
That's the title of our book, which takes you through the Imaginative Storm method: Write What You Don't Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow. I'm the poster child for this method. Above, I described the impasse I reached. So, what happened then? I'm a mule so I refused to give up and I thought, "Fine! If I can't write what I know, I'll write what I don't know."
It worked. The feared critic Lynn Barber wrote in her review of Love Child that I am "incapable of writing a dull sentence." I'm very capable of it! The Imaginative Storm method is what made that review possible.
You can read more about our method here.
Bestselling author Allegra Huston on how to do it wrong—and then do it right
Work with Us
Let the team at Imaginative Storm help you generate material to build into your first book.
Use the prompts in our book Write What You Don’t Know, or let us guide you step by step in our self-paced online course Write What You Don’t Know: Imaginative Storm Writer Training. Or work with us in person in a live workshop—and if you’d like a taste of our method before you do that, join our Prompt of the Week session any Thursday at 3 pm PT / 6 PM ET, for an hour.
Let your imagination take the lead. Put down whatever words it wants you to put down. Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing is relevant to the book or not. Often you’ll find that something you wrote for some weird reason, or no reason, becomes a central plot twist in your book! Or it gives you some idiosyncratic dialogue that illuminates a character. (I've had both those experiences.) You don’t have to know right now.
Does that sound counter-intuitive? Let June Kinoshita, a member of our Saturday writing group, prove to you that it works.
The Imaginative Storm method in action
June Kinoshita is working on a book about her Japanese family. She wrote these two pieces in 10 minutes each, inspired by prompts that have absolutely nothing to do with Japan. You can see how pieces like these will build into a vivid, powerful story.
I’ll show you the prompt we used on those two Prompt of the Week sessions, and then what June wrote.
All she wanted, all she ever needed was that love that never fades. She a mother, he her chosen child, in a gossamer embrace, a fragile foam more powerful than the destructive forces of the world. We are in this together, a family hovering, two birds in hand, refusing to drink the poison. The doves of morning gurgled softly outside her window. We are here. You must hold it together. You. You. It is all up to you and the strength of your heart. All the pain that you must endure and overcome. You hold it all in your hands.
He dreamed that he was young again, standing on the dock in Kobe, about to board a steam train. This mechanical dragon had reached these shores only twenty years earlier. He had read how Japanese scholars had carefully sketched these machines that the Americans had brought on their gunships, to impress upon the Japanese the benefits of trade and technology. In a few years, Japanese engineers had built their own steam engines and laid a thousand leagues of iron rails from Tokyo to Kobe. He boarded the train. The seats were a rich blue velvet, so soft and inviting. A stranger boarded the train, his figure concealed beneath a long black traveling cloak. He had with him a trunk. It was impossibly large, like a house, but somehow he got it onboard. The trunk shrank until it was no higher than Ben's knee. Open it, the stranger commanded, prodding the trunk with a walking stick. No, said Ben. He knew something dangerous, fateful, lay inside the trunk. He was determined not to let it out. Open it, insisted the stranger. No. No. Ben tried to speak but nothing came out of his throat. And in spite of himself, he touched the brass lock of the trunk. The lid creaked open and a plume of smoke rose out of it. Ben gazed at his hand and watched the smooth, strong hands shrink into gnarled claws, the rosy skin turn yellow, the hands of an old man.