Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to my writing studio
again in Brooklyn, New York. It's been awhile, a few years. I'm so happy that you're back. And if you're new
to this writers toolkits that series and
welcome to the family. I put this class together
from my experience of writing 15 books and also from traveling as an
author of a book tours, conferences, events, and
being that annoying person who follows authors into
the elevator and says, Yeah, What did you
have for breakfast? You know what pencils to use? You have to have a special
pillow before you write your finding out like what is, what makes other writers so
successful, so prolific? So everything you're
going to learn in this class is not just
what I've learned, but it's what I've learned from other writers that I talked to. I'm really excited about
this second class because it follows on from
writers toolkit one, which was the six
steps of becoming a writer and establishing
a writing practice. This new lesson is going
to help you achieve two really important
milestone in your writing. And the first is finding
your voice is like, Who are you on the page
as opposed to in mind? Because remember
when you write your sharing a part of yourself, that you're not sharing
ordinary world. So the second thing we're
going to talk about is avoiding six big
mistakes that often, or first book, you want
to spend years writing your first book for it not to work because of certain
structural things. Which if you've watched
this Skillshare class, you will know not to do. So these two skills, finding your voice and
avoiding six big mistakes, they are vital, I believe, to your success as an author artistically
and can commercially. I've designed the class so that there's really
nothing to remember. There's no memorization. Once you watch the video
and you grasp the concepts, then you'll have the
skills for life.
2. Class Overview: In this class, the
first part is going to be where we talk about voice. So I'm going to
show you a way to reveal your voice as a writer. And if you feel like you've
already found your voice, then we're going to use an
exercise to enhance that. There's gonna be four things. The first is finding your voice. The second is the
20 book exercise, which you'll find under
the Projects tab. Number three is developing your voice number for giving
up anxiety and judgment. The second part of the
class will be avoiding those six big mistakes we talked about that
can sink a book. And those are six tips and the first one is
eliminate backstory. Tip two is stay on
the surface of the present and flashback
versus backstory. Tip three, open with
unresolved conflict. Tip for show. Don't tell. Tip five, trim your sentences and tip six, think drafts, not book.
3. Class Project: 30 years ago, when I really
decided to become a writer, I wrote two books over
a couple of years, and I put everything
I had into them. I mean, I labored
for hours and hours, hundreds of hours,
maybe thousands. Then finally, I talked to
an editor and she said, Yeah, you know,
these aren't bad, but I don't think you've
found your voice yet. And I was like, voice, like, what do you mean? She said, Well, every writer has a unique voice and I don't
think you've found yours. And I thought, well,
somebody could have told me that at the beginning then
I've got to find my voice. So what we're doing now is so you can avoid that same
pain that I went through. Why is it important to have your voice as a
writer on the page? Well, a lot of music books are. The problem with it, is
that it's not bad quality, but it's derivative
of something else. Like a lot of singer-songwriters
sound like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell who bought
Delano, Tracy Chapman. It's that unique sound that
only you can recreate, that only you can create. That's what we're looking for. So I'm gonna give
you an example now of some writers voices. First book is seven
steeples by soluble. Pip chased the white cat. Pip chased the black cat. The cat's changed
color as they ran. Their patterns blurred
and reconfigured. Unlimited and
renewed, transformed, becoming brown striped as they
streaked through brambles, flickering into green as
brambles met bracket. Sometimes the cats happened upon small Hawthorne's elders, willows and Claude their
way up to the highest, thicker branches and pit, halted at the bottom and poured the Earth wind and jumped. She flowered into the canopy
until hours have passed. Until night was starting, until she had forgotten what
she was doing there beneath the Hawthorne or elder or
willow in the half dark. So the second book or read from now is Buddy
by Nigel Henderson. One of my, one of the first folks that
got me into writing. Buddy stole money from his mother's purse just
before he left for school. His mother was in the kitchen clearing up the
breakfast things, and his father was still in bed. He tip toed into the front room and slip the purse
out of her handbag. He clicked it open and
took out a £5 note. A wave of disgust
swept through him. Two weeks ago, he'd vowed to himself that he was going
to stop shoplifting. And here he was stealing
from his own mother. He hadn't done that since
he was a little kid. And it's sometimes nicht
the odd temperance, he was turning
into a real thief. And the final example
is from Chico, the Obamas orchestra
of minorities, which is another of
my favorite books. Insects dashed against the
windshield and burst like miniature fruits
until the glass was covered with small MCS
of liquefied insects. Twice, he had to stop and
wipe the mess off with a rag. But soon after he began again, the insects would rage against the pain with renewed force. But the time he arrived
at the boundary of omega, the day had aged. And the lettering
on the rusting pole with the welcome to Albia, God's own state sign
was barely visible. His stomach could become taut from having got a whole
day without eating. The three books. You just heard me read from our three of
my favorite books. But you can tell that the
author has a unique voice, even if they're writing
about a different things, the voice is very, very similar. In each book, each of
the authors books. So when you get
one of those books through your mailbox
as a first manuscript, you start reading it. You know, an agent or an editor
will quickly realize this is very different from anything
else that's out there. Now because your very different, your unique as a person. The key here is to find
your unique voice. 20 book project, which is in the project section of this
class, is really vital. And if you feel like you have some sense of
what your voice is, this exercise will help
you develop it more. Now, I actually still do this exercise if I haven't
been writing for a while, if I'd been on a book
tour or something, I will find a book. Maybe. I don't know the age of innocence by Edith Wharton. I couldn't get
into that. If it's a favorite book, I'm sorry. I couldn't get into it. Maybe
next year I'll try again. But the last book I first page
I re-wrote was that book. So I rewrote it into
what I thought was good. Even though it's great, writers won't mind if you do this exercise. Most
of them are dead. So don't worry, just do it
and you'll find your horse.
4. Developing Your Voice: So hopefully you've paused and you've done the exercise
in the project section, and you've got those 20 pages to compare which any similarity is, is basically revealing your
authorial fingerprint. Now, you might be wondering, will my voice change? In my experience as an
editor, as an author, your voice will not change, but your style will change. What I mean by that is, when you're in high-school, you might be Goff and punk, But that's, but that's
not your voice. Your voice is, you want
to dress in a way that reflects counter-culture
or disaffected youth. That will, that idea
will stay the same, but you'll change clothes, you'll, you'll develop,
you'll evolve. So to give you an example
of that in writing, Here's a book by one
of my favorites. Me between them is one
of my favorite writers, Billy Ocala, and this
book is for about 2008. In this book is from 2022, there's about 1415 years apart. Now the voice is the same. I mean, I know from reading these that this is
video Callahan, but the style has evolved. And that comes with
experience and just writing over many years. Now, if I show you an
example of this in art, we go, Vincent Van Gough, one of my favorite painters. Now this was, this
was painted in 1885. Now it doesn't, it doesn't
look like what you consider Van Gough to be. Now, if we look at a lake, we looked at a later work here. You see the style
is very different. The style has evolved because
he's evolved as a painter. But the voice, the idea of human loneliness and
isolation that's still there. That's part of who he was.
5. Releasing Anxiety & Judgement: It's really important
when you are developing your voice on the
page that you really give up worrying what people
are gonna think mean if your voice is very intense and there's
lots of curse word, that's perfectly fine
because you're revealing part of yourself on
the page that you ordinarily don't
share with the world. When we speak, we use
words and conversations, but when we write, we're using words in a slightly
different way. The other way that people who go to church or
temple or mosque, they will use wine like juices, fluids to symbolize something. But you can buy that maybe in a supermarket,
but it's different. The significance is different because the context
is different. So anyway, when you're
developing your voice, you absolutely have to give up anxiety and fear
about being judged. Because when you feel
judged, you're not free. And you have to feel free in order to be able
to write well. In fact, the
imagination is one of the only places in the
world where we can be free. So the key here is just be true to yourself and everything
will fall into place. Anxiety is a big problem that is creatively
inhibited as well. But there's a cure
for writers worry. And that is action. When you're writing, when I
find writers at their desks, they're not worried
about anything. They're busy with
their characters, the deep into the plot. So they're not anxious about, Oh, is this good enough? Am I going to fail
all that kinda stuff? If you're if you're
sitting in front of the work and you're not writing, it's easy to become upset because as a writer you're
going to spend most of the time with total chaos and you're not
going to feel good about it. Okay? It's in the very last stages that the project comes together. You feel like, wow,
yeah, this is good. There'll be moments
of inspiration. But most of the time
you're going to feel like you're failing. That's
the same for me. I mean, Ninety-nine
percent of my day is dealing with a complete mess on the page that I've created. And I'm trying to fix. Another way to get
rid of anxiety is to surround yourself with things that make you feel
like a writer, your personal things to you. There could be a
book of paintings, it could be music, it could be a sculpture. It could be photographs. Anything really that gets you
out of your frame of mind, your fear frame of mind. So you might be wondering, are there some things that
I keep around to stay inspired and to not feel anxious because I do
feel anxious and I do worry. But I can't really work well
when I'm in that mindset. So I keep my the ashes of my, my late first mouse Teiresias. If you'd met him, you would have had a very
different view of mice. You'd have loved, loved
them as much as I do. I keep pictures of Samuel Beckett and extra points
if you know who this is. Solute, vague Vichtenstein. And I also, this is one of
my absolute favorite books. And it's a first edition
of four quartets by, by TSL yet, so I keep
these things very close. Well, I'm feeling like, Oh, it's not going well, this book is going
to be a failure. I think to myself,
well, you know, these things, this is
like food for creativity.
6. Tip 1: Eliminate Backstory : Now we've talked about voice. Let's go over and now the
six big mistakes that often new writers make and that can sink their first books. The first one is to
eliminate backstory. Backstory in the opening section of a novel or a memoir
kills the pasting. Now, new writers are often a
worried that a reader won't care about what's
happening if they don't know what
the backstory is. And that's anxiety about, well, people like this will
people keep reading. But the truth, the
truth is thankfully, that we don't need backstory. If you come across a car accident, It's
immediately compelling. You know, everybody looks. You don't think, oh,
I don't know who's in it and I don't know
how it was caused. So I'm really not interested
in seeing that car on fire. One doesn't have to know
what caused a car accident to be gripped by the
sudden drama of it, right? So to begin in the
moment like that, not in the past is really crucial to the
opening of any book. Dialogue often
indicates that a book is not using backstory. Backstory implies
that the narrator has learned everything
already in his summarizing. So that feels passive
for the reader. Now I'm going to give you
an example of a backstory. And this is a book by HE Bates is one of
my favorite writers. But remember there's no
perfection in any art form. You make compromises
and you do your best. Nothing is ever perfect, but you do get your
book to a point where it is good enough
to be published. The town had grown swiftly
from a long stone street, 800 people and an open book in 1820 to a place a
50 Boot factories, ten chapels, staunch liberalism, and 10 thousand people in 1800s. And to a town of rho Tyrion
and Masonic circles. Many gleaming fish
and chip shops and a public library
of golf clubs and evening classes of
amateur operatic on winter evenings and
sacred concepts on Sunday afternoons in 1929, long rows of bright red brick of houses roofed with slate, shining like Blue Steel
and rapidly eaten their way beyond
the shabby confines of what had been a village. Beyond new railway
tracks and gas works. Obliterating pleasant outline
farms and hedge rows of Hawthorne and wild rose to stop only where the river
valley took it too steep, dip, too wide, flat meadows that were crowned in turn by
the iron ore furnaces. I could see flaring at night
along the eschaton beyond. Currently in a few generations
of valley side had been C, It's good writing, but it's
backstory and it feels like, okay, you know, we've been
told this would be lectured. And that's not great to
start a book with that. The second example,
we're going back to body by Nigel Hinton. Now let's compare. This is not backstory. Buddy stole the money from his mother's purse just
before he left for school. His mother was in the kitchen clearing up the
breakfast things, and his father was still in bed. He tip toed into the front room and slip the
purse out of her handbag. He clicked it open and
took out a £5 note. A wave of disgust
swept through him. Only two weeks ago, he'd found himself who's
going to stop shoplifting. And here he was stealing
from his own mother. He hadn't done that since
he was a little kid. And it's sometimes niche,
the odd temperance, it was turning
into a real thief. There must be something
the matter with him. First to shoplifting. He done it a couple of times with some other
boys from school. They had stopped, but he'd
gone on doing it alone. Now this you can see this is like the action
is happening right now. We don't know where
bodies living, we don't know how old he is, but there's actually stealing
from his mother's handbag. And it's just much more
interesting because it's active. Backstory is passive. So it's really important
that you eliminate backstory from the opening
pages of your book.
7. Tip 2: Write in the Present: So here in Tip two, we're going to talk about the
alternative to backstory. And Vladimir Nabokov,
who you might know as the author of Pale
Fire, Ada Lolita. Now book offset that the author, like mortals belongs on the
surface of the present, not in the ooze of the past. As an alternative to backstory. We're going to start
in the action. That's how novels and then
was really should start. This doesn't mean writing
in the present tense, because most books are in
the simple past tense. But it's a way where the writer feels that something is
happening, like it's immediate. Dialogue helps with
this because it's often spoken in
the present tense. So I'm gonna give you an
example of books that start on what no bulk of
calls on the surface of the present and
not with backstory. So this is by chaining
quark passenger. Great book. This is how it begins as the
cruise ship almost tipped over the horizon that
once bisected my lovely balcony door rises like a
theatre cook disappears. Now the C is the stage. I tumble off my bed onto the floor and roll
like a stunt man. For now the ship has
yet to fully flop. It feels like we're
getting pretty close. Lucky us. The modern ocean liner is an
engineering marvel equipped with technologies in sharing that it always stays up, right? We've been rolling
dangerously during a nasty storm, but recover, enlist upright after
each pounding wave threatens to capsize us. People's screams
pierce my cabin walls louder at times than the clog. A broken kitchen
equipment above. Water glasses fling themselves against my cabin door
as if possessed. Code echo. Echo, code echo. A man's voice crackles
over the PA system. So we don't know why this
person is on a cruise. We don't know where
they're cruising. All we know is that there's a bad storm and we don't
know what's going to happen. So it's told in the past tense, I think remember, but
it's happening right now. And that's what the bulk of meant by being on the
surface of the present. A lot of writers worried
that if they don't have the backstory of why this
person's on the cruise, the reader won't care,
but it's not true. If you start with action, you will immediately
pull your reader in. Another example is not
as physically exciting, is from a book by Ken hereof
called ourselves at night, which actually became,
became a film. Then there was the
day when adding more made a call
on Louis waters. It was an evening in May, just before full dark. They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the
oldest part of town, with elm trees and hack Barry and a single
NAPL grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk
to the two-story houses. It had been warming the day, but it had turned cool
now in the evening, she went along the
sidewalk under the trees and turned
in Lewis his house. When Lewis came to the door, she said, Could I come in and talk to
you about something? They sat down in
the living room. Can I get you something
to drink some tea? No, thank you. I might not be here long
enough to drink it. She looked around. Your house. Looks nice. So what does she
want to ask him? What is she going to ask
where she might not be? Be in-house long enough
to have a cup of tea. So it's happening right now. She's gone over to his house. We don't know who they are.
We don't know where they are. We know nothing. All we see is action and
things, things happening. So that's what I meant by staying on the surface of the present and that's
where you should be, at least in the opening
102030 pages of your book. Now, backstory versus
flashback, that's important. Backstory is passive and
it's what we talked about. Flashback, however, is
going back in time, but it's told on the
surface of the present. So flashback has dialogue. It's like it's happening
right now and that's fine. Flashbacks are okay. But the problem is when you're flashbacks are more
interesting than what's happening on the surface of the present in the main
part of the story. So you have to minimize flashbacks so that they serve what's happening on
the surface of the present, not so they compete with it. Often you might be a
really good writer, but you'll flashbacks
are competing with the action happening on
the main storyline, okay? So flashbacks are okay. There will be some
backstory in a later draft, maybe 20% backstory, maybe 80 per cent
surface of the present. But you really want to keep it minimal because the main
story should be told. On the surface.
8. Tip 3: Open with Conflict: So now let's talk
about Tip three. And that's opening your book
with unresolved conflicts. Some editors say, this
is like you're making a promise to the reader
that if they keep reading, they'll find out what's
going to happen. But I like to think
of it as like unresolved conflict
because we want to, the reader wants,
their curiosity is piqued that they're gonna
get pulled into the book. The first time I
discovered this, this tip was actually the
first story I got published. And there wasn't because
the story was good. It was starting to be
maybe in my voice. It was because of
these opening lines, the power of these opening
lines which simply pick the curiosity of the reader
and made them keep reading. Here's the book. Snow
falls and then disappears. My wife is Deaf. Once she asked me a snow made a sound when it fell and I lied. We've been married 12 years
today, and I'm leaving her. So that's not a very good
opening, but it's exciting. And it has unresolved conflict and the reader is going
to keep going because we want to find out what y is the narrator leaving his
wife after 12 years? It does her deafness have
something to do with that? What's the significance of
the snow and him lying? And so that's what I mean by starting with some kind
of unresolved conflict. Let me give you another example from this same book
by Cheney Clark. I think we got to
the part last time where the ship is listing and over the loudspeaker
we hear code echo Kodak. Kodak. A man's voice crackles
over the PA system. Then after a loud
bang, all is quiet. The heating vent size one last
time and stopped his sake. The television
screen goes blank. The ship means is if in slow-mo, it should snap back
and write itself. I wait and wait, but we keep falling. And that's the first chapter. So it's exciting, like is
the bulk and a capsize. What's going to
happen to the author of people are going to die. So it's well-written. You get a sense of the
voice of the writer. But it starts with
unresolved conflict and that's really,
really exciting.
9. Tip 4: Show Don’t Tell: So tip for I know. I know you've heard
it a million times. Show don't tell. Now. It took me a long time to try and figure
out what that meant. I just couldn't understand. And then when I finally
did through writing, it made a huge
difference in my books. So the fact is that showing, is when you show something, how a character is or what's happening and the
reader figures out what the character is like
telling is when you tell the reader this
person's like this. And that again is passive, whereas showing is active. Now, I had a really
hard time with this. I've actually got a couple of examples I'm going
to share with you. Hopefully, you're,
you're clever. The mesial pick this up quicker. So an example of telling, which isn't great, tellings, not great at example of
telling would be the old man boarded the train slowly as people waited
impatiently behind him. Now I'll read that again. The old man boarded the train slowly as people waited
impatiently behind him. So that's telling, we're
telling the reader that the man is old and that
people are impatient. Now, we want to change
that to two, showing, this is showing the
train steps with steep Mr. Harris could hear people sign as he pushed
hard on his cane, his arm wobbling visibly. Now, that's showing that's better because we're not
saying, Oh, he's old. Saying that he's,
he's pushing on his kay, arm is wobbling. We're using imagery to
show that he's also, the reader thinks,
Oh, we must be old. And we're not saying
that people are impatient with saying
that people assigning. The reader thinks people are getting impatient
behind him. And that's really the
joy of reading is figuring things out
and not being told. And that's really
showing versus telling. Now there is an exception
to when telling is okay. That is in a first draft. Your first draft is
going to be all telling. First, it's going
to be backstory. And then when you identify what the story is and what
the main scenes are, you'll convert that
backstory to telling, because telling is the
old man boarded the train slowly with people who
are impatient behind him. That's happening
on the surface of the present and that's great. But we then in a third draft, you want to convert the, the telling to showing. So we go from
backstory to telling, and then we convert the
telling to showing. And now your book, your story is really
starting to get momentum. Another example of showing
and not telling is, I'll use this book
to demonstrate, but it's where you show how the characters are
through dialogue. In this book, which again, is one of my favorites. You, we learned about the
characters by what they say, not what the author tells us. She will have somebody
to play with it in the lower end if this ladder of mine turns up this morning, Martin said that
from the orphanage, the woman said, she
think I'll allow my daughter to gala event
with somebody's know. I'll not say the word
aloud that maybe never saw his own mother and
doesn't know his own father. No call to fetch him
among decent people. Now, later on, when the lad turns up on the
boat to the island, He's come from an orphanage. And the, the, the
main character has talked to the orphanage
and he's gonna give him a home and have them
work on the farm. When he turns up and this woman actually sees him and
he's listening to him, speak and get acquainted
with the main character. This is what she says. That's a fine boy
you've got there. She went on looking
up at the lab. Though he might be to find
for a windy place like this, you will not hold him for long. I warrant you. So that tells us now she's changed her
mind. Thinks he's great. You see, so we're
not told that she's like somebody who changes their mind constantly
and she's Moody, which he is in the book, were shown it through
the thing she says. But then we also
know now that she's quite a negative person because whereas she now thinks he's okay and we'll let her
daughter play with him. She says, Well,
he's not going to stay long in a place like this. So don't get attached to him. She asked to find
something negative to say. But you see how much
more powerful it is when we learned about the characters
through what they do, rather than the author
telling us about.
10. Tip 5: Trim Sentences: Tip five is hopefully going
to save you a lot of bother. And that is to trim
your sentences. Now, when you get
to a certain level of writing and
you're quite good, you're writing well,
your sentences are good. The imagery is there, the plot, the
character development. And so cutting. When you're cutting,
your cutting, usually like sentences
that don't work, things that are poorly written. When you get to a certain level, you don't really write badly. You're sent everything
is quite good. So then it feels
counterproductive to cut anything because
it's good writing. So this is a key point. You need to trim
your sentences and trivial paragraphs
so that you're, you're keeping
only the sentences that relate to the main story, to the main idea. Remember that
writing and writing a book a very different. So we want to just really not
have anything in there that doesn't relate to the backbone of the plot or the
character development. So you often that means cutting good writing and it feels weird. Good writing. You have to do it. You have to do it
because otherwise, your story will just lose the pacing because
the reader has a finite amount of energy
to remember things. So you don't want to
give them details and places and characters and scenes that are not integral to driving
the story forward. Whatever the story
or the memoir is, it's really important that
you trim your sentences and only keep those
that serve the plot. Now, how, when should you
edit when you're writing? Well, the next tip is
about thinking in drafts. Instead of a book
in a first draft, you're not going to
really do much editing. You might write
for a day, right? Ten, maybe two to ten pages. And then maybe in
the afternoon or the next day you
might look over it. But don't spend
hours man occurring every brushing the hair
on your semi-colon, tying the tie on
your preposition. Just don't make those
final tweaks because you might be spending
time on sentences, they're going to be cut anyway, because it's a first draft. You, as Neil Gaiman said, you're telling the
story to yourself, you're exploding onto the page. It's gonna be mostly backstory in a first draft and
that's perfectly fine. But we want to get to the
end of the first draft. So you now know
what the story is. You can go back to the
beginning and you can start refining the story,
trimming sentences. So when you get to
a fifth, sixth, seventh draft, That's where
you start really monetary. For instance, if you're
an interior decorator, you don't go to a
construction site and sweep up every night after
the workers of left. Because the next day it's
going to get dirty again, Z you're wasting energy. So just get comfortable with the idea that
the book is going to feel unfinished and like
it's fading for quite awhile, at least until you get to
like maybe the second drop.
11. Tip 6: Think in Drafts: Tip six is hopefully going to save you a
lot of heartache. And that is to think
drafts notebook. When you're working on a
book, it feels endless. I mean, even for me, it just feels like a nightmare. It feels like it's
never going to end. It was like walking around a corner and you just
keep going, right? And then you realize you
go in circles, right? So if you think drafts, then that's a bit more
manageable because you don't have to finish the book
and it has to be amazing. You have to finish
the first draft, which is not gonna be very good. If you look at the original
of Laura by Nobel cough, which is he wrote
mostly on index cards. He died before he
could finish it. How unprofessional? Just kidding. But so
that book is a draft of a book he was going to call the original of Laura,
and it's terrible. It's not very good. No first draft is very good. But at least you're getting down the bones of the story, Right? So thinking terms of drafts, when I work as an editor
and people come to me with their manuscripts and they
say, it's not working. I don't know,
something's gone wrong. Often it's because a third of
the book is a third draft. A third of the book
is a fifth draft, and a third of the book is
first draft or an eighth drop. So the problem is, it's not consistent in
quality or in editing. So think about, let's go
with a five draft structure. With the fifth draft. That's when the magic is
really going to happen. Getting from a first draft to a fifth draft is
going to get it from 0 draft to a fifth
draft is going to take quite a long time. Maybe a year, maybe
a couple of years. But to go from draft
five or six to draft 30 doesn't take that long because every time
you go through a draft, It gets better and better. So you are going
quicker and quicker. So if we look at this draft, 39 to get to to get to that. 39 took maybe a year-and-a-half. Okay. But the last six
months I went from say draft ten to 39 because every
time you read through it, it's getting better and better. So you're making less changes. Because it really lets talk about drafting is a
five trough structure. First draft is going to feel terrible because you don't
know what you're doing. Nobody does. You don't really know
what the story is. The characters are still, they're not fully alive. So think about, I'm going to get through this
first draft and I'm gonna give myself six months, seven months to do it. It can be a 100 pages. Because remember, if the
first draft is backstory, the second draft is going to
be surface of the present, telling the third
draft is going to be surface of the present showing. Now when you get to
draft for your really rolling, okay, So this, this is my new novel which, which comes out in November
of this year 2022. And that was draft 43. So it took me a long time
to get to draw five, maybe two years, maybe six
months to go up to draft 43. Because you're just
reading through editing. Editing, editing. So even though so don't think
in terms of a book. I think in terms of drafts. Often you might send a book to an agent or an editor
and get a rejection. But it's not because the
book isn't, isn't good. It's just that you've sent
them to earlier draft. You might've sent, sent draft
to when really this book needs to go to draw ten here
because it's complicated. So think drafts, notebook.
12. Conclusion: And so summing up, we've
got the writers toolkit while near the first class
I did a few years ago. And that's establishing yourself as a writer with a
consistent writing practice. You follow those six steps and then you should be
generating material. Now in this class, it's really important that you find your voice as a writer. So even if your manuscript isn't as polished
as it could be, an editor or an agent is going to look at it and
they're going to say, there's nothing else like this. This is unique, and
that's brilliant. That's where we want to be. I want to hear
exactly who you are. The world wants
exactly who you are. Doesn't want you
to be not copying, but too much like any other
writer that's out there. So you find your voice,
you practice it. You will allow your
style to develop, but you can't really
change your voice. Often a writer says the same
thing over and over again, just in different books with different characters in
different scenarios. And then if you can
avoid those six big, if you can follow those
six tips to avoid those mistakes that will
often sink or first book, most books you pick
up in a bookshop, they start with
unresolved conflict there on the surface
of the present. I'm here, they're showing,
they're not telling. And then most of the
books that go through agents and editors mailboxes. Backstory telling that
passive rather than active. So if you can follow those, you'll really well on your way to writing something
magnificent. But keep in mind that the
goal here is not to like sell a book and to have people applauding you
and giving you a Awards. That's not the goal
of writing a book. The goal is honesty. It's authenticity,
its uniqueness. It's a series, it's a series of compromises that you've
accepted that work. This particular story can't
do everything with one book. It's one story about somebody. You may be the character that changed over a certain
amount of time. That's the goal, is
that was this real, is this emotionally connected
to who you are as a person? That's the goal of any book. Lot of the greatest books will never get published
because they're not following trends
or they were missed. But when you are old and you look at your
book on the shelf and you think I wrote that it should be an example
of who you were then. And it should tell that
emotional story hundreds of years from now when
people take down your book, whether it was published or not, and they start to
open it and read, they feel who you were
in the deepest sense. That's amazing that
somebody can connect with you hundreds of years
after you've died. That's the power and the magic of language and storytelling.
Simon Van Booy, Author and Editor
