Part 1 - Becoming a writer

How can programmers improve writing skills?

I’ve commissioned a lot of programmers to write books, so I feel I can answer this one. Except that I only ever commissioned programmers who were already blogging. By reading their blog I could get a cast iron guarantee of their ability to write well.

There is an outside chance that, rather than the best writers choosing to start a blog, that the ones who began blogs were the ones who became the best writers.

So begin a blog. Explain something to someone. Choose something you know something about. Explain it to the people who are just below you in knowledge level. That bit is key. You will need to learn not to speak to peers using jargon and shorthand, but in full prose using easily understood phrases, analogies, summaries. You will need to learn to keep it short to keep them interested. Mostly that’s it.

How can one get into the Publishing industry?

The traditional way is to get work as an editorial assistant or intern for a publishing company. The way I did it was to write a book for a publisher, then when a job came up there I applied for it. Given that I knew a lot about their editorial process and had a track record with them, I was a safe bet. Either route takes time and dedication.

English is my second language. Where do I start?

In general, you will be better off writing in the language you’re most comfortable with. Don’t forget, any language can reach hundreds of thousands of people at least. The English language part of the internet is vastly over catered for, so depending on your language, it may even be the case that you can be a “big fish in a little pond”.

Once a book has become popular with your native language audience, there is always the option to get a translator at that stage in order to reach the large US and UK markets. Doing it this way round has the benefit of only needing to pay the substantial translation costs once your work has proved itself commercially, therefore being much less of a risk.

What should a teenager do if they have a book idea?

There are far too many people that make the mistake of focusing on publication. Just start writing and focus on writing. See how long you can make the story. Ideas count for nothing by themselves, and you will always have more ideas. If you think this idea is particularly special, then shelve it and write a few more stories before you feel ready to give this one your best shot. In essence, writing as much as you can in your early years will develop the part of your brain that handles writing (just like getting on your bike every day will develop your leg muscles and stamina), and whatever you develop in your teens will never leave you when you’re older.

But don’t just write stories. Write letters to your friends. Write answers on forums. Submit short news articles to your local paper. If you want to learn to write well you need above all to develop the place where you get your ideas and where you reason – hence write broad and write a lot.

I’m dyslexic. What software should I take advantage of?

If you have dyslexia, or even are just not that fast at typing or getting your ideas down, you could do a lot worse than using a good speech-to-text software program.

Even better would be to hire someone to type up your dictation, called Transcription. This way you’d be able to dictate into a Dictaphone whenever you wanted, on the way to work, while out walking, or whatever, and still have the typist correctly identify your words. It obviously costs more (costs are up to $1 per minute), but results would be more accurate.

Should I start writing a book?

How do you know if you’re ready to write a book, when you’re just a beginner writer?

One way of finding out is to open a novel you like, and copy it. Type the whole thing out, word for word.

Do not use copy and paste.

It should be over 80,000 words long, so it will take a while.

Many painters employed to copy Rembrandt’s paintings ended up being well known artists in their own right. When you copy from a master, their pacing, dialogue, sentence formation, tense, scene setting, and so on, will rub off on you.

Copying a large work is also like running a trial marathon in preparation for a real race. How do you know you have the stamina until you do it? Running 4000 metres isn’t going to do it, and neither is writing 4000 word essays or short stories going to prepare you for writing a book.

When you’ve finished, you will be ready to answer the question, and should your answer be “yes”, you will have built up your writing muscles ready to do so.

How does someone with no experience test a book idea?

Here’s a cheap and easy way to test a book idea without drawing a biased response.

Write your story in the same format as a film blurb. You can see examples online in any film download site. Next time you’re choosing a film to watch with your friend or your spouse, pretend you’re on Netflix (or whatever) and say “how about this one…”, but read out your story blurb.

If you get some interest, your book idea may be interesting too.

Do you have to read to become a better writer?

I think what you have to do to become a better writer is to write. The idea that you need to read a lot comes because some high profile writers mentioned it as the secret to writing (Stephen King in “On Writing” for example), but to follow that dictate slavishly would miss the point, in my opinion. The reason to read a lot is to fill the head with ideas. While writing, the creative subconscious needs ideas to draw on. Whether you get those ideas from books, or from life itself, or from interviewing people, or from working hard in your career – these are all means to the same end. But the only way you can get better at writing is to write, a lot, and often.

In my experience the breakthrough as a writer comes when your ideas begin to flow seamlessly from the subconscious onto the page (or screen). The writers I’ve commissioned who have struggled most were the ones that constantly second guessed their material. They were the ones who didn’t have it in the forefront of their minds. When I wrote my first book the words just flowed onto the page because I’d spent a year immersed in the subject matter. That’s for non-fiction, and I don’t think it’s much different for fiction, except…

Well, where do you go for fiction material? If you want to write a best-selling travel guide you go abroad, and if you want to write a best-selling woodwork guide you spend 12 hours a day doing woodwork, but if you want to write best-selling fiction, either you have to live the life of your eventual characters, or as a second best, read the creations of other people. For most, reading books will be the best or only option.

There is one other reason for reading a lot, which is that the style of the writing rubs off on you. I can’t vouch for whether this is really a good enough reason to read the quantity some people suggest. If you’re writing a lot you will want to try things out, and that is where you can simply get the book of a favourite author down off the shelf and read a few pages to check out how they do it.

Where can I find a cheap (but good) ghost writer?

If you have a highly commercial book idea, or are a recognised authority on something important, or have a large online platform or following, then your up-front budget is largely irrelevant because you can offer a percentage royalty on the sale of the book. If you don’t have any of those things then all you can realistically get for $400 is a 20-50 page book. If that’s the size of book you’re after, just look around on Amazon for authors who have written books similar to the one you’re thinking about, and approach them, offering them $400 advance and 10% royalty. You only need to chance on one of them who’s a bit skint, and they might take you up on the offer.

Another way to go is to first get a recognised book publisher to accept your book proposal on its own merits, based on the size of your platform, your expert credentials or the sheer marketability of the book synopsis. State in the proposal document that you will be using an experienced co-author.

Do you need a degree?

Do you have to graduate to be a best selling Author? If you don’t, how do you get better to become one?

Being a graduate helps, but not necessarily a degree in Creative Writing. Any degree makes you, the student, have to research something in depth, form an opinion on it , then write about it. This process is a foundation stone of what makes a writer. Writing is seeing the physical world and the people in it, internalising that, looking at it in a fresh or interesting angle, then sitting down to communicate that in writing day after day. I’d rather have a degree in Physics than Creative Writing, and rather the latter than no degree at all. Having a degree makes it easier for you to write at the level the world expects of you.

My day to day work used to involve finding potential non-fiction authors and offering some of them a book contract. Most of the time I looked for people with degrees. When there’s so many people that have, why would I go for someone that hasn’t?

Which is the best ‘technical writing’ manual?

All the books I’ve come across about technical writing are terrible. That sounds harsh. But think about it like this. Why is someone writing a book about technical writing? Probably because they think technical writing is different to any other writing. And that’s why these authors write terrible books.

Do yourself a favor and let go of the idea that writing for a technical audience is somehow different to other writing. Get a book on how to write non-fiction and use that instead. All you need to learn is how to write clearly so that your reader understands what you mean. You do that by putting yourself in the shoes of the reader and at each stage of writing, thinking:

“How far are they from knowing this thing already? What do I need to add to their knowledge to get them there?”

This is the basic rule of writing. Think of someone. Ask them how far they are from knowing x. Fill in the gaps until they understand x.

Let’s apply it in a couple of simple examples. As a writer you usually decide you want to teach or explain something, and you start with “I want to teach people how to ice a cake.” The problem is, what is your definition of “people”? Some readers have iced hundreds of cakes with rolled icing but want to know about piping. Some readers never even baked a cake before. Are you really going to try to write for both of those… at the same time?

By applying the basic rule of writing you will get a drastically different set of instructions.

Example 1 Fill the icing bag half full with your standard icing mix. Take hold of the top in one hand and twirl the bottom half, creating a tight seal. Cut off the bottom with scissors leaving the desired diameter hole. Begin with the outside of the cake and squeeze…

Example 2 Icing is basically just powdered sugar with water added. If you mixed a cuppa-soup before, you should get the hang of making it no problem! The trick is to get the consistence right so that your icing spreads easily but doesn’t droop or flow off the cake. Let’s begin by assembling the following ingredients…

I hope you can instantly see the difference. For the expert audience we’re 1) missing out what they already know, 2) assuming they know what standard mix of icing is, 3) moving very quickly through the material. What we are most definitely not doing is writing in a special way, using convoluted phrases or hard words or jargon, nor are we writing in an “academic” way. We’re merely writing to the intended audience.

In the second example we’re starting much earlier because we’ve established the reader won’t even know how to make icing. We’re being more supportive “you should get the hang of it”, and we’re going much more slowly, not assuming any prior knowledge about what icing is.

The two books I recommend on writing

Writing Successful Self-Help and How-To Books (978-0471037392), Jean Marie Stine

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (978-1444723250), Stephen King