The 5 Steps to Writing a Book

The 5 Steps to Writing a Book:

teachingliteracy:

harperbooks:

1. Come up with an amazing idea. Know in your head this book will be a blazing bestseller and change the world. Annoy your friends by always talking about it. When they get too annoyed, mumble under your breath in casual conversation about how your book is going to answer that question or some such thing. Keep this up for about a year before you actually start writing. It’s important.

2. About once a month, sit down to work on the book. Go to a coffee shop and set up your computer on the table by the window. Look out the window for inspiration and notice how many cyclists run the stop sign outside the coffee shop. Think for a long time about how hard it is to actually stop a bike and then restart it and how long it would take to get across town if you actually stopped at every stop sign. Google how much you’d be fined if you get caught. Leave the coffee shop without having written. Blame it on the pastry that gave you a sugar crash. Promise yourself the next time you have a writing session you won’t eat a pastry.

3. Search the internet for images you might use for a cover. Look at other books on Amazon and study their covers. Print one of the covers and cross the authors name out to write yours. Use liquid paper if you can still find any. Sniff the liquid paper and wish they hadn’t started putting the chemical in it that makes it smell bad. Wipe the liquid paper off your nose with the napkin they gave you with another pastry. Blame the fact you didn’t get writing done on another sugar crash and the fact you sniffed liquid paper.

4. Rent a cabin. Get very serious about the book. It’s time. Pay good, hard earned money and hole yourself up in the woods to write the book. Bring with you a copy of Walden. Then, obsess about who is and isn’t following you on Twitter for half the first day. Get angry at yourself for being distracted and throw your phone into the woods as a sacrifice to your craft. Go to bed promising the next day you’ll really write.

5. Spend the next morning rummaging around the woods looking for your phone. When you find it and it doesn’t work, go back into the cabin and lay on the kitchen floor, preferably a cold, tiled kitchen floor. Look upward at the oven and lament the fate of Sylvia Plath. Wish, though, you could have a book published like she did before she took her life. Wonder to yourself how happy she must have been having had a book published, so happy she took her life. Pack up your stuff and head home, having written nothing.

Ah, pastries and liquid paper, the foes of every great writer.

That’s almost exactly how I did it! 🙂