On my group blog, If you give a Girl a Pen, Marj asked this question:

I have a really great idea for a book that I am attempting to write. I haven’t ever written a book before. I have written over forty pages, some of which I like and some I do not. For those of you that have written books how long does it take to write one, how many rewrites do you have to do, and when do you start sharing it and getting feed back? Thanks.

So I thought I'd blog about it.



My first book, Legend of the Protectors, took me 3 weeks to write and two years to edit, and has gone through the editing ringer about 80 times. For one reason, when I started, I had no clue as to what I was doing.

I have books I’ve started and stopped on because of life demands my attention, or the characters quits speaking to me, or research is in needed. But I keep them at the ready, to jump on whenever inspiration hits. Some of these are at 50k words. :)

I work on multiple books at a time, so that can lengthen the process. Often, when I have one book as my focus, then I write it faster.

The genre also seems to play a role in the time frame. Legend is a Young Adult Urban Fantasy based on the Cherokee legend The Stone-Shield which, as I said, was pretty easy to write the story down. But one of WIPs, Surviving, has required many hours of research and the characters are far more complicated than seventeen year old Samantha. These types of books, for me, require more time.

It’s also relative to how many hours a day you write and your understanding of "the rules". I’m writing one now, that won’t need nearly as many edits. This comes with the practice of writing. One thing I do, at least once a week, is practice. Not writing on my WIP, but grab a picture or a song, something of inspiration, and write for at least five minutes. Just write. Don't think. Glimpse at the photo, listen to the song, and write the first thing that comes to mind. I feel, often we over-think everything, instead of letting the story tell us where it wants to go. This allows me to listen to my story as I write it. (And I have some pieces I plan on following through. Surviving got it's start this way.)

As far as sharing what you have, you want to be careful with whom you share a WIP. You don’t want someone who will do major overhauls before you’re finished writing it. If you share it, you need someone who will read it and see if it makes sense. With your first MS, you may want to hold out until it’s finished, then let a few beta readers make sure it all makes sense on the first round. When it does, then do line edits.


Piece of advice: Grow thick skin. I try to always be kind in my crits, but everyone is not. And if you want to be a writer, you must take crit. Decide now that you want to learn from others. Open yourself up.

But don't take every piece of advice you get! Know your story and characters well enough to know if something will work for them. In the beginning, I changed everything that was critiqued as being wrong in someone else's eyes, fixed everything they thought would be better, to the point that it no longer felt like my story. I then went back to the original document and started over.

And the last thing, BACK UP EVERYTHING! And keep old documents!

This has saved me many times. Date the changes and save them, then when you work the next day, you save it under that date. I didn't do this date save in the beginning and lost a lot of work one day. When told about the date save, I have done it, and am soooo thankful I have. I also, not only save to my computer, but have bought an external harddrive and save to it. Then, I email it to myself and put it in the folder for that story. Saves a lot of worry, because I can access it from anywhere. (Oh, save in doc. even if you have docx. becasue I just recently realized that I couldn't open my attachment at my sis in laws, because she has an older Word. So now I save in both.)

Good luck in your writing endeavors! And have fun!

Writing Your Novel

My dear new friend Damyanti posted this on her blog, and I feel it's relevant enough to share again.
It's from The Fiction Desk. Saturday, 19th July 2008, by Rob. He says:

I thought it might be useful to list some of the more common mistakes I’ve seen writers make. So here’s your very own copy-and-paste critique. For free.

Too much backstory
Your novel should start when your story starts. If you find yourself using lots of space to tell us what’s happened before, you’re in trouble. Try cutting out all the backstory, and just let the background information be implied by the situation, the events, and the interaction between characters. If that doesn’t get across the information you want to share, consider that you may actually be telling the wrong story.

No actual story
While your characters may be interesting, and the setting original, something still needs to happen. Remember that a novel needs a story. (Or, as E. M. Forster put it in his book, Aspects of the Novel, “Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.”) I promise that it’s not unsophisticated to have something happen in your book. It’s essential: the story is the driving force of a novel. (And there’s no such thing as a character-driven novel, at least not directly. All good novels are story-driven, and all good stories are character-driven, but you do need that central part—the story—to turn a character into a novel.)

Show, don’t tell
This is partially related to the comment about backstory: If the right information isn’t coming across through the way your characters relate to each other, and the events that unfold, maybe it isn’t relevant to the book at all. This doesn’t mean you have to show absolutely every detail instead of telling it, but you do have to strike the right balance. If the things you tell aren’t essential to what’s happening right now, don’t tell them at all. If they are, how can you show them through the way the story unfolds?

Don’t repeat yourself
Either on a structural level, by giving the same information twice, or on a sentence level. And never write “I’m sorry,” he apologised.

Stilted dialogue
Do your characters all talk as though they’re attending a stiff, formal function? Do people keep reminding each other of their backstories and telling each other things that they already know? Do their speeches tend to start on one page, and finish on another? Then you have stilted dialogue. Consult a professional at once, or just cut it down and make it sound more realistic.

Your characters all speak with the same voice
Take some lines of dialogue from your story, cut the surrounding text, and show them to a friend. Ask the friend what kind of person is speaking. If he thinks your eight-year-old boy is a grandfather, your hairy tramp is a youthful banker, or your exhausted mother is a toddler, you need to address the way your characters speak.

Problems with word usage
If you’re not 100% sure that you use every word in the right way, you need to get a good dictionary. I generally recommend that Brits get the Oxford Dictionary of English, which is bigger than the Concise dictionary and, importantly, contains plenty of examples of word usage within the definitions. There’s also an American equivalent, the New Oxford American Dictionary.
If you are 100% sure that you hit every nail on the head, you’re wrong, so see the advice above. And if you’re 110% sure that your word usage is always perfect, get a dictionary and look up “percentage”.

This isn’t a novel
If you want to write your autobiography, write your autobiography. If you want to write a novel, do that. Of course you can base a novel on your life experiences, but remember that a novel is a work of fiction, and everything contained within it must be in the service of the story. That means you have to be comfortable making any changes necessary to make the story work as a story. If the story would be better if you killed off Uncle Ed, but you can’t do that because your Uncle Ted is still alive, you’re not writing a novel.

This isn’t a book
If your novel opens by panning across the scenery, then moves on to a series of fight scenes described blow-by-blow, and if things happen mostly for the way they would look rather than for the ideas behind them, then you’re probably writing a screenplay in prose. Write the screenplay instead, and you’ll be a lot happier.

So I will go over my MS again. Making sure I do these things. And thanks Rob for sharing!