Writing Books Is Easy

I'm often asked whether writing books is easy. I always reply in the affirmative. Writing is very easy. All you need to do is sit down and write. Oh, and by the way, please remember this number: 26753. I'll explain in a moment why.

Writing from an outline is always a good idea. Normally, professional authors write from a clear-cut, concise outline which eschews everything irrelevant. Why? Because deep inside, every author dreams of finally finishing their book, even if he or she has just started working on it. (This is the last generalization I'm making, because it's the only thing I know 100%. The rest I'll recount from my own experience.) I don't at all enjoy the actual process of writing. I can't wait to finish telling this story and start another one.

So, about the irrelevant bit. It's very easy to locate any scenes, paragraphs or words that don't belong. If you can delete them without any detriment to the meaning, then they were irrelevant. Frankly, I try not to delete parasitic expressions such as "actually," "however," "at the same time," and so on, because I think they add some of my personality to the text. Still, I know colleagues who delete them too. My friend and co-author of The Knockout, Max Lagno, tries to get rid of every extra letter, to the point where he deletes even an occasional pronoun. I've already developed a certain knack that allows me to work out who did what in his manuscripts. And here's another thing for you to remember: crimson.

So! Most authors write from an outline while doing everything humanly possible to save their and their readers' time by eschewing everything irrelevant. The other day, I opened my first book — an experience which brought me out in a sweat: you could safely cut at least half of it, which would have made it ten times better. My hero did all sorts of things, like having extended dialogues in the kitchen, spending pages ruminating, going to the bathroom, having a smoke, gazing at the stars while shivering in the October chill… no idea how it ever got published, but the publisher deserves a medal. I would never have published it even if they'd paid me. Oh, and another thing: 131011.

My first Level Up book wasn't much better, either. In it, Phil spent pages falling asleep, waking up, drinking coffee and feeding his cat. That's what happens when you don't have an outline. When I wrote Disgardium Book 3, I was way past the halfway mark with 21 scenes still to go — and each of those 21 scenes was pure unadulterated conflict. I do realize that you can't build up tension all the time: the reader needs brief moments of respite to make sure they don't rip apart their smartphone or whatever they read the book on. But honestly, adding them feels like such a waste of time. The editor is going to ask me to delete them anyway, and I'll still have 21 more scenes to write. One more thing to remember: the Craiovan dam.

When I just said that writing books was easy, I meant it. It is easy. Tens of thousands of new novels are published on the Internet every year in Russian alone. Lots of people take up writing. Not all of them finish their books, but as long as they can pen a Facebook post or a Reddit message, they consider themselves writers. Still, every scene is obliged to move the story forward in some way. Either the plot or the MC — something has to progress. Memorize: Bismuth.

But having scenes develop logically is only part of the job: you need to make sure that both the characters' motivations and their actions are perfectly clear to the reader. You need to show everything to the reader, not tell — and in order to do that, you need to experience everything yourself. Just try to tell your friends how you got to work this morning. Or how you had a bad meal in a restaurant. Or how your dog chewed your TV remote while the cat was watching him smugly from the top of the wardrobe, enjoying the poor pooch being told off. If you managed to pull it off — congratulations, you are indeed a natural writer who can experience a story and pour it down on paper. Pulse rate: 180.

Still, it's much easier to tell about something that actually happened to you. Which is why everyone can write about their life experiences on social media. Often, beginning authors base their first books on their own lives and those of their friends, even if the said friends are cast as Elves, and the Evil Overlord is a predatory octopus. Why Elves? Why an octopus? Dunno — it's just the way you write these things when you're in the zone. "Write drunk, revise sober" — this phrase is often ascribed to Hemingway, and that's exactly what he must have meant: being in the zone when your fingers flutter over the keyboard to keep up with your imagination, and when you don't bother to reread or revise anything until you've got your 5K words out of your system. I once wrote a theater play that way overnight: 20K words which turned out to be utter crap, of course, but if I edit it and beat it into shape… you never know, it might in fact come out pretty decent. One day, maybe. Ramsay Bolton.

But if you write a made-up scene involving made-up characters, the mere art of showing just won't cut the mustard, I'm afraid. Or rather yes, ultimately it will — but if you want your characters to actually live their lives instead of just exchanging abstract messages in an abstract empty space devoid of any scenery, you need to live it with them. You need to know your characters intimately; you need to remember what they did last night or this morning, what they said to each other last time they met and where they left off; you need to memorize their appearance, their height, their mood, their clothes and their mutual intentions. And if you write LitRPG as I do, you also need to remember your characters' levels, clan affiliations, their reputation and all the paraphernalia of stats, all the locations, abilities, mobs' names and damage numbers… And you need to keep it all firmly in your head. If you miss or forget any of it, readers will immediately complain saying you're a sloppy writer who can't even follow his characters' progress.

Normally, before starting a new scene, I refresh in my memory everything I need to know about the characters cast in it. Then I mentally transport myself there and start writing. That's what I mean about being in the zone. Half of my operative memory is taken up by this movie unfolding in my head, while I also need to keep in mind all the other things — like the 26753 XP my hero currently has, or the heroine's date of birth (April 2, 2036), or the fact that she's wearing a burgundy — crimson — dress; the fact that my MC is currently level 13 while his three friends are all level 10, not to mention a walk-in character who's level 11; their meeting place is in the vicinity of the Craiovan dam, and there's also something there that has to do with Bismuth… but what was it, dammit? My MC's pulse rate is 180 when his heart suddenly stops, and the heroine manages to tell him, just before he dies, that he looks just like Ramsay Bolton.

This may be a silly illustration, but I just wanted to give you an example of what an author has to deal with. Just imagine yourself typing away while having to keep a helluva lot of information in your head — and then something distracts you. It could be anything. Writers normally don't have offices in town, and at home, any excuse is good enough for the family to hassle the "writer."

It's actually very similar to the way programmers work. They too have to keep loads of data in mind even as they work on code, and to distract them "for just a moment" while they're in the zone is actually stealing a lot of their valuable time. Because it might take a good fifteen minutes to get back in the zone, at least. For some it takes an hour, while yet others might spend half a day just trying to get back into the flow.

And that's the hardest thing in writing, I think. The actual writing is quite easy.

Curious whether all that bookkeeping pays off? Read a free story — or see every series in Books in Order.

→ Start with a free story: Free Story.