How to write a book

I mean, I don’t know how to write a book. I’ve written one and co-written another and am working on a third so I guess that sounds stupid, but I mean it: nobody can tell you how to write a book, because it’s impossible. You just sort of do it.

But I like process posts, and I’ve just finished drafting chapter 2. (It’s messy but it’s done.) So here is what I do:

• Set up Scrivener at the beginning. I’ve been posting cheeky screenshots of my writing targets from Scrivener and lots of people keep messaging me to ask what it is. So basically: Scrivener is software for writers that lets you do a million things, a subset of which I actually use. I don’t use it for writing short-form work like articles; for me, it’s for books. Basically it lets you easily compile all your research and notes and pieces and drafts into one workspace, and once you get the hang of it it’s pretty easy and great to use.
  
  So I set up a folder for each chapter, and in those I create a draft document for each chapter (with target word counts, based on the rough word count for the book divided by how many chapters I think there will be) plus a “research” folder, which we’ll get to later. You can put all kinds of PDFs and other things in that folder but I don’t — they just go in Dropbox, for me.

• Then I read everything in the entire world. Just kidding! But I do read a lot. Usually I write one chapter per month, so at the start of the month I make a giant pile of books on the easy chair in the living room, figure out what I need to read, and then plan out the reading, chapter by chapter, for each day in the next few weeks. Otherwise it absolutely will not get done. (I wrote a little about this in this piece for Vox.) In my case I also need to watch movies, find articles in archives, and so on, so I try to get as much of that into my calendar as I can. I cannot emphasize enough how impossible it is for me to conceive of completing anything without this step.
  
  Here is a growing pile for next month, with bonus Totoro and hidden spangly throw pillow bearing the image of Nicolas Cage:

  

• When it comes time to write a chapter (usually around the last weekend of the month), I first have to do the world’s most laborious task, which is type out all of the notes I underlined and marked with little sticky flag things. I literally just re-type them into Scrivener, with page numbers. Each book or thing gets its own page in the “Research” folder. I will absolutely not use everything I type out. The goal is for me to just be able to scroll through and start to figure out the structure of the chapter, what the threads are, how they weave together. The other goal is for me to remember what I marked and read, because my memory is just shot these days. (Also this way I can pick up my laptop and work at the library or another location, I guess, without having to haul fifteen books with me.
  
  I need to get a lot better about doing this step as I go along, instead of all in one day, but currently I am mean to myself and so on Friday I spent hours copying out 15,000 words. Yup!

• Writing has arrived! I get up in the morning and read the last chapter I wrote (like, last month) to kind of juice the engine, a metaphor that I think is wrong but don’t know how to fix. Then I go to yoga class and have some coffee and think. Then I come home, do some stuff, think some more. Eat some lunch. Write down some ideas. Lay on my back and stare at the ceiling for a bit, maybe take a little nap. Wait for the inciting idea to come to me. Draw some flow charts of ideas — by hand, of course.
  
  This part is actually not super far off my process for writing articles for work; I spend (conservatively) 50% of my time trying to figure out what the first paragraph or two will be, and after that the rest comes easily.

• I light a candle in my office. I pour and arrange various types of liquid around my desk (a big old thing of water, usually a seltzer, and some kind of mocktail, and this time I also had a big mug of rooibos). Some kind of wine might arrive late in the day, but not till I’m near the end. (Useful for getting over the last hump, though, once you’ve forgotten how to word.) I fire up this playlist through my earbuds (noise cancelling, essential because we live on a busy street). And I put on socks because it gets cold in my office.

• In this book, the chapters are around 7,000-7,500 words long (in the draft; I expect some expansion and contraction once my editor gets her hands on it). Ideally I’d write down 350 words or so on Friday night, then 3500 words on Saturday and Sunday. Let me be extremely clear: this does not work for most people. That is a truly absurd amount of words to lay down in a day. But look, I’ve got an MFA, I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years, and I know for certain that this is the only way my writing is good; writing little clumps every day or whatever, the way fancy writers do it, is absolutely a non-starter for me. Surefire way to make clumsy sentences and paragraphs that “sound like writing” instead of conversation in my head, and I’m always aiming for the latter.

• So then I start writing, usually with the first section and then I start doing some jumping around. This time, for instance, I realized there was a really stellar symbolic way to tie the beginning and end of the chapter together, so after I cruised through the first thousand or so I jumped to the end. I include lots of TKs (copyeditor speak, roughly, for “something will be here eventually) when my buzzard brain starts jumping around ideas.

• On Saturday, I quit when I hit my target word count for the day. I’m fairly certain Didion herself (a main character in my book) used to talk about how she’d leave the page with something not there yet to make starting the next day easier, something that will show you the way forward. I think she also then took her pages and had a whiskey, which seems like a good idea to me.

• So on Sunday night I finish the draft. I search the document for TKs to make sure I haven’t left anything dangling. Then — and this is very important — I change the typeface immediately and move the spacing out to 1.5 spacing. (Normally I write in Palatino at 1.1 spacing; I try to switch to a sans serif font.) This is essential for taking one last read on the chapter; it just sounds different in your head. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s true.

• Then I print it. We bought a good printer during the writing of Salty basically for this purpose (and also because I cannot read articles for research on a computer screen, sorry).

• Then I blow out the candle, finish the various drinks, put away the books, pull books for the next chapter (which I’ll figure out tomorrow), make any last notes that I don’t want to forget when I get to the next chapters, and move places so I can give the chapter one more read.

• Then don’t read it again till next month.

• Rinse, repeat.

Other stuff I wrote:

• A long post-mortem on The Rehearsal, bringing in Leslie Jamison and Martin Buber, a sentence I don’t think anyone other than me has typed.

• An adapted excerpt from Salty, on Hannah Arendt’s cocktail parties and the subversive power of friendship.

• On the summer of maximalist movies!

While we are here, may I once again plug my book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women?

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Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.