Writing a book is hard, honestly looking back it was harder than I could have ever imagined. Now, it’s been five years since I started writing my first book and even now I wonder if it was all worth it. Writing a book was the biggest thing I think I have ever done, and one of my proudest personal achievements.
Now I am almost done the publishing process and everything is slowly winding down, I have the final pdf of my book got back to me a week ago. I am almost done reading it one last time so that I can officially set a release date! This is crazy to me, before I know it there will be a paper copy in my hand that I can actually feel. I’m actually over the moon! Here are some things you might encounter when you write a book!
Things You will Learn Writing A Book
I’m going to tell you everything I experienced while I was on my journey to write a book, this is so you know what to expert before you embark on the road to writing a book!
1. You Will Get Bored
There is an actual reason that it took me five years to write my book. Every so often I’d tuck away the word document into the far corner of my desktop, and I’d almost forget about it. Months sometimes would fly by before I went back and basically felt like I had to start over.
2. Your Emotions Will Go into Overload
Emotions! Your characters have them, you have them. Sometimes as a writer you cannot understand the difference while you are writing. I wanted to title this section, “you will cry a lot”. I say this because you will cry with your characters, you will be angry for them, you will feel their heartbreak, and celebrate their successes. This led me to write with a lot of tears streaming down my face. But writing a book is all about bringing your characters to life for the readers, if they aren’t alive for you, they won’t be for your reader.
3. You Will Want Your Characters To Die
As a writer, you are probably like me, and a pretty peaceful person. You spend a lot of time with a pot of tea, and a roaring fire, letting your imagination go wild. You probably don’t want anyone to actually die. But while you write a book, you will have characters that you can’t wait to kill off!
4. You Will Get Stuck in the Story
Sometimes you will look at the blank page in front of you, and wonder what you could possibly put into the white space. You will run into a lot of time where you honestly are not sure where the story should go. This is when you realize how important it is to find ways to shake your writers block. Running, shopping, social media browsing or cooking something are great ways to jog your brain and get it working right again.
5. You Won’t Know What To Write Next
When you go to write a book, you will be in one of two categories. Either you have planned out your book in its entirety, or you have a broad idea and you are just going to see where the story takes you. Whichever class you are in, you will still get stuck. You will sit, staring at the sheet of paper, unable to think where the story should go next. Then you need to find the ways that will give your brain a jog. Whether it is working out, shopping or social media browsing, every writer has something they do to reset their brain.
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6. You Will Read Your Writing and Hate it!
Most of the time you will LOVE what you are writing. You will read it, and feel extremely proud of the words that you put on the page. One of my favourite things about writing is when you read something back and cannot believe that it came out of your head. Sometimes though, the exact opposite is true. I have read back chapters I’ve written a few weeks later, and basically delete all. You will realize that some things you write have to be attributed to “bad writing days”.
7. You Will Be Emotionally Moved By Your Story
I have sat, staring at my screen, crying my eyes out. This is because when you go back to edit or re-read something you wrote in your novel, you will have a flood of emotions. This is amazing, it means that you have written something that delivers the feeling you wanted to portray.
8. You Will Debate Deleting It All
As you get closer and closer to where you want to finish (and don’t get me wrong, this stage will have changed a million times) you will think the whole thing is garbage. You will debate dragging the little icon that has sat on your desktop for years to the little trash icon on the bottom of your computer screen. Don’t do this! Even if no one ever reads it, you still accomplished something amazing!
9. You Won’t Want to Finish Writing
As I got closer to finishing my first draft, I debated not completing writing my first book. I was over it, to say the least, I didn’t feel like it was ready to be “done”. I wanted to stop, because the little demon on my shoulder wanted to tell me that I wasn’t good enough to have actually written a book. Looking back, the first draft wasn’t “done”, and it wasn’t good by any means. That is what second and third and fourth and fifth drafts are for. Even then you need an editor and a proofreader to make sure it is perfect.
10. You Will Be Super Proud of Yourself
After you go through everything above, including emotions, frustrations, break-downs and overloads, you can’t help but be extremely proud of yourself! And you should be!! Give yourself a pat on the back, and celebrate writing your book!
