Hey there! Welcome to Nothing but the Words.

I’m your Author Coach, Candice L Davis.

In this episode, I want to share with you what the process of writing a great book actually looks like. Not publishing and marketing, just writing.

After you’re done the planning, after you’ve outlined and done any necessary research, it’s time to sit down and write. 

A lot of first time authors have no idea what to expect. In fact, too often, they think writing a book is just a matter of sitting down to put words on the page. That’s true, but it’s also not the full picture.

When you sit down to write, you’re not writing your book. You’re not writing even a chapter or a page. You’re writing the FIRST DRAFT of your book, your chapter, one page.

Here’s the painful and liberating truth. Your first draft will not be good.  It’s not supposed to be.

You don’t have to struggle to make it good while you’re writing. That’s a waste of time. You just need to get the words on the page. 

It’s okay if you’ve used the same word seven times in the same paragraph.

It’s okay if your paragraphs don’t flow well from one to the next.

It’s okay if you know you’re missing something.

It’s perfectly fine if this first draft is something you really don’t want anyone to ever see. In fact, your first draft should be your eyes only.

Yesterday, I had a zoom call with a friend who’s a naturally gifted writer. She not only tells a good story, she knows how to write beautiful sentences. Her prose flows and carries the reader along with it. She has a book deal with a major publisher. There’s no question that she can write well.

I was so excited to talk to her and tell her that, while I was purging my office, I found an old binder with an early draft of her first published book. 

Her response was, “Throw it away!” That early draft is nothing like her finished product. It’s not nearly as good. But she would never have gotten to the finished product and the book deal that came with it if she hadn’t finished that first draft, which she can hardly stand to look at right now. 

When you sit down to write, make sure you’ve done the pre-writing work I discuss in other episodes.

You need to know who you’re one perfect reader is, and what kind of book you’re writing. You have a strong outline. If you’re writing a memoir or even fiction, you know your characters, what they want, and what’s in their way.

The goal of the first draft is to get the content on the page. It needs to be coherent enough that you can go back to revise it, but it doesn’t need to be publishable. It won’t be publishable, trust me.

As you write your first draft, if you can’t think of the exact word you want to use, don’t stop for more than a moment to try to think of it. Don’t stop to look it up. Just put in a placeholder. 

I’ll usually to put in a word in all caps and then use 3 asterisks to mark the spot I want to come back to.  That way, I can use the “Find” function in Microsoft Word or whatever word processing software to easily find it. If you realize you need to find a supporting statistic or verify a fact, don’t stop look it up. Again, use a placeholder.

If you’re really stuck and can’t get started. Go back to your outline and make a list of questions you can answer for chapter one. Type up your answers to those questions to get started on your draft.

Keep writing. You want to get into a flow of telling the story or writing whatever content you’re writing, and it’s hard to do that when you keep stopping to tab over to Google. Allow yourself to focus on the content without distraction and you’ll find you have better ideas, make connections you didn’t see, and produce better content.

As you write this first draft, make quality secondary to just getting it done.

Commit, early on, to the idea that you will have to revise your work several times.

One of the reasons self-published books sometimes get a bad rap is that the authors don’t take the time to revise their work. Writing well requires rewriting.

This process of rewriting is a big part of what separates bad books from good books and good books from great books. 

Rewriting is important, and I’ll share more of exactly what to look for in the rewriting process in another episode.

But for now, know this. I’ve written dozens of books at this point, but in the beginning of my writing career, I left several books unwritten, halfway written, or 80% done because I thought my first draft had to be good. It was a rookie mistake, and you don’t need to make it. 

But if you want to write a great book, a phenomenal book, the quality of your writing counts.

Take action this week by sitting down to write the first draft of the first page or the next chapter of your book. What matters at this stage is getting the beginning, middle, and end on the page. If you’ve done the prewriting work I talk about, and you follow the outline for the most part, with adjustments as needed, you will produce a complete draft of your book.

You won’t be done writing. You’ll still have to go through a few stages of revisions. You’ll may want to get feedback from beta readers. You’ll definitely want to work with a professional editor—and no, your first draft isn’t what you need to send to your editor—but you’ll be closer than the vast majority of people who say they want to write a book ever get to doing it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Nothing but the Words. I’m your author coach Candice L Davis. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you can take a moment to leave me a great review, I’ll really appreciate it.

Until next time, stay safe, stay well, and go write something.