3 Things You Should do When Writing a Book

1. Learn About Writing
   This doesn’t mean you need to get an MFA. If you’re looking for more affordable and flexible options, you can look for individual classes to help you. I personally like Tomi Adayemi’s Page-Turning Plot class. In her class, she teaches students about how to write a book in a Three-Act structure and even provides examples from popular stories so that you can understand the lessons better. I would also advise you to get books on writing as well, all the way from pocket guides to more loaded texts. No matter what method you use when learning to write, it will benefit you to learn the rules of writing, so that you can decide on what suits your writing taste and even what rules you would like to break.
2. Learn About Editing
   What?! This may seem confusing or out of left field, but writing is only a portion of what it takes to make your story good. Think of it like this. If you didn’t at least spell check your 500-word essay for English class, your teacher would not even play with you because they would have expected you to review what you have written not just go on a marathon of typing and print out your work. Your readers will expect the same thing, but it’s a little more complicated. You need to not only make sure that you didn’t forget a comma, but you also need to make sure that your character’s eye color doesn’t mysteriously change in the middle of the book, unless it’s a fantasy thing 🤷‍♀️. This is all to say, that you should edit your work, ideally multiple times. However, editing can get pretty expensive, so I would advise you to either save money over time to purchase editing services or I would advise you to train yourself to become an editor so that you can edit your own work. If you are able, I would actually suggest a combination of training yourself and buying services. In that way, you can clean up your manuscript and still get someone’s eyes on it to see things you missed.
3. Accept that there will be multiple drafts
   The number of drafts will vary, but the first draft is never going to be what you publish. Don’t do that to yourself. You will need to improve character arcs, maybe even get rid of characters, fix spelling, change then to than, and all kinds of other things. In order for your audience to enjoy your story, you need to take the time to refine your story to make it the best it can be. Remember, stories like The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas were not good in the first draft and that should encourage you. Angie Thomas and Sarah J. Maas had to struggle through multiple drafts too, so it’s not impossible. It’s just hard work.

I hope you found this post enforced important information about writing your book and you can share it if was helpful!