Many people have a great idea for a book. They start writing full of enthusiasm. At the beginning the sentences are flowing, original ideas are being put on paper, and the writer believes it’s only be a matter of time before they have a 80,000 word manuscript that publishers will be clamouring for.
But around 20,000 words into the first draft the words slow down. The writer starts to find words wandering off down pathways that lead to dead ends. Or the topics and ideas seem to be circling back, so the story loses direction. This often happens to new authors in both fiction and non-fiction writing. A few weeks or months into the manuscript, the enthusiasm is replaced by frustration, which leads to despair and giving up. The writer thinks, ‘Perhaps that good idea was not such a potentially great book after all.’ Then they bin the manuscript and waits for the next idea and next burst of enthusiasm.
This article explains how to avoid that. The key is understanding the type of book you are writing and how to approach it.
For the sake of brevity and an easy-to-grasp explanation, I will break the approaches to writing fiction and non-fiction books into four types. I name these types:
1: Road Trip
2: Mystery
3: Fish Out of Water
4: School Room
How you approach writing a book will depend on which type of book you are writing. Many of the problems you will encounter will be because you are, for example, attempting to write Mystery structure, but approaching it like Road Trip. Or vice versa.
Let’s look at the four categories.
ROAD TRIP: When you take a road trip in real life, usually in a car, you generally decide where you are planning to go—either a specific destination or an area—set out from a certain place, and enjoy the adventure of what you see and do along the way. It’s the same with writing a ‘road trip’ book. You start writing at the beginning of the story and see what happens. You record things as you go. If your writing is interesting, humorous or informative, then the reader wants to come on the journey with you. Travel books are usually written in this manner. At the start of the book, you tell your readers, ‘I’m going on a journey to this place. Come along (through the pages of the book) and we’ll see what happens.’
Daniel Defoe, best remembered for being the author of Robinson Crusoe (considered an early example of a narrative novel) also wrote A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Defoe travelled around the British Isles and wrote about what he saw. The three-volume book was published between 1724 and 1727. It’s a remarkable insight into life in Britain before the Industrial Revolution.
Two hundred and fifty years later, novelist Paul Theroux travelled around the British Isles, mostly by public transport or walking, and wrote Kingdom by the Sea. In both cases, Defoe and Theroux set out on a journey, with pen and notepad, and wrote their books.
Memoirs are usually approached the same way. Except that the journey is taken through memory. The author has achieved something noteworthy in their life, then goes back to the beginning and take the reader on the journey to get there.
It’s a Road Trip structure. It’s a linear approach to writing. Sit down. Begin the journey—physical or reflective. Start writing. Let’s see what happens. The reader comes along on the journey.
Now let’s look at a Mystery.
If you are writing a Mystery, you start at the end. The approach is different. With a Mystery you have something happen, for which there appears to be no explanation. Then you have a person or persons come in, work through the back-story and the clues, and figure out what happened.
Take, for an example, a typical murder mystery. A wealthy old man, who was about to change his will to benefit his young mistress, is found dead in his study with a knife in his back. The room is locked from the inside. The mansion where he lived is full of suspicious characters—the first wife, the drunken son, the gardener who was having an affair with the mistress, the mistress herself, the housekeeper who was secretly in love with the old man, and so on.
Enter the quirky detective who spends the book working out what happens and reveals it at the end.
With a Mystery, you need to decide the ending first. Who the murderer was, how they stabbed the old man and got out of the study leaving it locked from the inside and, most importantly, their true motive for killing the old man.
Work out the clever ending. Then start the story with the situation and the discovery of the body. Then bring in the detective, hide the clues in plain sight (surrounded by lots of false clues), then have the detective work through them, before finally revealing the solution.
With Mystery, you decide the ending first, but don’t reveal it to the reader. In that way the reader comes follows the story trying to be the detective and work out the clues. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (published in 1841) is often considered the first modern detective story. Women are found murdered in rooms that are almost impossible to reach, witnesses give conflicting accounts, evidence at the scenes makes no sense—along comes the detective and works it out. Famous examples of Mysteries are Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and, of course, Agatha Christie.
Publishers today call it ‘cozy crime’. The reader wants to sit in a comfortable chair, read about the characters and the situation, and try to solve the Mystery. It’s a mainstay of the publishing industry.
Writing Three Act Structure
Fish Out of Water stories are character driven stories where the protagonist is suddenly in a situation outside of their previous experience. They have to learn, adapt, overcome obstacles (both external and internal) and resolve the situation. Fish Out of Water stories are in three acts. Actually, all stories are told in three acts, but with Fish Out of Water Stories it is more obvious. Act 1: Take the fish out of the water. Act 2: Let them learn, adapt and overcome obstacles. Act 3: Resolve the issues that took them out of the water in the first place and move forward.
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is a Fish Out of Water story.
Act 1: Pip is a poor orphan who unexpectedly gets a benefactor who will pay for his education to become a gentleman. Act 2: Pip is educated, learns about life and the characters around him change and their true nature revealed. Act 3: Pip returns to his beginnings with the maturity to see the truth and control his life.
Most movies are Fish Out of Water stories. Act 1: You put an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, or you put an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances. Act 2: You watch them overcome the obstacles, change and learn. Act 3: They achieve their goal and resolve their issues. The change the character goes through is known as the ‘transformation arc’. (I will cover Fish Out of Water stories and how to structure them—in particular for film stories—in a separate article because it is a topic in itself.)
But before writing a Fish Out of Water story, you need to take a step back and look at the overall all structure. You need to understand what will happen in each Act, before you start writing.
Writing Non-Fiction Books
School Room books are usually non-fiction. The author knows more about a subject than the reader, then sets out to tell the reader about it. The author may have researched an historical event worthy of a book. The author may have specialist knowledge, gained from experience, of a subject and want to impart that knowledge. Biographies of a famous character in history, cookbooks, self-help books, diet books, political commentary—they all begin with the author having knowledge of a subject. If there are enough people who would like to learn about that subject, then the author writes a book imparting the knowledge.
Structuring and approaching a School Room book is a bit like planning a lecture. Decide if you have enough information to fill a book. Work out what you are going to talk about. Arrange it in some sort of order that is easy to comprehend. Then start writing. A great tip for the person planning to write a School Room non-fiction book is to start by writing a synopsis of each chapter. You will soon know if you actually have enough specialist knowledge to fill a book
In looking at these four simplified examples of structure and approaches to writing a book, it is important to understand there will often be overlap between them. The Mystery may involve elements of Fish Out of Water. The detective sent to solve the Mystery may be thrust into unusual circumstances and while solving the puzzle undergo their own transformation. The biography of a famous person (School Room) may contain elements of Road Trip as the author goes on a journey to research the character. In each case there may be elements of a different category.
Structuring Your Book
That’s okay, but understand at the outset what your primary category is. Which is the fundamental structure and approach? What is the basis? Elements of other categories can by introduced, but not at the risk or changing half way through the manuscript.
One of the fundamental mistakes to writing a book that talented but inexperienced writers make is to approach writing a Mystery like a writing a Road Trip. I have seen this many times. The author starts with a great opening—a body or something mysterious is found in the most improbable circumstances—and they start writing. They set the story up, then bring in their loveable but quirky detective. The first 10,000 words are very exciting, the next 10,000 start to lose direction, and then the author has run out of ideas.
They needed to plot out the complicated solution first, then go back and lay the breadcrumb trail that leads to it.
Other inexperienced authors will start a Fish Out of Water story with a great first act, but have not stepped back and mapped out their three-act structure. The wealthy arrogant person suddenly finds themself alone and without money in the hillbilly community. Great. But what happens in Act 2 and Act 3?
The ordinary person looks identical to the famous person and, by twist of fate, is mistaken for them. Good. What happens in Act 2 and Act 3? With Fish Out of Water stories character drives plot. Not action. But this is another subject worthy of its own article, which I will do soon.
The point here is that this approach to writing a book is basic stuff. What sort of book you are writing?
In many years of being a book reviewer for a national newspaper, a reader for a literary agent, a judge in literary competitions, an author, an editor, and a mentor to authors, I have repeatedly seem the problems with the manuscripts of first time authors. Some of the problems are fixable (bad grammar, poor characterisation, etc.). But the most common problem and the hardest one for new authors to understand is structure.
In future articles I will write about the Three Act Structure (Fish Out of Water stories), how Character Drives Plot, and so on. If you have any suggestions or want me to elaborate on any of these ideas, please contact me.
