The Art of Writing a Book

I am not an expert in writing. I may be naturally inclined to words (especially in comparison to numbers *shudders*) but that doesn’t mean I’m all knowledgeable. I don’t really know how to deal with writer’s block and I only know that a novel is typically between 55,000 and 200,000 words because I just googled it.

Regardless, I’m currently writing a book.

In my history of writing books, I have tried many, many times. Throughout high school, I’d come up with a pretty awesome idea (think: cheesy romances including a superhero who does nothing but save one girl repeatedly or a story that only has two characters in it. Hey, at the time I was proud of them.) and I’d write and write and write.

The beginning would be great, the end would be great. The middle would be non-existent. And so the cycle would continue, all through my years as a teenager.

As a seventeen year old, I finished two novels. Well, I call them novels. In reality they were less than 55,000 words. And I’ve deleted them since. A part of me regrets this, because I probably could’ve used a bit of them at least, but at the time I was so sick of bad writing, I just went on a rage and deleted every single thing I had ever written. Every single thing. I had so many short stories, so many poems, so many just sentences and paragraphs and words, beautiful words, and now they’re gone.

Still, let’s not mourn the past. Because I’m writing a new book!

I started this new book at the start of last year, and since then the idea has changed a million times and I have deleted so much and rewritten so much and I probably should’ve kept it all but instead I’ve deleted it all.

But I think I’m finally on a roll with something. Okay, so I’ve said that a thousand times with each new idea, and each time I think “this is it, I’ll stick with this one, the middle will be perfect” and the middle never happens because I delete the beginning and the end and start a whole new story altogether.

But this time is the time.

I’ve got 15,000 words and I think it’s going strong but I don’t really know because my judgement in writing novels is generally impaired.

Still, we’ll see how we go!

Sarah xx