So you have a state-of-the-art word processing package. You’ve read every book on the subject. You’ve visited every website that teaches you the tricks of the trade, and you’ve downloaded every bit of software that lays out your chapters and keeps track of your plot-lines. You even have an electric pencil-sharpener and your own shredder. Now all you need is greydogtales, and you’re ready.

As you know, everyone has a book inside them. In the UK, we have a National Health Service and Gastro-enterology Units which deal with this problem regularly. It may cost more elsewhere. If you decide to ‘get it out’, assuming there are no police around, then you will need to plan. Our step-by-step guide will take you through the whole process, and at the end you, yes you, will be a bestselling author!*

*Note that ‘best’ and ‘selling’ are relatively undefined terms, not regulated by the financial authorities and with no legal weight. The term ‘author’ is copyright by the estate of Sr Arthur Conan Doyle, as are most things.

In Part One, we cover Ideas and Writing. Part Two will cover Editing, Publishing and Marketing.

IDEAS

Many people say “I want to write, but I don’t have any ideas.” We’ll ignore them, because they will be represented by the major publishers at some point, probably in their autobiography ‘I Was on Big Brother Once, You Bastards’ or ‘Fifty Shades of Oatmeal: A Life in Window Blinds’.

This greydogtales guide is aimed at those people who are already collecting ideas and hoarding them in a box made of discarded skin cells and spittle. Putting together a few workable ideas is easy. Here are the most common sources for your ace new writing project:

1. Dreams – are a rich source of imagery and concepts which will translate easily into a story which makes little sense to anyone, including you. “Did you dream this?”, people will ask as they edge away from you.

2. Alcohol – produces wild and original ideas which, when typed up quickly at three am, strangely transmute overnight like fairy gold. The next day they seem to be a string of barely comprehensible words linked together by glaring plot holes.

3. Dead writers – are plentiful, and by scouring Project Gutenberg you can find many ideas which were used in little-known works at least a century ago. With luck, no-one will notice – and at least they can’t sue.

4. Public transport – is full of people talking day-to-day nonsense, arguing about their boyfriends and describing hideous intestinal operations. Make sure to listen in, nodding all the time, and when challenged, say “I’m a writer, you know.”

5. Muses – are rare and mostly unreliable. If you find you have a Muse, your best bet is to chloroform it, build a cage for it and then write a best-selling story about having a Muse in a cage.

6. Those notes you’ve been making in margins and on envelopes for ten years – are probably useless for organised writing, as you can no longer remember what they meant. But you can throw them in randomly and claim to be ‘experimental’.

7. Newspapers – are full of made-up things every day. You can steal anything from newspapers, because the chance of what you read being true is very low.

WRITING

This is harder, but not by much. With a basic command of your native language, you will have come across things like sentences before. Writing is essentially a lot of sentences. Make a gap every so often for people to catch their breath, and you have a paragraph. And so on.

The four major elements at this stage are plot, characters, tone, theme, voice and viewpoint. Note: Numeracy is not a requirement. Your computer can count, after all.

1.  Plot – is useful for ensuring that you have a start and an end. You may need to shove a middle in there, but consider it as necessary filler to improve the word count (this is also the role of the second volume in your trilogy). Plots can be simple – they meet, they marry, she kills him because of his habit of putting forks in the spoon drawer, she redeems herself through volunteer work in New Guinea – or complicated – four different Illuminati branches, the Womens’ Institute and the Bank of Scotland all seek the same fish-plate on which Salome carried John the Baptist’s head, while Arthur is in love with the unattainable Kevin but has doubts about his black ops work for the Belgian Government. Makes notes beforehand.

2. Characters – are employed to make the plot happen, regardless of what they are actually like as people. You can give them feelings if you like, but that may interfere with the plot, so be careful. Remember that men and woman react differently to key events, such as mice in the kitchen and nuclear holocaust. Diversity in characterisation does not mean merely various white middle-class males of different heights, despite your father’s hang-up about elevated shoes. Black people do not all come from Harlem or Nigeria, and not all gay people like interior design. No, really.

3. Tone – is important. Remember to refer to the weather a lot, as this helps the reader ‘feel’ what you are saying. Unremitting rain is always a good start if you want to convey a bleak tone. Background diseases and references to mental health issues are good, along with unexplained childhood abuse. If you prefer a cheery, optimistic tone, make sure that your characters smile, nod and look to the future a lot (with umbrellas always to hand). Do use words from your Scrabble dictionary if you want to engage literary readers – these people like to look things up and then decide on the tone themselves later.

4. Theme – is a big one. Are you trying to say that humanity is dying under the weight of its own insane self-destructive urges, and the sun will burn out in the end anyway? Or are you setting out to show that through love, courage and the indiscriminate use of hugs, we will all bond together and conquer the galaxy? Some writers compromise on theme, and suggest that the squalid meaninglessness of existence can be forgotten for a while through hugging. Think hard about this one.

5. Voice – is a tricky devil. Every writer has a unique voice. Sometimes at least four thousand and seventy three writers have that same unique voice as well. What makes yours stand out? You may want to consider the degree to which your personal life and beliefs show up in your work. “He stabbed her repeatedly, just like my mum should have done with Aunt Aggie and her bloody Dresden shepherdesses” may be too direct an approach. Your narrator may incorporate some of your own prejudices, but tread lightly. You may dislike the Catholic Church, but ending each chapter with ‘”Hang the Pope”, can put some readers off.

6. Viewpoint – Best to sort this out right at the beginning. Second person future-perfect viewpoint, for example, can be tricky to carry off. If you write in the first person, remember that your trained CIA assassin will not be mulling over your problem with the dishwasher but will be puzzled at having a gun you can’t describe because you’ve never even had a water-pistol. In general, stick to ‘third person omniscient but occasionally forgetful’, which will get you through most novels. On no accounts use forms of the vocative and address the reader with “O listen now!” every page. This becomes stale quite quickly.

Congratulations. You now have everything you need to construct the first draft of your story, novella or novel. When deciding which of these you’re going for, remember the following rule:

• A story – is something which you made up because your novel’s a disaster
• A novella – is what your novel should have been but there wasn’t enough of it
• A novel – is a novella padded out in the hope that you’ll get noticed

Next time on How to be a Bestselling Author – more words of encouragement and handy hints for everyone. At greydogtales, we care…

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