How to Write a Book or Story

Video Transcript

"So, you want to write a book. I don't suppose I can talk you out of it, so I might as well help you where I can. The first thing you need to know is why do you want to write this book? If you just want to express yourself you're going to write it very differently than if you want to sell it and make a great deal of money. Incidentally, if you want to make a great deal of money you are going to fail. There are more professional baseball players in America than people who support themselves from freelance writing. But you want to go ahead with it anyway, all right. Knowing why you want to do it helps you to shape the way you want to tell the story; whether it's fiction or nonfiction, so understand that. The next thing you're going to need is what the Germans call sitzfleish, the ability to keep your butt in the chair. If you write one page a day for a year and each page is brilliant, at the end of the year you'll have three hundred sixty five pages, which is a reasonable length for a book. That's a lot of work. Most people; a page a day is a pretty good rate in fact, so you have to be able to sit down and do it. You probably remember the narrative arc from high school, exposition, complication, climax, and resolution. It doesn't matter whether you're telling a true story or a made up story, or whether you're writing about dragons and elves or macroeconomics. You still have to start with the background, set up the situation, put the person in some kind of problem, or in the case of macroeconomics put the entire society in the problem of trying to understand macroeconomics, climax, and resolution. We keep the reader involved by using suspense. Again, fiction or nonfiction doesn't really matter. We have to pay off with a resolution at the end so that the reader doesn't hate us and say I want to destroy it to end it. If they want to destroy it to end differently that's one thing. If they wanted it to end you've probably got a problem. You have to have that resolution where the, the right number of strands are all tied together. Not everything needs to be neatly tied up in a package, but you have to give a satisfying end to the reader."