Don’t Write That Book (the best writing advice I’ve ever received)
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TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO 001
If you’re like me, you’ve probably got a story idea for a huge, space opera with different civilizations and eras and magic systems, and, of course, time travel.
But let me tell you the best advice I received when I started writing fiction:
Don’t write that book.
Yes.
The best writing advice I’ve every received is don’t write.
It came from my friend Lance Schaubert. He wasn’t talking to me specifically, I think I read it on his blog, and we weren’t friends yet, but it resonated with me.
His advice wasn’t to never write that book. The full advice was to not start my writing career with a story that big.
He said to start with something small.
So I did.
And he was right.
Enter: The Rose Weapon
This was 2016. I had written a handful of short stories and was ready to try my hand at something longer.
So, for my first book, I decided to write a small, familiar story, adding my own twist to it, and using the tried and true hero’s journey outline.
By doing this, I made sure there was never more than two people in the scene at the same time. I had a hard enough time trying to figure out how to write dialogue between two people. Trying to balance a group conversation would have been impossible for me.
If I would have started my writing career with trying to write that big space saga time travel fantasy story, with all of the characters and locations and plots and subplots and side plots, I wouldn’t have finished it.
I would have gotten discouraged, more than the regular levels of discouragement an author gets when writing a book, and I would never have finished.
But I did finish.
I stuck to an outline and wrote a short, 30K word novella about a dragon that attacks a viking village every ten years, and a young soon-to-be-chief who has to deal with it.
The goal of the first book wasn’t to tell a story that would blow everyone’s mind with its originality. The goal was to learn what it felt like to write a book. To finish a book.
Period.
So, shelf that space saga, pick one of your simpler story ideas, and write a book you can finish in the next twelve months.
Until next time.
Jump. Build. Fly.
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This video’s feature indie book is Bell Hammers by Lancelot Schaubert. Bell Hammers is a picaresque novel about carpenters taking on an oil company using practical jokes, and is based on interviews with the author's grandfather.
Pick up your copy of Bell Hammers today!