Six Unusual Tips for Writing Your first Book

Just start writing. 

This is generally the advice most advanced writers come up with. 

I find it cliché, and too easy. I rather ask: Do you feel pregnant with a story? 

At the end of the day, the story will write itself. You are merely the instrument. But you need to be a well-tuned instrument. Clean and ready. 

One part of the story is creating those conditions. 

When you picture your writing aspirations as a barrel of inspiration, skill and ambition: how full is it?

Writing is about tuning into momentum and creating conditions

When the barrel is full, and the water is starting to overflow. This is the moment to start writing. The words are likely to pour out and drench those virgin white pages with that story in your mind.

Here are six tips that will help you to become the instrument and to finish your creative birth.

Create the conditions that work for you

Can you only write a book when you're financially free?

No. You don't. 

You can start it as a side hustle, but in the end, you'll find it's everything but a hustle.

There are millions of writers that create brilliant work on their phones in the metro rushing home, by getting up 1 hour earlier each working day, by moving from busy city life to quiet countryside.

You don't need to be Dan Brown hanging upside down like a bat before his genius mind starts pouring out words.

When you work 9 to 5, when you have kids or a difficult borderline relation, that's likely to take a lot of your precious writing energy away. Still, you can totally create your private conditions to write.

It's all about priorities. 

When I wrote the base structure of my novel in 3 months in winter in Ibiza, I rarely had a social life. I refused all invitations to go out at night. The mantra that kept me going was: It's only 3 months of my life. It will be totally worth it. 

And it was. 

Find your own unique conditions that work for you. 

When you start - Go all in.

When the barrel starts to overflow, when the conditions are set, you are ready to rock and roll.

I started and wrote my first page.

And then waited for another year.

A writer's block of 365 days after finishing the first chapter. My mind took me on a journey of 2 possible scenarios of my book. And I was not able to choose.

I actually liked this period of taking notes, writing out the 2 scenarios, reading a lot, learning. All that time, my story spirit waited patiently for me to make the right choice.

Writing a novel is a matter of building confidence.

When you are not completely convinced you are going to write your novel, and feel the stamina and guts to finish it, you might back off for a while. 

You are testing your dream.

Once I chose the scenario, wrote down my chapters, sculptured my characters, I knew it was the right moment. I wrote every early morning my minimum of 1000 words for 3 months. Sometimes adding to 3–4 or even 5000 words. I had no clue where this journey would take me.

I was writing my novel. Nothing beats that feeling.

When you find your sacred momentum, go all in. 

Turn your book-idea into the best-kept secret

There is a magical aspect to the birth of your story. To contain its magic it feels that not revealing any detail about the story will concentrate its power and potential.

This is because your story is in the inception phase. It's an embryo. It's super vulnerable. It's the same feeling why parents wait for the perfect moment to release the name of their baby, 

You don't want some random friend to intervene with your pristine creative process by asking "What is the story about?"

Because you might not know yourself. That's the other reason to treat your idea like the holy grail. 

Writing is a creative process where you create a new world on the go with every chapter. During this process, the story can start to lead you. 

You might end up in a slum in New Delhi when your intention was your hero to become a Bitcoin millionaire hanging out in Miami.

Let your friends wait out there in the dark for a while, until you are finished.

Find yourself a writing buddy

Try to find a writing buddy. This is half of the work.

I luckily found my partner in crime. We started writing on the same day. 

Crazy enough, she experienced the same blocks and crisis at the same moment, as if we were connected with an invisible wire. 

Her story spirit and mine must have been friends.

Find your partner in crime, to share this deeply intellectual process.

Realize you'll be 90% alone in this. Get the best out of the shared 10% with a writing buddy, you'll benefit both. 

Don't spoil that 10%. 

Enjoy the process, how hard it may get.

There is so much to say about writing. 

Medium, for example, is an eternal library of infinite advice. 

What I remember most, is this burning ambition to finish my novel. The awareness that I would leave humanity something behind long after my bones had turned into bird food at the cemetery. I have no kids, so this book did feel like my first baby.

Advice about editing, marketing, covers, and how to become a bestselling author you can get elsewhere. 

Writing your first novel is a stairway of experiences that will lead to this memorable day when you write the last sentence.

You have reached the heaven of your manifested dream, the birth of your spirit story, the timestamp of your eternal signature in the worldwide dance of literature.

The feeling of writing those last sentences will probably stay with you forever. It is all worth it, I promise you. 

Writing is a mirror, like all art forms. It shows you who you are.

Learn the Aikido of writing - It's all psychological

A writer's block is a lack of confidence. It is a purely psychological phenomenon. 

When you get stuck, get together with your writer's buddy and talk about what's happening with you and your creative flow. 

Talking about anything that blocks you will get you in writing mode again. You won't find yourself any longer alone in a dark forest of words where you temporarily had lost your way.

You will only write your first novel once. Enjoy the process.

Whether it will become that NR.1 bestseller or not, it's irrelevant. 

You've brought your story spirit on this earth to live forever in the minds of people as long as they will read your words.

It's an absolute intellectual orgasm to see your book in that bookshop, to smell the freshly pressed pages. And to come back the next week to see that it's gone.

Lucien Lecarme