Thread by @CollinsMandy

Let's talk a little about books. About the process of writing, editing and producing a book and what that really takes. Because I have recently had three people approach me either for advice or to ask me to edit their books, all on extremely tight deadlines.

All three are works of non fiction, which is where my expertise is greatest. I've written my own non-fiction, I've ghostwritten several NF books, and edited many more. So let's assume you've survived my lecture about whether you should be writing a book at all.

Because the truth is that not every story is suitable for a book. And even if it is, not all books need to be published. Some just need to be written - but that's a whole other discussion...

So you're writing your book and you've given yourself three months to do it in.

And at the end of that period, you are going to publish that book - either through traditional channels, or you'll self publish, and you hope to have a finished product three to four weeks later.

Sounds reasonable, right?

The experienced writers reading this are chuckling, though. Because they know that it's not reasonable at alm. But I get these kinds of requests - and expectations - from people ALL THE TIME.

When you sit down to write a book, you see, what you are producing is a first draft. This is not something you send to an editor. This is just the beginning.

Because writing a book - telling a substantial story - takes a lot of time and crafting and work.

Experienced writers will often produce in excess of 10 versions of their manuscript before they even consider it final. And then they send it for editing.

Then the editor will work on it, painstakingly checking it not only for language errors, but for storytelling errors.

We look for leaps of logic, for too much or too little information, for logic and flow, for poor or inaccurate research, for potential legal issues and we will also typically go through that manuscript several times, working closely with the writer.

As you can imagine, this takes time. It takes several weeks, sometimes months, and because it's so pernickety, if you do more than a few hours at a time, you start to miss stuff. It's very fine, detailed work.

Only then can it go to layout, which again takes several weeks, after which it must be proofread several times, because you miss things on a screen that you will pick up on paper. And then you have to check that fixing the errors hasn't introduced errors elsewhere.

By now you should understand why I said at the beginning that experienced writers would be chuckling at the time frames.

Can you produce a book of, say, 65K words in the time frame suggested at the beginning of this thread?

Well, yes and no. I did write one of my books (of 80K) words and I had to edit it myself (far from ideal) in four months. It nearly killed me. But it's not my best work, and I wish I'd had more time. And, crucially, I am a very experienced writer, who makes her living from words.

But even if you're prepared to use your first draft as a final draft - and I would advise strongly against it - expecting to print or even have an electronic version ready three weeks later is ridiculous.

And if you do pull it off, you're going to have an extremely sub-standard product on your hands, with your name on it. And all issues of self-respect aside, the potential reputational harm is huge.

And if you think critics are harsh, wait until the court of public opinion takes hold and people start discussing you on social media. Is it really worth it?

A reputation is a difficult thing to rebuild, once lost.

In my opinion, you haven't don't start writing your book until you start working on the second draft. Before that you're just vomiting out content. So give yourself time - a book is a serious undertaking that will require a lot of hard work.

It's also an organic, dynamic process that shifts as you work on it, and requires distance after each draft so you can look at it with fresh eyes each time you come back to it.

There's a prevailing notion that writing books is kind of romantic,...

... That it will flow from your brain to your fingers, pretty much fully formed.

Well, if you want it to be any good, you need to disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. It takes work and it takes time - and much more of both than you could ever imagine.

The End