April 20, 2025
I decided I wanted to write a book, so I did. It's 88k words long. It's rough and unedited right now, though. Anyway, I figured I'd document my process here and say some other random thoughts about the whole thing.
I suppose some people are born knowing they want to write a book. Or, they read a bunch of books when they're in school and decide they want to write one of their own some day. Maybe they get an MFA at a prestigious school or something. I didn't do any of that shit. I never once thought about writing a book until like last year. Had nothing against it, mind you, but I just never really had an idea I was excited about, and I never felt a strong desire to say anything. Bukowski was famous for being unable to stop himself from writing. On his tombstone he has written "Don't Try"; for if you have to try to write, you shouldn't be writing at all. The words never came spilling out from every orifice, so why write? Or, some bullshit like that.
At some point during my travels I became wildly unsatisfied with my life. It happened all at once and it was completely out of my control. No, that's not right. It happened gradually and it's probably my fault. Regardless, I realized then that travel wasn't an end in and of itself, it was more of a means to an end. I was running from fulfillment.
So, what'd I do? Dream of writing a book? Fuck no. I started making a video game. I mean, I knew I wanted to create, I just didn't know what. And, hey, I know how to program, so a game seemed doable. I knew I didn't really feel like making a website or e-product or something boring like that. Games are fun. I like games. I make game.
It was fun at first. It really was. I made great progress, even, I think. I would design and implement interesting systems, learn the programming language (I was using Godot), and learn how all the pieces fit together. But a game isn't just logic and systems, it's a fuckload more than that. It's designing fun gameplay, it's making music and sound effects, it's marketing, too. Worst of all, it's art. It should look good, right?
The only problem is I can't fucking do any of that shit, especially the art. Holy shit it's hard. Pixel art seems so simple because, shit, there aren't that many pixels to place in a 16x16 grid. Except, that's what makes it fucking hard. I would practice for hours, make new pieces and improve, bit by bit. But then I'd look back on what I'd created for the game and be disappointed. I simply couldn't create what I envisioned— what I'd dreamed of when I wanted to make a game. . I didn't have the skills I needed to make something I could be satisfied with. And if I wanted them, I'd need months or years of hard fucking work where I just sucked ass. It fucking killed me.
And so I didn't. I stopped making the game, disheartened by what little it had all amounted to, despite the time I'd spent working on it. It's still there, unfinished. I guess it'll be there forever? But I don't regret it. It was probably the first thing I'd ever really done for myself. I didn't do it because I wanted money. I did it because it seemed cool and I wanted people to have fun playing it. It allowed me to realize I could just do something I was passionate about.
At some point, I came back from all my travels and settled (a little bit) in New York City. I'd visited before, but this time I'd be a little more than just a visitor. There's something magical about NYC. It's a dumb ass thing to say, and it's cliche to the point of frustration, but fuck me if it ain't true. When you're in the city, there's an invisible force all around you and it's telling you something— whispering right in your little ear. It's telling each person something different, I think. It tells some people to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. Others, it tells them they can do anything here. Apparently it also tells people to take a shit under a bridge, too.
Me? It was singing to me. It was a symphony, maybe. Or, some kind of orchestrated machine that I knew I had to observe and document. Everywhere I went I saw something I knew I had to write down. Maybe it was a woman smiling at a pigeon. Or, a burnt out plastic trash can. A woman dropping her cigarette in a small puddle. I knew these moments were special. I knew the city was trying to tell me something. It was showing me what it meant when you say "New York City." So, over the course of about a year, I wrote it all down. Every special moment the city revealed to me, I dutifully recorded.
Fairly quickly, I knew it all needed to go somewhere. I mean, I couldn't keep it all to myself. I had to let everyone know what New York City was. They had to know. Of course, I'd write a book and stuff it all inside there.
The thing about writing is that it's about the lowest friction way to get what's inside your head out into the world. Movies, video games, paintings— they all require years of hard work to make something even remotely passable. But, most people have been writing for pretty much their whole life. Now, most of that is some absolute bullshit, but it's still writing. So, of course it had to be a book.
But what's the book gonna be about? It's not enough to write notes on a page, jumbled and out of order as they were presented to me. No, I'd have to write the symphony myself. I'd have to decide where all the notes should go. And I'd need to place new notes of my own to fill in all the gaps. I think everyone's got something important to say. Something they need everyone to hear, loud and clear. Well, at least I did. So, I plucked a few things I wanted to say from my head and orchestrated my machine.
The first thing I did, on August 18, 2024, was write down everything I wanted the book to be, and everything I wanted it to say. What was the genre? The tone? How long? All that sort of basic, but important shit. Some of it was hard to decide, like what are the conflicts or tone. Some of it was easy, though. I knew it had to be a first-person narrative, and I knew what themes I needed to include.
Eventually, I came up with the characters and then I decided what should happen to them. But, I discovered it's pretty easy to pick an outcome for a character, and it's pretty fucking hard to figure out how we get there in a story. The characters and plot where the hardest part of all this. What kind of people should the main characters be? How did they get to be someone like that? What do they want from life, and how does that all tie into the story, and then how does all that relate to what I'm trying to say with the book. It's all a tangled pile of wires that you need to organize. Or don't. Life's messy.
Once I was satisfied with the characters, it was time to formalize the plot. I knew generally what I wanted to happen, but not how it should happen, and certainly not all the circumstances that would lead to everything. And, how would I start the book? How would it end? Like, the last page. I strung scenes together mostly in a linear fashion. Sometimes I'd decide a scene should be spliced between two others, but it was mostly sort of straightforward.
Practically, I just wrote all this shit down in different Obsidian notes so I didn't forget and could track and map it all easily. It was a lot to keep track of, from characters to themes to NYC's precious moments to the whole damn plot— separated by headings. But, it all came together.
I've heard stories of people taking fucking ages to write a book. Like, some books take goddamn years out of some people's lives. I knew I didn't want my book to take that long to write, and I knew it wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't know why some people take that long. Either some people are just perfectionists, are shit at writing quickly, or what I wrote is low-quality garbage that I pumped out too quickly for it to be good. I don't know. But I didn't want mine to take longer than a few months.
So, how much then? Well, I had everything planned out, basically, so I figured a good schedule would be to write about 10,000 words every two weeks. That was my goal. It's a little under 1,000 words a day. Frankly, it seems like pathetically little to write. I've farted out blog posts longer than that. This post is already longer than that. In practice, though, it was about right for me. I'm still working a full-time job, but I was still able to find the time to write.
I also knew that I wanted to sprinkle in little rewards as I went along. For each 10,000 word goal up to 90,000 words (the length I estimated for the finished novel), I decided something I'd wanted but maybe held off on. The rewards got better (and more expensive) the closer I got to finishing it. I also planned to look back on what I'd written at each goal, but I didn't do that shit. My start date was November 25, 2024, and my expected end date was April 30, 2025. I tracked all that with Todoist. Pretty straightforward.
So, if you've made it to this point, maybe you're hoping for some tips on how to write. I know a lot of people struggle with writing a lot each day. Unfortunately, I don't really have any tips. Mostly, I just sorta sat down and the words came out. It's a mix of stream fo consciousness, looking at the notes of what I wanted to write, looking at the NYC moments I wanted to include and placing them. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes I struggled to write even the next paragraph, let alone the next 10,000. Sometimes it was easy and I wrote thousands of words in a single sitting.
Mostly, the important thing is to not focus on your daily output. The goals are bi-weekly for a reason. I do a weekly review most weeks, so I'd consider my progress weekly at most. And it's usually not a "how many words did I write this week?", but rather just a sentiment: did I feel good about how much I wrote or not? There were some weeks where I swear to God I didn't write a single word. but there were others where I crushed my goals and then some. At one point I ended up two whole weeks ahead of schedule. That proved helpful when I fell two weeks behind that back to just "on-schedule."
I will say that you should write however works best for you. If you can only write one day a week, write 5,000 words that day and fuck off the other six. If you can't write more than a few hundred words a day, then just write every day I guess. I think you probably just want to make it as easy as possible to just write. I'll also say that I work best in a place that isn't my own home. Most of my writing happened in a co-working I already have for my job. It really helped.
Sometimes throughout the writing process, I'd realize I needed something more than what I'd planned. Like, two scenes didn't make sense right next to each other, or there just needed to be more. Hell, I actually left an entire chunk of the book undecided because I wanted to see how I felt about it when I finally got there. I guess the plot is a kind of moving thing, even if you've already planned it. Don't be afraid to add, remove, or flesh out a simple scene in the moment. Just do what feels right.
In the end, I ended up finishing on April 7th 2025. That's about three weeks ahead of schedule, though I did come in 2,000 words short of my 90,000 word estimate. But, I wouldn't have the book be any longer. I may even shorten it as I edit, who knows. As the end of the book I remember feeling like I just wanted it to be done. It's not like I was sick of it or anything. And I wasn't struggling super hard every time I wrote it. I just wanted it to be finished. I wanted to have it done. I needed to see the project finished so I could be satisfied. I decided to just write until it was done.
Most of the writing was pretty easy for me. I think the first-person narration and the main character's likeness to me made it easy to just write what I thought would be interested for him to think. And, I had most of of the scenes already decided. I also had a bunch of random things I could put in wherever I felt like it. Dialogue, though, was hard as fuck, especially at first. I'll probably have to revisit a lot of it in editing. There were also some scenes that were hard to write, emotionally. You know, life is mostly good times, I think. But as long as you're living, there will be bad times, too.
I expected finishing the first draft to feel like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Instead it felt like nothing. It's not that I wasn't satisfied with my work or it wasn't fulfilling— it was. But, still, the only thought I had the moment I finished is that I could trash the whole thing and (almost) nobody would know. The world would continue exactly as it had before. If I wanted to, I could pretend like nothing had ever happened. It was a terrifying thought, even if I knew I wouldn't be doing that.
The work is far from over. Actually, I've done arguably the easiest part. The next step is editing, and I have intentionally not yet started that. Apparently it's good to take a break between finishing the novel and editing it. Give yourself some time to disconnect from it. The waiting has actually been driving me a little crazy, so I wrote this damn post. My planned start date for editing is May 1st. I had originally planned to start June 1st, given my previous end date. But, since I finished early, I was able to move it up a month.
As for editing, I have no fucking clue how it'll go. I've barely edited anything in my life, I feel like. I've got to do several passes, too. First, decide which scenes still make sense, or where overarching plot changes need to be made. Basically, determine if there need to be any big changes. And you don't fucking touch the document until you've finished the whole thing. Just gotta write notes and do the editing all at once at the end. Then, once that's all taken care of, you make sure all the sentences and paragraphs flow nicely. Or, rearrange paragraphs and shit. You're allowed to edit the document as you go along now. Finally, you do the basic grammar editing. This is the simplest and apparently least important.
What's my plan for all this? Fuck if I know. Haven't made the plan yet. Maybe I'll post an update when I finish this step.
Ah, fuck, that's right. Then there's still the most daunting task of all: getting someone to give a shit about this thing you poured your whole being into. Really, I flip-flop between thinking I wrote a really great book with lots of interesting characters and deep themes and thinking I wrote a huge, steaming pile of shit that nobody is going to like. Really, I have no clue, and I won't have any clue until it's published, will I? How wonderful.
I think first, you're technically supposed to have beta readers check out your book first. Then they'll trash it or I guess give you some helpful feedback, usually in exchange for money. Or, maybe they'll be relatives or friends so they'll have some kind of invisible social obligation to read your book for you.
Honestly, this is the step that scares me the most. At least editing is fairly straightforward, even if I don't exactly have a lot of experience with it. It feels very doable. Publishing is like this nebulous concept to me. Like, I know you submit your "manuscript" (why the hell is it called this? I think some mustache twirling agents/publishers decided this word was more pretentious than book or novel and therefore preferred) to literary agents, who then decide if your book is shit or not based on a blurb you pass to them. No pressure, right? Then, if they decide it's not shit, they ask for the full thing. After reading the whole thing, they once again decide if it's shit, and pitch it to publishers only if it really isn't shit.
This whole process is apparently miserable, which makes sense because it reminds me of applying to jobs. Here's hoping I handle rejection well. I suppose I'll try to get it published this way as best I can. This is the "traditional" path to publishing, 'cause it gets you published by big names like Penguin or HarperCollins, or some smaller publishers too. But they'll handling printing and (maybe?) publishing and shit. The stuff that isn't writing about getting a book out on shelves.
The alternative to all this is self-publishing, usually through Amazon, though that'd mean you'd only be publishing digitally. Personally, I wanna hold my book in my fucking hands, man, but if everyone decides my book is shit and not worth publishing, I guess I'll fall back to self-publishing. Really, what I want is for people to read my book. I want people to read it and feel something. I want to change people's minds about things, or make them realize things they secretly knew all along. I want people to interpret the messages of my book and decide what it all means for themselves. I think I just want people to care about what I might have to say.
Yeah, I know I haven't posted in awhile. I got sick of it, honestly. And I found it hard to both write the book and write the blog, especially when not many people are even reading this mf. Google just congratulated me on getting five clicks in the past month, so yay me I guess. But, I wanted to document my process, because I feel like so many people treat these things as some kind of secret sauce they can't tell anybody. Personally, I want as many people to create great things as possible. I just hope this can help even one person create something.