Process

What they don’t teach you in school is that everything has a process. Everything.

They hint at it, they teach you some things where the process is easy to understand, like the life cycle of a butterfly, but they don’t stress that EVERYTHING has a process.

The part of EVERYTHING I want to talk about is books. Books have a definite process. But it usually get talked about in bits and pieces, because it is more complex than a butterfly, but just as wonderful in the end.

CONCEPT – We are storytellers by nature. History tells us that campfires and families carried the facts of our existence for thousands of years before we started writing it down. So when the idea forms in our brain, we now put it down on paper. Sounds simple. Write it down. If you write enough, it’s a book, right? Not really. At best, you have a first draft. At worse, you have a hodge-podge of words.

CONTENT – We now have to move parts around to make sense, to make sure that things are understandable to a reader. To make sure it is correct to it’s time period. For instance, if it is a novel about your great-great-grandmother, she probably would not use the expression, “Hey, Dude”.

Enough for now. Return in a couple of days and I’ll talk about the other things you need for a whole book.