How I start a new book

Ten ways to keep your writing sustainable, orderly and sane

Hello,

I appear to have started writing my next book. I realise that I should have done this quite some time ago, but life - and other projects - got in the way. In all honesty, it’s hard to truly account for the time, and I’d rather not think about it too hard. I’m quite easily distracted. At least I’ve finally got round to it. 

I used to think that I was pretty much a techniqueless writer who did things differently each time. But now, quite a few books down the line, I realise that I have a process that helps me to orient myself as I begin a new project. It’s not exactly watertight, and there’s plenty of room for meandering along the way. But today, I thought I’d share the cornerstones of my approach. It was actually soothing to get it all on the page; it gave me hope that, however daunted I feel now, I can see my way to the end. 

I’m always incredibly curious to know how other people work, and even as I write this, I’m slightly concerned that other writers practise in a far more magical way, retreating to stone turrets filled with ancient alchemical tomes. I just close the door to my office, take steps to cut through the chaos, and try not to let my head get in the way. Writing is a big ol’ iceberg, and the words that come out are only the tip. This is the rest.

1. Chase down your ideas

The very beginnings of my writing projects are marked mainly by exhaustive reading. The actual writing is surprisingly thin on the ground. Instead, I make an attempt to know absolutely everything about the topic in hand, hunting down every book, article, film and interview on my subject, making transcripts where I need them, and copying quotes and ideas into my notebook. Very little of this will make it into my final draft, but that doesn’t matter one bit. This phase is about building my confidence to say anything on the subject and generating enough ideas to populate a whole book. But it’s also about desire.

In truth, the genesis of a book is, for me, deeply chicken-and-egg. Yes, I am putting in the hours - burning the shoe leather like a pulp-fiction detective - but it wouldn’t be possible without the obsessive fixation that lands on me when I start a new project. I would love to claim that I just labour away until it works, and that this is some kind of morally superior stance on my part. But instead, it’s a kind of test. If I am attached enough to a putative book, my sense of fascination will only ever be deepened by burying myself in the topic. It’s almost romantic in nature, a kind of ardour that won’t be dampened by reason. It becomes the central pillar of my world-view: all things, even seemingly irrelevant topics, will feel connected to my book, somehow. 

However, like many romances, there is often a moment when the passion just dies early on, and I can no longer bear to throw myself at the pursuit of perfect union with my research. That’s how I know that this one isn’t a goer. I have learned to let go of these projects that never quite came to be, but it’s still a loss. Sometimes, though, I find my true topic in the ashes of the old one. A small fragment of my research keeps on gnawing at me, and off I go again…

2. Make space, not time

A book takes space, and not time. You need to make room for it, but it shrivels under any goals that are too specific. I’ve learned over decades (and this is still very much a work in progress) that you need to divorce yourself from the mentality of an office worker, and instead think about creating space in which books can weave themselves. This might mean blocking out mornings to write, but it might also mean always having a notebook to hand so that you can jot down ideas, getting into a habit of writing down your dreams each morning, or concertedly spending more time watching movies rather than TV quiz shows. For me, it means taking a lot of walks. These are the kind of things that make the space for a book to grow by itself, and to become wilder and richer than it would through mere planning. 

Physical space is important, too. Over the years, I’ve found that I need to write my books in a different place to where I work, even if that’s just a different corner of the same room. It’s all about association. If I’m at the desk where I check my emails and attend meetings, I will keep on getting distracted by things from my to-do list. Keeping a separate place for writing (which - full disclosure - has sometimes for me meant sitting up in bed with my laptop on a pile of pillows) helps me to transition more easily into the act of thinking. 

3. Write a proposal first

I realise they make a lot of non-fiction writers groan, but I love writing proposals. A lot of people assume that I no longer need to go through this process, and that instead I just have a nice chat with my editor and she draws up a contract. Not true. I still need to do this to win my next contract, and I’m glad of it. 

I find it incredibly useful to put together a package with my first 10,000 words, an outline, and a chapter-by-chapter summary of what I plan to write. Far from being a waste of time, proposals have saved me more angst than I can express; there have been quite a few occasions when writing a proposal has shown me that a book won’t work. I would far rather discover that after three chapters than after 300 pages. Whether the book takes off or sinks, most of this early attempt will be wasted, and that’s fine. Books cannot - and should not - be created in an efficient way. The wrong turns and dead ends are what bring them to life.

I see proposal-writing as an experimental phase, a kind of sandbox for the real project. It helps me to find the voice of each new book, forcing me to articulate the ideas that seem so ethereal in my head. The most useful part is the two-page synopsis, in which I try to distil not just the content of the book, but also its mood and tone, its unique language. It’s a huge challenge to get it right, and working on it usually draws out the deeper concerns below the surface of the concept. Even if everything else changes along the way - the chapters I thought I’d write and the concepts I thought I’d explore - I tend to find that this outline stays true. That’s if I get it right in the first place.

4. Keep it close to your chest…

If you ask me about my work in progress, you will get an evasive answer that will make both of us feel awkward. That’s not because I think you’ll steal my ideas. It’s because there’s a big explosion of concepts filling my brain, and I struggle to articulate what it’s all about until the whole thing is finished. 

But I’ve also learned to protect my projects in their early stages. They are fragile and pale, and I don’t want to hear anyone else’s views on them. People who are not writers tend to make intrusive comments like, You should write about this, or That sounds really boring. People who are writers can, on occasion, be a bit snippy or condescending. I, on the other hand, am over-sensitive and anxious about the whole thing. It’s best to keep it all nice and safe until it’s ready to face the world. 

5. …but also talk about it

One of the things that made writing Enchantment so hard during lockdown was the lack of opportunity to chat about the ideas in my book. That doesn’t mean I’m telling everyone all about it (see above), but I do find that the issues come up spontaneously in conversations while I go about my daily life. That’s why it’s useful to get out of the house during the writing process, rather than glueing myself to my desk and trying to maximise my word count.

This is really about inviting the random into my process. By chatting to other people about life in general, I spontaneously start to see specific links to my work. Books have a kind of magnetism, and I find that everything is miraculously relevant to my ideas. But it’s also about letting my thoughts breathe a bit. The nine-to-five work ethic does not apply here. It’s good to look away. 

6. Set lame goals 

Let’s not mythologise the creative process too much: writing books takes sustained effort over a long time, and some level of organisation is necessary if you want to actually finish the damned thing. But when I started, I treated writing like an office job. I thought I could conquer it with metrics: I calculated my average word rate, boosted it a little higher to make it extra spicy, and set myself goals such as: 6am - 7am, 2,000 words. 

I sometimes even met those word goals, but I often wrote absolute trash in the process. I can barely even type that fast, and I certainly can’t think while I’m doing it. When I completed my first novel, the manuscript stood at 140,000 words, which was nearly twice the length I needed it to be. How did it get so long? I’d written everything twice: every piece of description was rendered in two different ways with identical meaning; each metaphor was repeated; there were lists of synonyms where a single word was required. Characters talked endlessly without ever quite getting to the point. The whole thing was written in the service of an arbitrary number of pages, rather than literary quality. 

Since that first, heroic edit that cut out 60,000 words and re-wrote the rest, I’ve changed the way I think about word-count targets. I still use them, but I set myself completely lame goals with the bare minimum of words I can get away with, and that frees me up to see where the session takes me. It’s rare for me to ever try to write more than 2,500 words in one week, and it’s often far less. I need to leave plenty of time to do the other things that support my writing, like reading and travelling, and it’s so easy to exclude this from the neat spreadsheet that makes everything look tidy. Sometimes (actually, quite often), I need to pause in the middle of a chapter and rethink my approach entirely. This takes time, and produces zero words, but it’s worth it.

One of the key ways that I keep my goals lame is to plan firebreaks in my writing schedule, usually every three weeks. This acknowledges the fact that I get tired along the way, and my ability to find freshness in my work dwindles. It also allows me time to catch up if I’ve failed to adhere to my already-lame goals. 

Somehow, despite this, I (usually) manage to finish on time. I’m not lazy; just realistic about what I will actually do. 

7. Open a project book

For each book, I open a special notebook just for that project, and I use it to track my thoughts as they progress. It’s a bit like keeping a diary: I start every writing day by jotting down a few notes about what I’m thinking, and sometimes it runs to pages. This is my anchor; even if I end up making notes elsewhere (for example in my regular notebook), I cross reference them in the project book. But it also tends to hold the memoir elements as I experience them - here is a space when I capture everything that happens, the minutiae of my experiences, and the facts that I’ll need later. As much as anything else, it gives me a routine. Every session starts this way. It prevents hours of staring into space. 

8. Keep it looking good

Right from the start, I lay out my draft exactly as it will look when I submit it to my publisher. I double-space the lines, set indents on each new paragraph, and number the pages. I tag each heading properly, rather than just making the font bigger, which means that I can index my chapters and navigate around the document easily. I add in footnotes for each reference, ready for my copyeditor to check. It saves a lot of work later, when I’m sick of the sight of the thing, but it also sets the tone as I work. This matters, and so I take care of it. It will be seen by others, so I keep it tidy. I deserve to work in a pleasant environment, even on-screen. For the same reason, I shower and get dressed before I start work, and keep my desk tidy. I don’t work well in goblin mode. 

9. Document absolutely everything 

Books take a long time, and pieces of research that seem so obvious in Year One can vanish entirely by Year Three, when your editor is asking for the proof behind that assertion that someone in Brazil has a talking dog. I cannot tell you how often I’ve lost access to references I’ve made in my text, or have spent half a day chasing down a vaguely remembered concept that I’m sure I read in one book or another. These days, I am ridiculously careful to keep all my information to hand. 

I fully admit that my approach is a little ‘belt and braces’, but it lets me sleep at night. I store everything I read, regardless of whether I think I’ll use them. I keep digital texts in Evernote and Pocket (belt and braces, friends), carefully tagged with keywords. Quite often, I also print them out too, just in case. For physical items like books and magazines, I clear a specific shelf at the beginning of each new book, and devote it to collecting all my research materials together. I no longer rely on my own notes; if I read a useful book in a library, I take photocopies of the pages at the very least, but I buy the book if I can. I like to think it’s paying something back into my industry as well as giving me a chance to check up on my quotations at a later date. 

In addition, I log all of this in bibliographic software like Easybib, just so that I have a master list. I never actually check this, but it’s there.

Finally - and this is a bit more fun and less worryingly obsessive - I also keep a Google Doc where I can dump links, quotes, ideas and travel plans. It’s scrappy and completely nonsensical, but I often wander through it during the course of writing, and stumble upon really good ideas that I’ve long since forgotten. Now I come to think of it, I should probably back it up somewhere. 

10. Keep a ‘simmer’ file

The process of writing books is full of despair, and at many points during the process I will experience a strong yearning to write something completely different that seems so much more juicy and coherent. There’s no point fighting it: these ideas will come, and the best thing to do is to document your thoughts, add in any links to research you’ve already done, and keep it safe until it’s needed. I call this a ‘simmer’ file, and it’s designed to keep intrusive ideas warm until I can deal with them properly, and even to indulge them a little. 

Quite often, these ideas do not survive in the daylight. But working on them for a few days can be hugely refreshing, and will often send you back to your original project with renewed ardour. Those of them that do survive might just become your next book. It’s worth looking after them. 

If you’re curious about the fruits of this process, my books are available in all good bookstores!

Enchantment UK /US

Wintering UK / US 

The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US 

Take care,

Katherine

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Coming up at The Clearing

Next month’s True Stories Book Club guest is Maggie Smith, and we’ll be getting together to talk about her book We Could Make This Place Beautiful on 29th February, 7pm UK/2pm ET.

If you’d like to attend this and other live Book Club events where you can ask authors questions about their work, and have access to the replays afterwards, subscribe to be a paid subscriber here.

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If you think a friend or loved one would enjoy The Clearing by Katherine May, gift subscriptions are available here | Website | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US 

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