How to write

Last Oct. 1, I was a speaker in a panel on “So You Want To Write a Book” at the Filipino American International Book Festival held in the San Francisco Public Library. The other panel members were Juanita Tamayo-Lott, Marivi Blanco, Paulino Lim, Jose Dalisay, and Criselda Yabes. Oscar Peñaranda was the moderator.

For those not able to attend that session, here is a summary of my tips on how to write:

When should you write?

Anytime as long as it’s the same time.

If you read the biographies of famous writers, there is one thing most of them had in common. They all had their favorite time to write. That time is called “writing time.” Writing time is sacred. Whether it is early in the morning, late at night, sometime during the day, every weekend, during November (during National Novel Writing Month or “Nanowrimo”), or even every other year, that time is sacred. If you want to be a writer, you should not allow any distractions during that time — not phone calls, not text messages, not Facebook, not even regular meals.

The extreme example is American playwright Arthur Miller, who would shut himself in his study all day and not allow his wife Marilyn Monroe to disturb him (needless to say, that marriage did not last!).

A recent example is Samantha Sotto, who wrote her novel “Before Ever After” while waiting for her son who was attending prep school.

Where should you write?

Anywhere as long as it’s the same place.

Again, there is Miller in his study. There is Sotto in the coffee shop across the street from her son’s school. J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel in the back room of a tea and coffee shop in Edinburgh. Unlike writing time, writing place is not sacred, because you can do a lot more things in a study than write, and a coffee shop is about as public a place as you can get. But there is something about a writing place that stimulates creativity. Whatever that is, whether it is the clutter in a study or the smell of coffee, it is crucial to the imagination of a writer.

How do you write a book?

There are eight easy steps.

First, you must have an idea.

Your idea does not have to be original. Who has original ideas anyway? Apple’s iPad and iPhone are based on ideas found in “Star Trek” (which itself took its ideas from old science fiction stories). Shakespeare borrowed his plots and characters from earlier writers. F. Sionil Jose admits to being influenced by Jose Rizal who was in turn influenced by Cervantes and so on. Many, if not all, the stories in the Old Testament can be found in other ancient books. Even the idea of resurrection, central in the New Testament, was around long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

What is original about your idea is that it is yours. You are unique. You are the only one on earth ever to have had your life experiences. Use your own experiences as the source of your book. This does not mean that you will be writing an autobiography, but it means that whatever you have to say should be based on what you really did or are really doing in your own life.

Second, you have to research. You can research in a library, on the Web, or in the field. You cannot rely only on your own experiences. Even if you have traveled a lot, loved and lost a lot, done a lot, you still are only you. There are a lot of people that have similar, though not the same, experiences as you. If you want your book to be read by a lot of people, you must find out what other people have experienced.

Third, after deciding on which of your ideas you will write about and after doing research on that idea, you can write your first draft. This means writing, writing, writing. Write without stopping to correct spelling, grammar, facts, and anything else. Write without worrying about whether what you are writing will go into the first chapter or the last one. This means simply writing to express whatever it is you want to express.

In technical terms, it means writing until you reach at least 50,000 words if you are writing nonfiction and 70,000 if you are writing a novel. (The number of words is on the lower left hand corner of a Microsoft Word document.)

Your first draft is what Syd Field (the teacher of many Hollywood screenwriters) calls “the terrible pages.” The thing to do with your first draft is to throw it away. I don’t mean that literally (although some famous writers did that), because you will need your soft copy later when you revise. You should, however, be ready to discard the whole first draft, because it might not look at all like the final product. You have to be psychologically prepared “to kill your baby,” as Alfred Yuson likes to put it.

The fourth step is what will make you a writer, rather than just someone keeping a diary or fulfilling a classroom assignment. This is the step called “First Rewrite.” (To be continued)