Dan Brown - How to Write a Book: Writing a Novel That Sells

Library House Books

Paramount, CA

Copyright 2018 Dan Brown

All rights reserved. No part of thisbook may be reproduced in any format or by any means withoutwritten permission from the publisher.

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How To Write A Book: Writing A NovelThat Sells

by Dan Brown

ISBN:978-1-936828-44-9(Softcover)

First Edition March 2016

Digital Library Edition January 2018

1. The Seed 3

2. Nothing important has ever happened to me'' 6

3. Catching YourSeeds 8

4. Write about what you know.(?) 11

5. Knowabout what you write. 13

6. Keep a journal.15

7.Warning: a theme is not a seed. 20

8. How much planning?22

9. Take notes. 24

10. Setting:Place and Time 27

11. Characters 34

12. Plot 39

13. Research 42

14. Form 44

15. Point of View46

16.For whom do you not write? 55

17. Know when toquit. 57

18. The best laid plans... 58

19. Writing AsMeditation 59

20.Your Writer Versus Your Critic 62

21. Pace and Temperament: Flaubert Versus Sand 64

22. The Beginning 66

23. The Middle 68

24. The Ending 71

25. Don'tsave anything' 73

26.Writing is rewriting 75

27. First, Set itcool. 77

28. Read it through.79

29. Making Changes81

30. TheEmergence of Theme 87

31.When do you ask for criticism? 89

32.Who should criticize your work? 92

33.How should you take criticism? 98

34. Read it aloud.99

35. When is it done?100

I never knew any writers before I started towrite. Until then I thought books and paintings and music justpoured out of special people called artists, who possessed a rarequality called talent, which was easily recognized at a veryearly age and immutable, like the color of their eyes. Thesemisconceptions led me to asking the wrong questions, like, Am Igood? or Am I too old to start? They led me into agonies of fearand self-hate and paralysis every time I encountered the ordinary,daily problems in the process of writing. They led me to makingresolutions to quit, followed by dejected crawling back to thetypewriter because I couldn't quit.

After a while I quit quitting, gave upasking myself if I was a real writer, accepted my compulsion, andasked people to recommend books that would help me. Some teachersgave me titles of excellent books that were worse than no help atall. Written by critics examining the finished products of greatmasters, these books scared me by pointing out inimitableachievements, and, though they helped me to be a better reader,they told me nothing about the process of writing.

No, I told my teachers, I need somethingthat will help me get started every morning. They laughed.

So I kept on writing. And I kept onsearching for what other writers might have written about theprocess of writing. I found little help and most of it in scraps: aparagraph from an interview or letter or essay; sometimes even ananthology of scraps, like Walter Allen's Writers onWriting.

After twenty years of writing, I understandthe laughter of my teachers, for I know we all still need somethingto help us get started every morning. In fact, as most experiencedwriters will tell you, it gets harder, perhaps because, as MaryAustin expressed it in her

Everyman's Genius, every new projectrequires, ... a new alignment of the various faculties of the selfthat produces it. So at the beginning of every piece of creativework there is almost always a time of struggle and torment for theproducer. In other words, we are all perennial beginners.

Yet there are some things an experiencedbeginner can tell a new beginner, some misconceptions I cancorrect, some shocks I might spare you. That is what I have triedto do here, to answer some of the questions beginners ask, to writethe kind of book I was searching for when I started.

I mention a few other useful books inpassing. But I do not provide a recommended reading list becausesuch a list would start with all the great and good novels,stories, plays and poems ever written. Those are the books fromwhich we learn the most, and we do best to find our way throughthem at a rate and in an order which suits us individually.

When I can, I cite experience from writers Iadmire. More often I give examples from my own work, published andunpublished, because my own writing process is what I know best,most deeply, and first hand. This experience is offered with adisclaimer similar to the one Thoreau gave readers of his Walden,when he warned them not to look for him in the woods because by thetime they got there he might be somewhere else. What I offer is nota set of rules but a picture of a working process still developing,a guide toward asking the right questions, the ones you eventuallyfind answers for in yourself, in your work.

This book, then, contains nothing new. Itonly brings together parts of the process as I have experienced itand found it confirmed by most fiction writers, most of the time.What I tell you may mean little until you reach the sameconclusions through your own work, but I hope I give hints thatnudge you in the right direction, toward your own answers.

These hints are addressed to novelists but(excluding the planning section) may help in writing short storiestoo.

Finally, on the subject of gettingpublished, all I can offer is this urgent suggestion: while you arefighting and waiting through the publishing struggle, start yournext book.

Henry James called it the seed or germ: animage, a glimpse of a person, shreds of overheard dialogue, acasual reference dropped in conversation at dinner by a womansitting next to him. In his preface to The Spoils of PoyntonJames insisted that the seed must be small, rough, incomplete, thatif the woman enlarged upon her anecdote, she would kill it. Hecould use only that hint, which he believed a writer instantlyrecognizes as his material.

But these hints are not always recognized.In Art and Reality Joyce Cary tells us he once wrote a story weeksafter catching and forgetting a glimpse of a young woman on a ferryboat. The story was nearly finished before he realized that it hadcome out of that brief moment, or had been triggered by it.

It was Gary's good luck, or a sign of hisdevelopment, that his raw material grabbed him in spite of himself.Some of our best ideas come as rather weak clicks in the mind,clicks that may be easily ignored in the general noise of living.The seed of Ella Price's journal was such a weak, frequently heardclick that I had ignored it many times before I really heard it: amiddle-aged woman sitting in my office at the college where Itaught in the mid-sixties, crying and telling me that going toschool was both saving her life and destroying it. Click. Here isthe heroine of an invisible drama, heroine of a novel. Ever sincethat book was published teachers have been telling me they kickedthemselves for not having written Ella's story, which they allknew so well. But that statement only shows their ignorance of thefirst step in writing fiction: to see what is so familiar toeveryone that it has become invisible.