Writing a book – advice for new authors; my experience

I got inspired by Dave Taylor‘s recent post with cool advice for new authors. Joe Wickert provides some more insights into this seemingly common “writers block”

In the recent past, I have met with several “to be” authors. One or two
of them were even taking a course on how to get published.  One of
my close friends over analyzed this whole writing process that now his
writing has come to a grinding halt.

I agree with both Dave and Joe. Writers write. The structure and polishing come later.

Here is a bit of my own experience. I caught the writing bug very early
in life. I wrote my first novel when I was nine years old. My parents
thought I was crazy and the my friends thought I copied this whole book
from another book. Those were interesting times and as you could have
guessed there were no rules. We didn’t have a computer at that time and
I didn’t even know how to type. I started writing in a notebook and
kept writing for about 200 pages.
When I re-wrote the book twice, I did the same thing again. Wrote every
single page by hand. It took me four years to get this published (at
age 13) from a reputed publisher.

My most recent book “Beyond Code
due to be published in September was entirely written by hand the first
round. You think crazy. It’s really not. Let me explain. The alternate
option that I have is to go and type on a computer. While it has all
the advantages, it has one big disadvantage. You can do a lot of things
other than writing on a computer. Being an entrepreneur I will have a
ton of things pending anyways and it’s so easy for me to get carried
away and do “other” things other than writing. Writing in a book also
gives me a discipline to get it right the first time (at least most of
the times). I have developed some page numbering and indexing tricks to
ensure that I still keep sanity while putting content in different
chapters. If anybody is interested, send me an email and  I am
happy to share more.

If you still think I am crazy, you may be right to some extent 🙂