Writing a book is like running a marathon

Since writing and publishing my book, I’ve had numerous people tell me how they have a book inside of them, just screaming to get out.

“I think I can write a book,” they say. And you know what?  They CAN write a book. YOU can write a book.

But it’s not as simple as that.

You can’t go from 0 to 60 when writing a novel. If you haven’t been making writing a regular part of your routine, it would be next to impossible to have the stamina to write an entire book.

I mean, you wouldn’t run a marathon without training, right?

The trick is to start small.

I toned up my writing muscle years ago with poetry. Through stanzas of metaphors and similes, prose and drawn out descriptions, I worked at capturing a very small moment and making it larger, painting a picture using only words. (You can read some of that poetry HERE)

And then I focused on writing what I knew – my family. As a single mom with two growing kids, I was never out of material to write about. First I wrote these stories just for me, placing them in my blog at winecountrymom.com. Then my friends started reading, and I had an audience. And then my blog was discovered by the local newspaper I work for, and developed into the job I have now – part of it writing about families with a monthly in-print column.

I dabbled in short stories, journal entries, writing out my feelings… Anything I could write about, I did.  Before it got big, my writing all started small.

And then, I wrote a novel.

Best advice I can give you is to just write every day. Every. Single. Day. Even if you only have time for ten minutes of writing, do it. Describe your surroundings, your feelings, what you ate for breakfast…. Write about anything you want, just as long as you are writing.

You want to write a book?  Do it.  But make sure you’ve stretched and toned up that writing muscle first.  Otherwise, you might injure yourself and never get that book up off the ground.

xoxo

Crissi Langwell is the debut author of A Symphony of Cicadas.  Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.