Brave New Writers

So, You've Decided to Write a Book

Transcript: S1E1

Let me tell you about Oliver.

Oliver is a young man from Oregon who had a secure job, a 401K, and a cat named Phoenix. Oliver has a mustache and dark hair that just brushes his shoulders, he’s of about average height, and a self-professed “average Joe”. In addition to these normal and respectable qualities, there is something else about Oliver that is worth mentioning.

Oliver has no idea how to sail a boat.

Which, for most people, isn’t really a problem, but it’s a big one for Oliver, because in 2024, Oliver quit his stable job, drained his 401K, and bought a sailboat with the goal of sailing around the world with his cat named Phoenix.

Which is insane.

And awesome.

And, I think, maybe, terrifying?

Anyway, whatever else it may be, there is certainly something about Oliver’s story and ambition that speaks to us, or at least to me. There’s something profoundly human about what he’s doing, and I’m not just talking about some high and mighty Call to Adventure – the thing that’s really appealing, again, at least to me, is that he’s doing this with no background at all. Dude’s just jumping in and learning what he needs, so that he can accomplish his goals, even if that means starting from zero.

And, according to one of his earlier videos cataloging his journey, it was a real shit show at the start. His words, not mine.

We’ll come back to Oliver later, but I wanted to kick off this episode with a really extreme example of something that is central to what we’re talking about today, which, in keeping with our nautical theme, I’m going to dub “Getting your bearings”.

If you’re listening to this, chances are pretty good you’ve got some passing interest in writing. Given the subtitle of this episode, you may even be considering writing your first ever book. Which is exciting stuff, and it also means you probably have a lot of questions.

Well, I’ve got good news, bad news, and some more good news.

Good news: Writing is fun. Storytelling, world building, making characters, crafting plots, and adding something uniquely and truly yours into the world is a worthwhile and significant pursuit. I’ve been hard pressed to find something quite so fulfilling or satisfying as telling stories, and learning how to tell them well.

Bad news: It can be overwhelming, maddening, frustrating, slow, and you may often feel like you’re genuinely losing your mind. It can be tedious and boring, and it requires an amount of patience that frankly feels inhumane at times. There’s always going to be people that are better than you, that are more talented than yourself, and it can be incredibly difficult to be a “success” in this field.

Good news: You don’t have to quit your stable job, you don’t have to drain your 401K, and, unlike sailing around the world, you (probably) won’t drown if something goes wrong. Or at least, you won’t physically drown. Metaphorical drownings are still very much on the table.

But being overwhelmed is part and parcel of starting something new, and if you’re willing to put the time in, you can make something really special.

Stretching our nautical theme even further here, this podcast aims to be a lifeline for new writers and a resource you can revisit as you develop and work on bringing your manuscript to life.

So, let’s get started.

And let’s get started by first talking about what your goals are and defining them.

We’ll start with what a book even is. Yeah, we’re going basic here, but bear with me.

There are different kinds of written works, and definitions get a little wonky pretty quick, but the metric used most generally to categorize a given work is word count. Not page count. You can sniff out a new writer pretty quickly if they’re telling you how many pages they’ve written, and not how many words they’ve gotten down. The average novel and non-fiction books have a minimum word count of about 50,000 words. Anything less than that is usually categorized as a novella, down to about 17,500 words, then a novelette, and finally a short story, which caps out around 8,000 words.

Why do we use word count and not page count? Well, because page count varies wildly depending on formatting, while word count is consistent and objective.

Now, like I said, these word counts are loose definitions at best, and can vary wildly depending on certain factors. For instance, a fantasy or sci-fi novel that does a lot of world-building and scene-setting typically has upwards of 90,000 words minimum. That’s why you get authors like Brandon Sanderson or James Islington publishing books that look suitable for cinderblock construction so regularly, while, say, a contemporary romance novel looks more like something a normal human could conceivably read in a couple of sessions.

If you’re writing non-fiction, these rules are even more nebulous, I’m afraid. But we’ll tackle that in more depth later, but for now, know that the 50,000-word metric is a good rule of thumb.

So why should you care about word count?

Well, for a couple of reasons. First, if you’re aiming to write a novel, it’s good to know what target you should be aiming for. It helps with knowing how much you need to add or reduce to the story, which ultimately helps you to judge your pacing, if you’re clipping along too fast, or if you’ve spent way too much time on a certain scene. It’s a good tool to have, especially as you develop your skills.

Secondly, if you’re looking to publish your work, it’s good to know what exactly you’re selling readers. If you’re looking to publish traditionally, then agents will ask for the word count in your query letters; if you’re self-publishing, then you need to be able to set readers' expectations before they buy your book. If you’re advertising a novel, but selling a novelette, you’re going to undermine the confidence of your audience, and they may feel cheated. You don’t want your readers to feel cheated.

Okay, so we’ve defined the kind of book you want to write, and we have rough goal posts for how many words that’ll take. Time to get started, right?

Well, maybe.

Let’s talk about how you’re going to write.

And no, I don’t mean whether you prefer keyboard or pen and paper. What I mean is, are you going in with a plan?

When you start exploring the writing world and writing communities, there are two archetypes of writers you’ll hear talked about a lot. They are plotters and pantsers.

In my nerdy brain, I think of them as Knights and Chaos Goblins.

Knights, or plotters, map their novels out neatly before they begin writing. They have a plan, and they stick to it. They have highlighters and notebooks coming out of their ears, they’ve read books on the craft, they’ve studied the Hero's Journey and Freytag’s pyramid, and they have charts and graphs tracking character arcs and development. Everything’s color-coded and labeled, and organized, and you get the idea. Their characters get on the story train, and there’s no unplanned stops, no sightseeing, dithering, lollygagging, lingering, lurking, or laying about.

And then, there’s the Chaos Goblins.

They… well, they just do shit.

They start with an idea, or a character, or a scene, and they just sort of follow it. There’s no preplanned structure, no guiding star, and they’d probably go into anaphylaxis at the sight of a highlighter. There are only two things that plotters and pansters have in common, and that’s a pulse and the notebooks thing. An abundance of notebooks is one of the few constants that transcends all writerly differences. It’s kinda like how all humans have an inherent desire for belonging, or how every time you make pancakes, the first one is going to be an unmitigated disaster. Some things are just always true.

And speaking of things that are always true, you know that thing that people do? Where they identify themselves with one group of people or way of doing things, and then there becomes this like, tribal animosity towards anyone who does things differently, because different somehow became equated with wrong?

Yeah, surprise! You’ll find that here too. Plotters can view pansters as lazy and uninformed, while pantsers can view their own approach as the truer form of art. Famed panster, Stephen King is famously quoted saying, "Plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice".

Ouch.

But hold on. Before you go burning your flowcharts and surrendering your sticky notes lest you be perceived as a dullard, let me point out that J.K. Rowling plotted her books, and Harry Potter is regularly featured in articles talking about the most-read books of all time – usually it’s featured just below the Quran and the Bible. So, maybe the plotters vs pansters discussion shouldn’t be so focused on the theoretical superiority of one over the other, but rather framed as a question of preference.

I know, crazy idea.

Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t pros and cons to each approach. Plotting can lead to a more cohesive first draft, leading to fewer edits later on. It can also be easier to keep track of story elements and threads that you’re trying to weave through the whole work. But it can also be restrictive to the point that it impacts the quality of the story, making it feel stilted and stiff. However, the biggest downside to the plotting approach, in my opinion, is one that I don’t hear talked about that often, and I think it’s because this particular drawback is a little more insidious and hard to see, especially for younger writers. Let me explain.

There is an important difference between writing your story and writing about your story. When you're writing about your story, you’re spending a lot of time developing the world and the plot and where you want things to go, which, as we’ve established, is not a bad thing on its own. But, it’s very easy to get sucked into a sort of limbo, where you’re spending a lot of time and a lot of words on a project that isn’t actually going anywhere. Excessive plotting can give the illusion of forward momentum. And when that illusion inevitably breaks, you’ll find yourself still sitting at the starting line, which is disheartening to say the least.

Over the years, I’ve talked to several would-be authors who’ve written literal tomes of material about their world, their setting, characters, and plots, and yet haven’t written a single word on their actual manuscript. I know of one woman who's been working on the same draft for nearly two decades but has never finished her book because she keeps going back to her world-building document.

Preparation is great, plotting is great, but unless you’re actually working on the book, you're effectively just packing for a trip you’re never actually going to take.

We’ll probably talk more about this idea in later episodes, but I think this danger is important enough that it deserves a shout-out here too.

So, the next natural question is, does pantsing have similar drawbacks?

Of course it does. They just look different.

Pantsing offers more creative freedom, is excellent for getting words on the page, and is a great way to get Draft 0 on the table quickly. The reckoning comes during editing. My first ever novel was written, for the most part, in the pantsing style. It was a fever dream of following characters, being surprised by their actions, being surprised that I was surprised, and writing, writing, writing.

Then came the day that I wrote the last sentence of my first book, and shortly after that, all hell broke loose.

I have never cursed another human being as much as I cursed myself during that whole editing phase. I essentially re-wrote the entire novel upwards of three times, and I promise that’s not hyperbole. I’m talking total overhauls and complete restructures; sometimes the only things that stayed the same were the names of the characters, and even some of those were changed. It was a nightmare, and by the end of it, I promised myself that I’d never even dream of doing a full pantsing run ever again. And I still haven’t, or at least I no longer do pure pantsing, but I never really embraced the full plotting approach either.

And honestly, that sort of puts me on the level of most writers I know.

See, the more that I’m out in the writing community, it becomes clearer that most people aren’t fully a plotter or a pantser, but some combination of the two. That’s certainly the case for me. When I write my books, I treat plot like lattice work, and my characters like vines. I have the structure, but how the characters navigate it is up to them. There’s room for surprise and movement, but there’s also a clear path on where I want to be and how to get there.

At the end of the day, my advice is to just try both out and see which you prefer. In the end, finishing a book is the goal, so whatever approach works best for you is best for you.

Alright, so we’ve talked about defining the thing you’re writing, and we’ve talked about some different plotting styles, now let's talk about the deed itself and the process of actually putting some words on the page.

Now, I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I may have hinted once or twice that writing a book takes time. How much time exactly depends on more factors than I care to count, but I’ll use myself as an example here. I wrote my first book of about 80,000 words over the course of about three years, and it took another three years to get it into a state where I felt comfortable publishing it. I wrote my second book, just over 60,000 words, over the course of six months. I wrote my third book, roughly 125,0000 words, in about a year and a half. I’m currently writing my fourth book, and at the time of my writing the script for this episode, I just passed the 25,000-word mark after about three months of work.

Now, I don’t mean to present my own writing pace as the gold standard for how long it should take you to write a book; the reason I share that information is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It might be that your book takes longer, and that’s perfectly fine – author of the Game of Thrones books, G.R.R. Martin, isn’t exactly the Usain Bolt of authors, but I think it’s fair to say that he’s done alright for himself. Conversely, there are writers, like Stephen King, whose sheer volume of output could probably rival a Xerox printer.

The important thing when you’re writing a book is consistency. Routine. Regiment. Schedule. Which is all well and good to say, but what does that actually look like?

Well, that depends on you. Look, this isn’t the type of podcast that’s going to tell you to get up at four in the morning and put on the Sigma grindset or whatever the hell they talk about on all those shouty self-help podcasts. All I will say is this – look at your current schedule, find a time and place that’s suitable where you can crank out a few words. Then do it again, and again.

If doing that means that you’re getting up at four in the morning, because that’s your quiet time and you’re that special kind of crazy that likes being awake before God and decency, then go for it. If you’re a night owl and that’s when you’re able to write more freely, then do that. If you’re in a season of life where things are crazy and upside down and you’re just trying to stay afloat, then just write what you can and as you can. When I was writing my third book, I was working a full-time job and taking college classes – I had no time ever, so I started writing what I could during my 30-minute lunch breaks at work. Was my progress slowed down as a result? Of course. But even if I was slow, I was at least consistent, and as a result, I wrote the damn thing, and now, that “damn thing” is sitting on my bookshelf with my name on it. That wouldn’t be the case if I didn’t have a routine that helped me to put words on the page.

And that’s really what it boils down to: whatever gets words on the page. Progress is progress, no matter how you slice it.

Remember Oliver and his cat named Phoenix that we talked about at the top of the episode?

Well, after a little over a year of learning the literal ropes, learning how to repair his boat, how to navigate the open ocean, and stocking up on cat food, he set sail, and on May 31^st, 2025, he landed in Hawaii, having successfully navigated the Pacific Ocean.

Oliver's story might seem extreme or even wildly reckless, and you’re not going to catch me saying otherwise, but I think there’s a lot to learn from it. It’s about trusting yourself enough to take that first step, even if you don’t have all the answers. It’s about embracing the chaos—learning, failing, adjusting—and doing so with perseverance. Because in the end, writing your first book, or any creative pursuit, is a lot like sailing across the ocean: unpredictable, sometimes turbulent, but ultimately rewarding for those who keep their eyes on the horizon and their hands on the wheel.

Remember, whether you're a plotter, or a pantser – your process is valid. What matters most is that you keep moving forward. Set realistic goals, carve out dedicated time, and don’t be afraid to stumble. It’s through these imperfections and challenges that you’ll find out your own unique rhythm and marathon pace.

And if it feels overwhelming – and don’t worry, it is -- just think about the story you're trying to tell. Every word, every sentence, builds toward that final destination, a story that’s entirely yours. Writing is not just about creating a manuscript; it’s about discovering and sharing a part of yourself with the world. And I think that alone makes the effort worthwhile.