When I started writing professionally, about seven years ago, I knew I was a fraud. I had zero background in writing—in fact, I was a physics major. That’s about as far left-brained as you can get. However, I had all of these stories trying to explode out of the right side of my brain. So, I picked up a pen and paper and let them out. Still, I had no experience in characterization, setting, pacing, or any of the elements that made a book a good book. So, I started reading books on writing. If I could read a differential equations book and do complex mathematics, I could do this right? It’s just a set of rules.

Those of you laughing know it doesn’t work that way.

The books just stunted my creativity. Am I at the hook? Did I pet the dog? Did I slam that doorway shut hard enough? Am I writing a three-dimensional character? Does he have enough quirks? I mean seriously, it was like trying to follow a complex recipe and sucking the joy out of the end result. So, I compromised. Now, I only read writing books by James Scott Bell, or another author he highly recommends. I take their recommendations and put them in the back of my brain. (It’s getting kinda full now.)

One of the pieces of advice any writing book will give you is to use the question What If? What if this guy jumps from a tall building and lands on Mrs. Davidson’s poodle? What if God dropped down into the chair across from you at Starbucks? What if Molly were pregnant and the baby was a zombie? My problem is, the book doesn’t come to me as a question. I have no idea what’s going to hit the page until I sit down at the computer or with a pen and paper and really listen to the voices in my head. It’s their story – not mine.

The question I ask myself isn’t What If? but How? What if Brian and Jamie have sex in the tree house and get caught? No, I know what happens there. My question was – how are they going to find each other again? What if Jamie becomes a drug addict? No – how are they going to save him from himself? Sitting on a bus across from a boy, I wonder how he got his scar. How would it feel to fall in love only to have that love endanger your son’s life?

It’s like chess. I don’t ask the pawns in the first move. I ask the rooks ten moves down the line—that’s just how my brain works. Something else about my brain that’s a joy is that it never shuts off. Usually I’ll get an idea for a story in the shower (that’s where my brain is the most disengaged). I’ll start taking notes on my Aquanotes there, and then grab a legal pad and keep going. I won’t be able to sleep until the premise is out of me and on paper. Then, I’ll set the legal pad next to my bed because as more things trickle in, I have to write them down too. It’s kind of a compulsion.

So, the next time you read a writing book and it stunts your creativity rather than expanding it – just take a step back. Not everyone works the same way. Not everyone’s brain processes information in the same way, that’s what makes a book a different experience for everyone who reads it.

Because sometimes, it’s less a matter of “What if I want to write a book?” than “How do I start?”

XOXOXO,

JP Barnaby