Hey everybody, it’s Ginger, writer and writing professor, and I’m here to talk today about the dream of writing a book.

I’m going to start off with another story, which is that when I was a little, little girl, my mom used to read me stories all the time. She read me Hans Christen Andersen, all the standard Three Little Pigs, we never went to bed at night without a story. And she also took me to the library, and we picked out books for her to read to me and for me to read when I could. We actually rode a bus to the library because it was the 50s and my mom, I think like other moms at the time, didn’t drive. Plus, we only had one car and my dad had taken it to work, and so she was home with me and when we went anywhere we rode on the bus. I think we had to transfer somewhere because there wasn’t a bus that went straight downtown from our house. In any case, she would take me, and we went to the library in downtown Charlottesville, it was a really wonderful building with a marble staircase to the front door. That was the big people’s library, the children’s library was around to the side of the building, you’d go into a little door and then there was this whole world of books. We’d pick out a stack of books for each of us, and then we’d carry home as many as we could possibly carry in our arms on the bus. We would do that pretty regularly and we would go home and crash out on the couch and read books. She would either read them to me or we would read separately because she really loved to read too.

I think that may be where I actually started as a writer. That doesn’t seem like I was writing, but I was preparing to write. Then I went through a series of different stages to get to a point where I published my third book American Queen, and my first two books The Body of Summer and Algebra of Snow are out in the world and available on Amazon. I also teach people how to write good books. That is what I want to talk about today, I want to talk about the dream of writing, which for me probably started when I was tiny, tiny before I even thought about writing a book. It took many years for me to even understand that it was a thing I wanted to do, but when I realized it was what I wanted to do, I knew in my soul that was what I wanted to be; I wanted to be a writer, I already was a writer, I probably had become one by the time my mother took me to the library. So I wanted to talk about that dream, I have been talking to a lot of people, asking them about their dream. Why they want to write a book. They have the most amazing reasons to do it, and I resonate with them.

People have always thought about writing a book, or maybe they have just recently thought about it, sometimes people want to write a book because they want to leave stories for their kids. Some people, like me, knew it was just in their soul and they dreamed of being a writer and that is what they want to do now. There are lots and lots of different reasons; they want to make it a business, they don’t want their wisdom lost and they want it captured on the page, and they want to help change people’s lives. There are a lot of great reasons to write a book. Almost invariably, the instant that we understand we want to write a book, or we want to be a writer, this whole world of challenges comes to bear. All kinds of fears, all kinds of doubts, “who am I to write a book”, “will it be worth it”, “will anybody read it”. All these questions just come flooding in.

I am here to help people with those problems, they are all problems I have struggled with myself, and one of the handiest concepts I have come up with and taught is that writing a book really happens in stages. It is an iterative process, and sometimes it takes quite a number of iterations, repetitions, drafts to get it to completion.

I have talked about this before, and now I have a slightly new analogy for it, which is that it is like building a house. You start off with a design, you have a blueprint for a house. Then you start laying a foundation, then you put up the walls, the drywall, the electricity, and so on. After that, you do your windows, your paintings, your cabinetry, and furnishing. Then you have a house! You don’t start with the painting or the windows, you start with an idea. It goes in stages, so when you’re writing a book, sometimes when we are in those early stages, those delicate stages, where it exists way more in our imagination than it does in reality, we think “oh my gosh, I don’t know what color this house is going to be, I don’t know if people are going to like it”, it is not quite time to think about all of that finished stuff quite yet. You can be dreaming about that; you can start thinking about some of those colors might be. You can start planning way ahead of time about how to start building that platform and that is a good idea.

Don’t worry about those finishing touches at the beginning. At the beginning you want to make sure you have a good design, you lay a solid foundation, make sure your framing is good, and then you can worry about all the rest of it. My advice to you is to think about where you are, think about what you need to do for that stage of the process. I went from a reader to a storyteller. In my family we had a kind of competitive story telling at our dinner table, because my parent’s siblings loved to tell stories, so I heard a lot of that. Eventually I could plunge in with telling stories too, and by the time I realized I really was a writer I went to graduate school and learned how to write while I was getting my PhD in creative writing. Now I am a writer, and I write and publish and teach. But that definitely went in stages. When I was a reader if I thought about marketing and publishing as a little girl, I probably would have completely freaked out. It goes in stages: reader to storyteller to student to writer.

Ready to talk about writing that book? I’m accepting applications for my new writing program. Sign up for a 15 minute chat right here:

My calendar is the place to sign up!

Okay, that’s what I’ve got for you today!