This last week I was asked what it takes for an ordinary person to be an author. My first thought was, no one is more ordinary than an author.
But I didn’t say that.
Authors are crafts folk, people who work at the craft of writing and take the time to turn out a finished product that is as good as we can make it. You wouldn’t enter a half-finished quilt at the county fair. You would go through all the steps to finish the job and take pride in your creation.
A serious writer takes the book through all the steps needed to make it readable, salable, and enjoyable because we love what we do, and we take pride in it.
It’s a lot of work.
Some writers are better than others, not unlike those crafters who work with wood. A good author is like a carpenter who makes a piece of furniture that will be handed down for generations.
Today seems a good day to revisit an article from February of 2020 on this very subject. Nothing has changed since I wrote this article, so here it is, a rerun that I hope you enjoy.
People often say they want to write a book. I used to say that too.
In 1985 I came across my first stumbling block on my path to becoming a writer. I didn’t know it, but to go from dreamer to storyteller is easy. Anyone can do it.
But if we choose to become an author, we’re taking a walk through an unknown landscape.
And the place where we go from dreamer to storyteller to author is the hardest part.
At first the path is gentle and easy to walk. As children, we invent stories and tell them to ourselves. As adults, we daydream about the stories we want to read, and we tell them to ourselves.
That part of the walk is easy. At some point, we become brave enough to sit down and put the story on paper.
The blank screen or paper is like an empty pond. All we have to do is add words, and the story will tell itself.
The first impedance that would-be authors come to on their way to filling the word-pond with words is a wide, deep river. It’s running high and fast with a flood of “what ifs” and partially visualized ideas.
If you truly want to become a writer, you must cross this river. If you don’t, the path ends here. While this river flows into the word-pond, the real path that takes us to a finished story is on the other side of this stream.
Fortunately, the river has several widely spaced steppingstones. Landing squarely on each one requires effort and a leap of faith, but the determined writer can do it.
The last thing you do before you step off the bank and begin crossing that river is this: visualize what your story is about.
The first stone you must leap to is the most difficult to reach. It is the one most writers who remain only dreamers falter at:
- You must give yourself permission to write.
We have this perception that it is selfish to spend a portion of our free time writing. It is not self-indulgent. We all must earn a living because very few writers are able to live on their royalties. If writing is your true craft, you must carve the time around your day job to do it. All you need is one undisturbed hour a day.
The second stone is an easy leap:
- Become literate. Educate yourself.
Buy books on the craft of writing. Buy and use the Chicago Manual of Style. You can usually find used copies on Amazon for around $10 – $15, passed on by those who couldn’t quite make the first leap.
I freely admit to using the internet for research, often on a daily basis, and I buy eBooks. However, my office bookshelves are filled with reference books on the craft of writing. I buy them as paper books because I am always looking things up. The Chicago Manual of Style is one of the most well-worn there.
Most professional editors rely on the CMOS because it’s the most comprehensive style guide—it has the answer for whatever your grammar question is. Best of all, it’s geared for writers of all streaks: essays, novels, all varieties of fiction, and nonfiction.
The third stone is the reason we decided to write in the first place:
- Good writers never stop reading for pleasure.
We begin as avid readers. A book resonates with us, makes us buy the whole series, and we never want to leave that world.
We soon learn that books like that are few and far between.
The fourth stone is an easy leap from that:
- We realize that we must write the book we want to read.
As we reach the far bank, we climb up and across the final hurdle:
- We finish the work, whether it’s a novel or short story.
Over the years since I first began writing, I’ve labored under many misconceptions. It was a shock to me when I discovered that we who write aren’t really special.
Who knew?
We’re extremely common, as ordinary as programmers and software engineers. Everyone either wants to be a writer, is a writer, has a writer in the the family, or knows one.
Even my literary idols aren’t superhuman.
Because there are so many of us, it’s difficult to stand out. We must be highly professional, easy to work with, and literate.
Filling the pond with words and creating a story that hooks a reader is as easy as daydreaming and as difficult as giving birth.
Because writers are so numerous, every idea has been done. Popular tropes soon become stale and fall out of fashion.
A study by the University of Vermont says there are “six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives.” These are:
- Rags to riches (protagonist starts low and rises in happiness)
- Tragedy, or riches to rags (protagonist starts high and falls in happiness)
- Man in a hole (fall–rise)
- Icarus (rise–fall)
- Cinderella (rise–fall–rise)
- Oedipus” (fall–rise–fall)
No stale idea has ever been done your way.
We give that idea some thought. We apply a thick layer of our own brand of “what if.”
It’s our different approaches to these stories that make us each unique.
Sure, we’re writing an old story. But with a fresh angle, perseverance, and sheer hard work, we might be able to sell it.
And that is what makes the effort and agony of getting that book published and into the hands of prospective readers worthwhile.
Even if you don’t have an idea of what you want to write, it’s time to go out to 
Once there, create a profile. You don’t have to get fancy unless you are bored and feeling hypercreative.
You can play around with your personal page a little to get used to it. I use my NaNoWriMo avatar and name as my 
Next, check out the community tabs. If you are in full screen, the tabs will be across the top. If you have the screen minimized, the button for the dropdown menu will be in the upper right corner and will look like the blue/green and black square to the right of this paragraph.
You may find the information you need in one of the many forums listed here.
Make a master file folder that is just for your writing. I write professionally, so my files are in a master file labeled Writing.
Give your document a label that is simple and descriptive. My NaNoWriMo manuscript will be labeled: Stowe_Bridge_NaNoWriMo_2023.
This year we will have write-ins at the local library. The authors in our region will come together and write for two hours and support each other’s journey. We will also meet via the miracle of the internet, using Discord and Zoom. My co-ML and I are finalizing a schedule for November.
Indies occasionally have to write a synopsis if they submit their longer work to contests, agents, or publishers. When a literary contest or publisher asks for a synopsis, they don’t want a book blurb, which is a “this is why you should buy my book” teaser.
I recommend you go to the Jericho Writers site and follow their guidelines if asked for a synopsis. The article there is one of the most comprehensive and useful ones I’ve read anywhere. Again, that article can be found at 
I quickly regretted that decision.
Arthur and his court originated as ordinary 5th or 6th-century warlords. But the tales featuring them were written centuries later. Their 11th-century chroniclers presented them in contemporary armor as worn by 
I am an abject fangirl for Don Quixote, so different versions of both Galahad and Quixote appear regularly in my work. 
And sometimes a theme refuses to let go of me. I took Arthurian myth and the chivalric code and turned them inside out with the characters of Lancelyn and Galahad in 
No matter the level of our education or the dialect we speak, we use these rules and don’t realize we are doing so.
Muddled phrasings often slip by when I revise my work because my mind sees the words as if they were in the correct order. This is the writer’s curse—the internal editor knows what should be there, and the eye skips over what we actually wrote.
I adore mishmash words. They’re poetic and musical and roll off the tongue with a satisfying rhythm. Sadly, while I regularly bore my grandchildren with them, I hardly ever get to write them. Mishmash. Hip-hop.
“Ing” words are a terrible temptation to those of us raised on Tolkien. He was writing a century ago, but that style of lush prose has fallen out of fashion. We open the gate to all sorts of verbal mayhem when we lead off with an “ing” word at the front of a sentence.
Calendar time is a layer of world-building. It sets the story in a particular era and shows the passage of time.
Consider the following sentences: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”
Every story is unique; some work best in the past tense, while others must be set in the present.
This novel was meticulously self-edited. I could see it was run through the author’s writer’s group many times, and the major flaws were ironed out. There were few typos, and the formatting was done well.
Let’s be real—style and grammar guides are tedious and hard to understand. We may own them but we hate to crack them open. Trust me, researching grammar gets easier and more interesting as you advance in writing craft.
In this regard, gerunds and other passive code words are the author’s first draft-multi-tool. They are a compact tool that combines several individual functions in a single unit. One word, one packet of letters that serves many purposes and conveys multiple mental images to the author.
One character archetype that is critical to any story is the villain. Yet the negative energy of a story is often less developed, two-dimensional.
Skeletor is a cartoon villain with one of the least believable storylines in the history of cartoons. He has great passion and drive as a villain, but it’s all noise and show. His ostensible quest is to conquer Castle Grayskull and acquire its ancient secrets. Possession of these would make him unstoppable, allowing him to rule the world of Eternia.
When we write a story, we want the protagonist’s struggle to mean something to the reader. We put them through hell and make their lives miserable. But we must remember that the characters in our stories aren’t going through these horrible trials alone. The moment we begin writing the story, we are dragging the reader along for the ride.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 