Writing A Book

After focusing on the AI side of things over the last few articles, it's time to circle back to the good old craft of writing. Like I mentioned a few articles back, I'm also an author who wrote a book (spoiler alert: it will be published very soon!). How did I decide to take on such a tedious yet fun endeavour and how did I actually pull it off? That's what this article is about.

A book, are you crazy?

Yepp, looking back it's certainly one of my crazier ideas. It all started with great news - my wife was pregnant with our first kid. As if I didn't knew I'd have a ton of sleepiness nights ahead of me, I decided to use my 14 weeks of paternity leave (thanks, Google!) for a personal project. Out of my usual comfort zone it was supposed to be, something different from my day to day work as a software engineer. I like reading, in particular thrillers, so hey why not try that myself? The idea of writing a novel was born.

And like any other project, it needed preparation. So first, I turned to reading again, not thrillers this time but - you guessed it - books about writing. Two in particular resonated with me: You've Got A Book 

In Your by Elizabeth Sims had many practical tips and greatly reduced my mental threshold to get this whole thing started. And How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson helped giving this whole project a tangible structure. The latter in particular guided the months leading up to the birth of my baby, and a few weeks later, my first chapter.

Prep work

As suggested by the Snowflake method, I started with a single sentence. I don't remember the exact words I put down, but it was something like this:

Socially awkward data scientist joins big Silicon Valley tech company and discovers a crazy conspiracy that threatens the lives of a whole bunch of people, and he's the only one who can save them.

Not very well crafted, but you get the idea. There's a whole bunch of my own experience in there (the tech world part, not the one about saving the world). That's of course intentional. I had 3 criteria for my story:

1. I wanted to write about something I was deeply familiar with: the tech industry and Silicon Valley culture - comes for free when you work at Google
2. A zeitgeist-y topic: In 2018 (when I started writing), machine learning wasn't exactly at the same level of hype as it is in 2023, but it was obviously going to play a major role in the future of the industry 
3. I wanted to enjoy reading my own story - that's the thriller part

The next step was to come up with characters. Obviously (to me at least), my hero was going to be a true underdog, a nerd who accidentally slips into the story. And what better than a shy data scientist from Eastern Europe: meet Lukasz a.k.a. Luke. He needed a sidekick, his polar opposite that he could argue and solve riddles with: here comes Ada, sharp-tongued ex-hacker and Silicon Valley native. And of course a brilliant but misguided super villain with unlimited resources: meet Umesh, billionaire and CEO of a powerful tech company.

I fleshed out character sheets for these and a dozen more minor roles before going back to my story and expanding the one sentence above to a longer paragraph and then a multi-page synopsis. That's the principal idea behind the snowflake method - start small and expand, bouncing between story and characters in each step.

What I ended up with was a spreadsheet containing the list of my scenes (each with a preliminary title, characters present, rough storyline and estimated length), and a whole bunch of character sheets (containing anything from appearance, background story, to commonly used phrases).

Writing, writing, writing...

And then it was time for the first chapter. Truth be told, I had a very good idea about the first one for quite a while, a classic prologue that sets things in motion but is otherwise a bit disconnected to the plot and basically it's own little short story. I had it done in a few hours and never paused a second - of course, it was way too long and had to be edited a few times, but hey, a start is a start.

I didn't write the rest of the chapters sequentially, but always made sure I finished the current one before I picked the next, even if it was sometimes tempting to leave one unfinished and move on to the next when I ran out of ideas. My motto was: better have something finished in a shitty way than not have it finished at all. And once I did finish one chapter, I picked the next one from the list that I was particularly interested in or a had a good idea for.

I actually wrote a lot of it on my phone. During his first year, my son was a terrible sleeper and every night, I had to walk circles in our small apartment with him strapped to me to make him close his eyes (of course, whenever I stopped he woke up immediately). So I spent hours and hours every night walking around anyway - no kidding, my watch regularly tracked more than 20km a night -, and thought: why not use this time productively. So I wrote thousands of words totally sleep deprived on my phone, and it made total sense at the time. On other days, I wrote on my (ferry, thank you Sydney) commute to work. 

And not surprisingly, when I read the same stuff the next day, it was full of mistakes and sometimes complete, utter shit. But the point is: I steadily progressed and produced a few hundred words almost every day. And I think this is super important: keep making progress, even if the words you put down aren't one hundred percent - you can always edit later. And oh boy you will.

But even like that, it quickly became clear that I completely underestimated the timeline for my project. I finished the first draft around my son's first birthday, i.e. 18 months after kicking this project off in the first place. Not bad for "let's do this in 3 months of pat leave", huh? To be fair, I did spend a whole lot of time with my kiddo, and I'm a software engineer, so we're anyway used to projects running way over, am I right?

Editing, editing, editing...

But the first draft was just the beginning. I went through about 5 full passes of editing myself, first expanding the whole thing from 80k to 100k words, then cutting it back to under 80k. Use active voice, be concise, show don't tell, don't rant around, make sure something happens all the time, this kind of stuff. When I dared sending my manuscript out to a whole bunch of publishers and agents, guess what, I got rejected every single time - but that's a different story, which I'll get back to in another post. 

Once I did find an agent who was interested, their editor made me rewrite the whole thing again at least 3-4 more times, this time with deeper changes like swapping chapters, rounding our characters, and cutting basically everything that's not totally essential to the story. All in all, I'm sure I turned around every word at least 10 times and the whole editing process took almost another year. But guess what: the whole thing got better and better with every iteration, and finally did land me a publishing contract.

But getting there took time again. All in all, my little pat leave project stretched way beyond my second kid (and second pat leave). Now, almost 5 years later, my book will be finally published next week!

Was it long, tedious, and often outright nerve-wracking? Yepp, absolutely. Was it worth it? Totally.