Find your corner of paradise.

Look for a place in your home or anywhere you like where you can be sure you have privacy, silence and where you know you can concentrate 100%. Don’t skimp on your work tools; you will spend many hours in front of the PC monitor, sitting in a chair, so look for the highest possible quality compatible with your pockets, paper, pens and pencils; keep everything close at hand; this will prevent you from getting up and distract you when you’re sitting down to write. Break your writing project into small pieces so you won’t be afraid to write books over 400–500 pages. If you do it, you won’t be afraid of being unable to write all the pages of your novel; imagine eating an elephant; how do you do it? One piece at a time…

Find your big idea.

The idea behind a book must necessarily be “big” If your idea is not big enough, then better write an article or a blog post. How do you know if your idea is “big”? It is if it stays with you during the day if you can’t help but tell your spouse or friends about it.

Build your narrative outline.

Before starting to write a book, try to always have under control where you are in history and where you are going, whether you are a seasoned writer or a beginner. If you do not have a clear path, you could lose your way and stop, in what I define as the marathon of the middle (the marathon of the middle ). I find myself dealing with this difficult point after the opening and the conclusion; the most important part of the book is that you absolutely must not let your narrative just survive, but you must make sure that your writing is as prosperous as possible. Otherwise, this is where readers are most likely to abandon you. The same principle applies to both fiction and non-fiction novel writing (essays, manuals, etc.) and remembers that the outline of the narrative should serve you as a point of reference if, at a certain moment, you see that the book is taking a different and unexpected fold, change the pattern don’t change the book!

Set a schedule and stick to it:

If you don’t have a deadline, if you haven’t given it to yourself and no one else has given it to you or expects the manuscript from you, then it’s very easy for your work to stall at some point. You have to give yourself steps to meet and give yourself a deadline. Doing so is of paramount importance. Think about the number of pages you want to write roughly: 400, 500? Divide that by the number of days you think you’ll want to spend writing them, so you get the number of pages a day you need to write; when you start writing, you’ll better understand the time it takes for each page. If you see that you can write ten pages a day, then use this parameter to calculate how many days it will take you to write the number of pages you want your book to have; once you get the expiration date, keep it sacred, respect it no matter what, when I was editor only 1 out of 100 authors met this deadline, if you respect it you will stand out from 99% of writers.

Study research and dig deeper.

You absolutely must do this if you write nonfiction; you must study and be an expert on what you are writing; many writers overlook the fact that this study should be done even if you write fiction (fiction); in fact, I think it is even more important for the fiction: if you miss a detail in the story while telling about an aeroplane or weapons, rest assured that readers will point it out to you, try to pay the utmost attention to making the narrative believable. Then once you have concluded your study and your research, do not fall into the trap of wanting to show it to your reader; remember that the main point of the narrative is not to demonstrate how many things you know or how many things you have studied, the main point is the story that you want to tell, study and research must be the right seasoning that gives credibility and specificity to the story.

Write the most compelling and “reader-first” opening possible.

The whole book will benefit if you come up with one major and gripping novel opening per hour. The opening can be: Surprising — Dramatic — Philosophical, Poetic. Here is an example of the opening of Surprise: 1984 by George Orwell. Now let’s see what I mean when I say “Reader First” Whatever choice you make for your novel must go through the “Reader First” filter, don’t think about the publisher, not the literary agent, not the critic or the blogger; think only of the reader, your reader.

Fill your story with conflict and tension.

This is what readers want; there is nothing more wrong and boring than writing a boring conversation between protagonists that is an end in itself, which leads nowhere. Instead, even if they are talking about the weather, the underlying conflict between the two conversationalists must flash to the reader, what is the cause of their tension? Why is their relationship complicated? This conflict, this constant tension, will keep the reader glued to your pages.

Turn off your proofreader soul. (As you write).

Silence the critic in you at least until the next day. When you write, focus only on this; write without thinking about redundancies, clichés, logical sequences or simple typos. You’ll return to it the next day when you put your perfectionist hat back on, and only then can you focus on all possible fixes.

Don’t give up during the half marathon.

When you are in the middle of the narrative, you need to enrich and make your writing flourish with new elements and details, not survive by trying to lengthen the old story and hoping that readers will follow us to the end because it will never happen, we need to prepare the grand finale already in this phase, and this always regardless of whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction.

Write a sensational ending.

Take the right time to think and write it; I have spoken to many writers who have nimbly written their manuscript and then stuck on the ending; if it is unpredictable, it better be correct and logical so that your reader does not feel cheated, should be delighted with a surprise and not deceived, if you have more ideas, follow that of the heart rather than the head, even in non-fiction. Readers remember most of all what shakes them.