Always wanted to write a book, but I have no idea where to start. Should I build a “skeleton” for my story...

Always wanted to write a book, but I have no idea where to start. Should I build a “skeleton” for my story, with topics of what will happen and what I want to say with it? Do you just write as it goes in your head then edit everything? How do you do research for the parts outside your area of knowledge?

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Actually, that all depends. What kind of book are you thinking of? Fiction, nonfiction, you kinda need to start there

I try a skeleton and to make it not utterly dull and tasteless just find something (like tiger hunting in the local forest) get obsessively in it details and try to put that stuff in somehow. That's what muggles can do.

The easiest way for me to write a story is to pick a philosophical concept I strongly believe in and mold a narrative around exploring that. It's like the foundations of a house, it's no good having all these cool ideas for a world or characters and having no framework to lay them on.

Could you give an example what you mean ?

Well, take anarcho-primitivism which boils down to "we need to go back to hunter gatherer times".

Well now you have a framework. You have something to dip into and ask "well what would a society like that look like" "how would the people behave in terms of morality" "what kind of difficulties would they face" "what would a post revolutionary anprim world look like". It's a great way to get your imagination running wild with ideas and really come up with something interesting and new for the reader.

I’m thinking about a story about conflict in a fictional country and how that stimulates científic progress.

Is your country earthly or does it have a different mythology and astrology ?

When writing fiction, I like to take days/weeks thinking about all the details of the world I'm creating, and then create a pretty solid outline that guides the story. I find that keeps the "slog" writing easy to get through. As for featuring things you know little about, of course you want to become book-learned on the subject, whatever it is. Then its helpful to run your understanding/plot points/passages past someone in that field for evaluation.

I don't like just word vomiting and fixing later, because I think that leads to unnecessary rewrites.

Honest question:
Do you guys want to write a book just to have in the curriculum or because you have something to say?
Maybe because I'm a faggot but I really don't see myself writing just because I want to say I wrote a book. I would like to make art like the real writers did, I don't want to taint the genre and be on the same level as Stephen King or GRRM.

Not going the fantasy route if that is what you’re asking

Seems a good way, I’ll write it down

You know, I don't want to poo-poo what you said, but I find it really amusing when Yea Forums people look down on hugely successful authors because those guys fail to meet the exacting standards of those not in the industry.

On the other hand, I agree that you have to have something to say, or you're going to go nowhere.

I'm like more of the Murakami, Pamuk kind. I wanna write to about nothing, no morals or message. Just a mud cake salad.

King did write good stuff, like Carrie and Green Mile. His mistake was writing too many books without caring about quality. But he is rich, so who can blame him?

Plenty of great writers wrote shit books to make a buck

This is like the unilateral Yea Forums double standard. Go to any board and you'll mostly see people with incredibly vitriolic criticism for not only publicly loved works, but also critically acclaimed works too, all the while not really having any inkling of what technically makes good book or bad or how to write themselves. Herman Melville didn't exactly start with Moby Dick either. Luckily, there are so many critical and advisory resources out there that anyone can quickly shore up the knowledge of what makes good writing.

My Name Is Red is good.

Get to the point where you no longer care whether you write anything, but it becomes a part of who you are, an avenue by which you actualize your essence. Life is your unique story. Focus on cultivating experience where writing seems more like a mechanism to understand life as it has culminated within yourself.

From my personal perspective of having gone through years when I wrote devotedly, the things that come out that way are subpar until you NEED to write them. Until your head is static where you drink to drown the questions that you ask yourself but can't answer -- until your desire to grow is crippled by the weight of experience itself, your writing won't be much more than masturbatory. If you're talented, there's a chance that it'll be you'll find some success, but writing exists to be a medium between living and understanding where they finally meet and consummate their union. Until you write with material that comes from your literal inability to understand the world otherwise, writing can't do much for you; and that is the point, for it to change who YOU are.

Start writing individual scenes. They don't need to be in order or anything, but it's good to write a few things directionless at first, that way you can write a skeleton based on your own strengths and tendencies as a writer. Plus, you may get bored with your original structure/idea as you write, so some flexibility makes the process a lot easier as well as more pleasant.

nobody likes this answer, but take at least one creative writing class if you can

if you take one at a real university, the professors are usually published authors that can specifically groom to be published especially if you get into a master's program but it's still a good experience to work with such people. in addition to this, there are professors out there who hate genre fiction and will try to groom you to be the next DFW, and there are also professors who specialize in genre fiction and will groom you to be the next Stephen King/John Green/Brandon Sanderson/Jeff Vandermeer

but not just that, it's a good experience seeing both people that write better than you (to see techniques you can rip off) as well as to see people who are way worse than you to boost your confidence, and almost every introductory class will have at least one person in each category