how do you write a book? tackling the first draft
Before writing Fringes, I had never written anything longer than 5000 words; that was at university where the idea of writing a 10,000 word dissertation seemed so unrealistic that I elected to do 2 half length pieces instead.
80,000 words makes for about 300 pages - a decent sized but not a long paperback book. Traditionally published books tend to be of that length or more in order for their spines to stand out on the shelf in a bookshop but that's a subject for another day.
To write a not that long book, I'd have to come up with 16 times the material that I'd ever come up with, around a theme and containing as little guff as possible.
I'd already been writing some rugby content for Talking Rugby Union as well as just noodling around in my Google Docs writing fragments of pieces around different rugby topics. Sometimes they were character sketches of people I'd met, sometimes they were relatively bitter reflections on how cruel the sport can be at a professional level. Regardless of their quality, or lack thereof, they helped me shape a style and a point of view and some of them went on to form the basis of future book material.
The aim was to come up with a first draft. This is technically a whole book but with the implicit admission that this is not the done deal. It will need copious pruning, reordering and editing, maybe even some extensive rewriting. You can't edit what doesn't exist though so a first draft needs to happen. Then you can go about refining it.
So without further ado, here are some tips on getting that first draft done.
How to write your first draft
muddle around for as long as you want in a low pressure way
I messed around for a while with no intention of writing 'a book'. It was all for my own amusement, a bit of catharsis and just a general experiment. You genuinely never know where you'll see a connection that you'd not made previously and writing is a great way of you developing your thoughts on a subject. It makes you actually consider what you think, forces you to articulate it in a readable way and makes you commit to it. Once it's written down you can of course change your mind. In fact, loads of people walk back what they write. Commiting to what's on the page is scary to begin with. So don't put extra pressure on yourself! Start in a low key manner.
collect ideas and inspiration
Notes are your friend here. I just used my notes app but you could go analogue. When you think of something, no matter how trivial it seems, note it down. You'll have a host of ideas or starter sentences before you know it. Then you can copy them into a doc and just expand on each one. You'll build material up and again, some of this could end up being part of a bigger work. Some of it could and will be garbage but the practice is still valuable.
start to get some structure
You'll probably begin to develop a theme, or realise that you've been heading in a certain direction all along. I suddenly realised that although I was writing broadly about rugby, I could use the linear path of my rugby career to then jump off and talk about bigger themes or wider issues in the game. Then I began to write two types of fragment:
one documenting my career and specifically my time in France. Sometimes I'd write up my recollections of a particular game or one of my teammates, sometimes it could be a certain social or odd instance from living in France.
other more general musings on rugby and issues within the sport. These could be thoughts on an issue like taking drugs, having a sporting sibling or retiring from the game.
The two differing positions kept me interested and prevented me from getting stale.
steal like an artist
If you do anything, you're remiss to not study best practice. I reread one of my favourite sports books, Barbarian Days by William Finnegan and the only other book that felt similar to mine in Confessions of a Rugby Mercenary by John Daniell, about his last year playing professionally in France. I then took the structure of Daniell's book, his final season chronologically interspersed with insights into different aspects of French rugby or profiles of teams, and tried to merge it with more of a Finnegan approach to the prose and subject matter. Whether this was successful is down to the reader of course...
make order from chaos
Eventually I had a huge bank of material that wasn't in any sort of order. Due to the vagaries of memory, I had actually reordered many of our matches in my mind and was fortunate to find a French rugby website with all our results from the 4 seasons I spent there. Once you have the material chronologically organised then you can start to see where some of your wider lens material can slot in. Your narrative then goes from all over the place to a sudden coherence!
tidy up the loose ends
Once your narrative is in place then it's about elminating the joins. You'll need to reread and rewrite, chopping bits that don't quite work and even eliminating bits thata you're quite fond of in order to best serve the text. I wouldn't discard these things totally though - either copy the whole thing to a new document or when you delete passages, copy them to another place first. You may be able to reuse them later, perhaps in bonus material or another work entirely.
Once you're done here then take a final reread and see if it hangs together. It doesn't have to be perfect as you're going to edit anyway but it's in your itnerest for it to read well, especially if you're going to go straight to an editor or a test reader for feedback. Try to be objective and think about how it might come across to someone who's not seen it before. This is where I sent the file to my Kindle - I had only read it on my computer screen so the new medium helped a bit in this respect.
Then you're ready to get it edited...