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Saturday, April 25, 2015

Writing a Book in 90 Days on Hubpages



One of the hardest things to do for many people is to start a book. They will research for years and years yet the blank page stares back at them from the computer screen, howling in mock defiance. For others it is not starting that is tough, but completing a manuscript and getting it out to the general public. No one is ever guaranteed that their manuscript will be published, except perhaps for best-selling writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but the plain fact of the matter is that if you dont finish it and expose it to someone like a writers agent or a book publisher then it will be 100% guaranteed never to make it big (or small).

Writing a book in 90 days can be done if you have some tools at your disposal. Since the biggest setback to most writers is procrastination, there is an online site that actually can aid you in getting at the very least 30 or 40 pages finished and published online. The site is called Hubpages and several aspiring authors, myself included, have used them to build the beginnings of their novels. The great thing about Hubpages (www.hubpages.com) is that it forces you to write. How does it work, you may ask. Hubpages basically gives you the author a blank page to work from. You can write anything you want on it and get it published in seconds. You can even monetize it and earn some money with Google Adsense but mostly it is for blogs and there is a lot of really bad writing there. Since there are few rules, a lot of hacks go on there and use it for clutter. The great thing about publishing fiction stories on hubpages.com is that you can start with part one for instance, finish it on the fly in about an hour, publish it, then you are stuck and have to write and publish part two or else be branded a liar of sorts.

For anal types this works well and forces you to write something every day and make it good enough to publish. Eventually you will have five to ten of these pages, each about 1000 to 2000 words long. You could theoretically publish the entire 200 to 400 page novel like that, but you would be in effect, giving away the publishing. The great thing is that not only can you get feedback (and if the story is good, you will) from other Hubbers as they are called, but you can gauge for yourself if the story merits further expansion or if it is just a good short story. You can also take the 30 or 40 pages that you have already written and plug in more details, back stories, sub-plots, character studies, etc., and use that as the framework (more detailed than a mere outline) for your final book. Writing a book in 90 days then becomes plausible. You wont finish the entire book in 90 days unless it is terrible, but you can certainly structure and place large chunks of the book into a workable form.

Writing a book is like shaping a statue out of clay or chiseling it out of stone. In the case of a book however you need to make the stone. That is the main body of the writing. The problem with many if not most writers is that as they write they get obsessed with polishing what has come before. By writing and publishing in Hubpages you avoid that trap and crank out huge chunks in bunches. Before you know it you have 30 or 40 or more relatively finished pages in front of you, and that my friends, is a great start to any full length book.