ALLY CARTER

HOW DO YOU
WRITE A BOOK?
| S CHOLASTIC P RESS | NEW YORK

iii
 To all the kids who think someone like them can’t
do it, from someone who used to think that, too,
but did it anyway.

Copyright © 2019 by Ally Carter

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-338-21226-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 20 21 22 23

Printed in the U.S.A. 23

First edition, April 2019

Book design by Yaffa Jaskoll

 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

DEAR ALLY,
How do you write a book?
Congratulations! You’ve asked the question that all writers ask
themselves at some point. But do you want to know a secret? It’s a
question most of us never really stop asking.
Every time I sit down to write a new book, I convince myself there
must be a way to do it faster, more efficiently, better! Surely, after ten
years in this business and with a total of fifteen books under my belt, I
should know what I’m doing by now.
But I don’t, I’m afraid. So I can’t really tell you how to write a book.
There is no single way to do it, you see.
Every author is different. Heck, every book is different. How I wrote
my first book is different from the process I’ll use to write my next
book. Why? Because they’re different books. Because I’m at a different
place in my life and in my career. Lots of reasons.
Luckily, there are some things that always stay the same, and I’m
going to try to cover as many of the basics as I can in this book—things
like creating characters, making sure your story has enough conflict,
and building a world that feels real to you and your readers.
But just know that what works for me might not work for you.

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 Really, there’s only one thing I can say with absolute certainty: This
process will take time.
A few years ago, I did the math and figured out that I spend at least
nine hundred hours plotting, researching, writing, and editing every
book I write.

STORYBOARDING/BREAKING THE STORY: 4 HRS/

DAY FOR 20 DAYS: 80 HOURS
RESEARCHING/ THINKING/BRAINSTORMING:
50 HOURS
FIRST DRAFT: 5 HRS/DAY FOR 30 DAYS: 150 HOURS
SECOND DRAFT: 5 HRS/DAY FOR 80 DAYS: 400 HOURS
LINE EDIT: 5 HRS/DAY FOR 25 DAYS: 125 HOURS
COPY EDIT: 6 HRS/DAY FOR 5 DAYS: 30 HOURS
FINAL “PAGE PROOF” EDIT: 8 HRS/DAY FOR 4 DAYS:
32 HOURS
CRYING: 30 HOURS

Nine hundred hours. And that’s for just one book. That doesn’t
include all the hours I spent learning the basics.
A lot of new writers— especially writers in their teens—start out
full of ideas and energy, but when they don’t immediately write some-
thing perfect, they give up. They tell themselves they just can’t do it.
That’s certainly what I did.
I remember when I was in middle school and I got the writing
bug. I sat down at our kitchen table one night to write my first novel.
My mother (an English teacher) was so proud. I could see her watching
me as she cooked dinner. I wrote really hard for a really long time—like

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ten whole minutes! And then I read what I had written and burst into
tears.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked as she stopped cooking.
I could barely catch my breath, I was crying so hard. “It’s just . . .” I
started. “It’s not . . . It isn’t as good as the opening paragraph of To Kill
a Mockingbird!” I exclaimed, and then cried some more.
That’s when my mom gave me the best writing advice that anyone
has ever given me. She said, “First, that’s the greatest novel ever written,
so maybe we lower our standards? Second, you should never compare
your first draft to someone else’s finished draft.”
That advice is probably the only reason I was able to write a second
paragraph. And a third. And a . . . millionth.
You see, in a lot of ways, writing is like turning on a garden hose
that hasn’t been used in a really long time. The first water out of the
hose is always rusty and dirty and full of gravel and all kinds of gross
stuff. But it doesn’t stay that way.
Nope. The longer the water runs, the clearer it will be. Writing is
the same way.
That first paragraph that I wrote at our kitchen table was dirty water.
The story that went with it was dirty water, too. So were the four screen-
plays I wrote in college and the six short stories I wrote after grad school
and the first book I wrote, which to this day has never been published.
Even now, the first draft of every book I do is my “dirty water
draft,” and that’s okay. No one gets to the good stuff right away.
No. To get to the good stuff, you have to let the water run.
Writing takes time. It takes work. It takes putting in the hours—
sometimes more than a thousand of them—to get the story and the
characters and the words just right.

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 You have to put in the time, is what I’m trying to say.
And that time is up to you. To find it. To use it. To make the most
of it because this thing—this writing thing—it’s optional.
It’s something you do because you want to do it. It’s something you do
because you like to do it. It has to be something that you do for you.
Because ultimately, the answer to your question—“How do you
write a book?”—is this:
You write a book by putting yourself in a chair and not getting up.
For approximately nine hundred hours.

How did you come up with the idea for this book?
Writing isn’t just what I do for a living. It’s what I . . . do. Most
writers are the same. We’ve always dabbled or scribbled or played
around with stories and words.
When I was in middle school, I started wanting to be a writer, but
there weren’t a ton of resources available in the small library in my small
town. As I got older, I came across some really amazing books about the
craft and business of writing—books like On Writing by Stephen King,
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and Screenplay by Syd Field (all of which
I highly recommend).
I also had the opportunity to join some great organizations and
online communities and attend some fantastic conferences.
Most of all, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know some of the
best writers in the world, and whenever two or more of us get together,
inevitably we all get to talking about characters and plots and all our favor-
ite tricks. (Not to mention the mistakes we hope we never make again.)
Which is why, whenever I’m at a book festival or tour stop or school
visit and someone says, “I’m writing my first book. Do you have any

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advice?” I want to scream, “Yes! I do! I have so much advice!” but it’s
hard to answer in a few sentences what, in a way, I’ve been learning to
do my whole life—what I’m still learning to do.
When I started looking around for books to recommend to these
young aspiring writers, I realized that while there are a lot of great
books by adult authors, written for adult writers, there aren’t a lot of
things written by YA authors for teen audiences.
So that’s why I’m doing this: to change that.

Do you have to get good grades in English class to be

a great author?
This is an interesting question. And the short answer, I suppose,
is: not exactly.
Were most authors pretty good at English in school? My guess is
yes. But no publisher is going to ask to see your report card before they
offer you a contract. Nope. What they’re going to ask to see is your book.
Is your book good? Does it have compelling and interesting char-
acters and a well-paced plot and a vivid world? Those are the questions
that are going to matter most.
But there will be other questions, too. Like, does this person make
silly grammatical mistakes? Is she so obsessed with sounding smart
that she uses words she obviously doesn’t understand? Is he the kind
of person who is going to send out a really important letter without
proofreading it first?
Ultimately, publishing is a professional business. You will be
expected to write and speak professionally.
And let’s not forget, English classes aren’t just about writing. A lot
of times, they’re also about reading, and the ability to read carefully and

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thoughtfully is absolutely essential for anyone who wants a career in this
business.
So even though no publisher is going to ask to see your report card,
now is the time to develop the skills you’re going to need down the line.
Just like someone who wants to be a doctor needs to pay attention in
science class and someone who wants to be an engineer needs to take
good notes in physics, writers pay attention in English class—almost as
if our job depends on it (because it kind of does).

I always seem to run out of story before my work

approaches book length. How do I craft a story that
can go the distance?
First, it’s great that you’ve already started writing! That’s the
first step.
Second, you should know that not everything has to be a novel.
You might not be doing anything wrong at all. Maybe you’re simply
writing a short story or a novella. There are lots of really great stories
that are only a few pages long. And I think, in the beginning, the most
important thing is that you actually finish what you start. So if your
story is finished after a few pages, that’s fine.
But if you think you’re ready to try to do something longer, this
section might be able to help with that.
First, I’m going to assume that you’ve read a lot of books. If you
haven’t, then take my word for it: Your first job is to read a lot of books!
Do you have any idea how many people tell me, “So, you’re an
author? I’m going to write a book someday.” And then when I ask them
what books they like to read, they almost always reply that they don’t

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have time to read a book. Then how are you going to have time to write a
book? I want to scream.
So if you take the time to read, you’re already way ahead of the game.
Read funny books and serious books. Read long books and short
books. Read bestsellers and award winners and dusty books in your
school library that only your librarian has ever read. Read everything.
If you’re already doing this, awesome.
But your new assignment is to stop reading like a reader and start
reading like a writer.
How do writers read? We pay attention to details, to what is—and
isn’t— on the page. What happens? When does it happen? Why does
it happen?
So how do you do this? It’s actually pretty easy (and fun).

STEP 1. Pick up one of your favorite books.

STEP 2. Get ready to take some notes.
STEP 3. Start reading.
STEP 4. As you read, make a list of every big thing that
happens. Your job here is to identify all the scenes.
For example, if you are reading Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone, your list might start like this:
—Dumbledore shows up on Privet Drive.
—Hagrid brings baby Harry to the Dursleys.
—Harry wakes up in the cupboard under the stairs on
Dudley’s birthday.
—Harry talks to a snake at the zoo.
etc., etc.

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 STEP 5. After you’ve finished writing down all the scenes
from your favorite book, dig out a fresh piece of paper and
do the same thing for the story you’re writing.
STEP 6. Put your two lists side by side and compare them.

My guess is that the list for your favorite book is going to be a lot
longer than the list for your book . . . but you already knew that, didn’t
you? The point of this exercise is to illustrate that your problem isn’t
that your book doesn’t have as many pages.
Your problem is that your book doesn’t have as many scenes.
Again, it’s possible that your story is just smaller. Instead of taking
us all the way to magic school and thwarting a terrible villain while sav-
ing unicorns and flying around on brooms, maybe you told the story of
a kid who blew up his science lab one day.
If that’s the case, you’ve written a short story. Which is great. Go, you!
The only way to turn that into a novel is to have that be the opening scene
of a much bigger story. Maybe by blowing up the science lab he turns the
class hamster into a dragon that gets loose in the city and he and his friends
have to save it? Maybe he opens up a hole in the floor that leads to a secret
world beneath the school? Maybe he switches bodies with his twin sister?
You get the idea. Something else has to happen. More things have to
go wrong. Your characters need more hurdles to jump, more dead ends,
more false starts.
You need more conflict.
And you need more scenes to resolve all that conflict.
Look at your lists again. This time, I want you to mark every time
the character in your favorite book had something go wrong. Now
do the same for your story.

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 That’s why your story’s so much shorter.
You need more times when things go wrong, and you need more
times when things go right.
You need more conflict. You need more scenes.

How do you keep things unique? As soon as I think

I come up with a good idea, I read a book that has
the same general thing happening in it. It seems like
every idea or concept I come up with has already
been done.
Okay. True story. Several years ago, I was at my very first writing
retreat. There were a lot of amazing authors there, and I was pretty
much starstruck, so I tried to keep my mouth shut and stay in the
kitchen, cooking and learning from everyone else while they talked
shop at the kitchen table.
When Holly Black started talking about her next book, my ears
perked up. Then I started freaking out.
You see, the day before I’d left for the retreat, I’d turned in a draft
of my book Heist Society, about a girl named Kat who grew up in a fam-
ily of criminals but then cons her way into an elite boarding school in
order to try to steal a normal life.
I was really excited about it . . . right up until the point when Holly
started talking about her new book, White Cat, about a boy who grew
up  in a family of criminals who cons his way into an elite boarding
school in order to steal a normal life.
Holly Black and I had written the same book! Needless to say,
I wanted to cry because there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Holly had
done it better.

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 It was all I could do not to burn the cookies. (Oh, who am I kid-
ding? I totally burned the cookies.)
But the more Holly talked, the more differences I saw in what we
had each created. White Cat has magic and curses and one of the best
fantasy worlds that I have ever read. Heist Society has art thieves and a
crew of geniuses and a teenage billionaire with a private jet.
They are two very different books that are, at first glance, exactly
the same.
This is something that new writers often have a hard time grasp-
ing. After all, once you get an amazing idea, it’s human nature to think
you’ve already done the hard part. We all want to believe that every-
thing else will be easy.
But it’s not.
The truth is that, in the long run, ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s what
you do with the idea that really matters.
A lot of times what people see as similarities are really just staples
of the genre or tropes. No one author owns the idea of dystopian futures
or vampire romances or boarding schools or kids who have to save the
world. The key is to take those tropes and genre staples and turn them
into something that is uniquely yours and amazing. You can do it!

How do you avoid taking too much inspiration from

other stories you’ve read?
If writers are supposed to read a lot, then it only stands to reason
that they will sometimes be inspired by what they read—they’re bound
to be! I mean, isn’t that kind of the point?
But plagiarism is bad. Very bad. Like don’t-joke-around-about-it
bad. So where does the line between inspiration and plagiarism lie?

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 Sometimes that line is fairly clear. While rare, there are instances
of  people copying whole paragraphs of another author’s work and
claiming those words as their own. In research papers, you can use
quotation marks, cite the original author, and make sure the reader
knows they aren’t your words, and then that’s totally okay. If it’s fic-
tion and you want to, for example, use a quote from something in the
public  domain (like Shakespeare or Austen) then you could cite that
as well.
But in cases where someone pulls whole sentences or paragraphs
from one novel and plops them down in another and acts as if they’re
original? Well, those cases are about as close to cut-and-dried as a case
of plagiarism can be.
So if a sentence in your book is exactly like a sentence in someone
else’s book, you’ve plagiarized them, right? Well . . . maybe. Consider
a sentence like If you don’t hurry, you’re gonna be late. That sentence is
probably in a thousand novels—a million. Any writer could write that
sentence at any time purely by coincidence. But could they write an
incredibly similar sentence just before it and an almost verbatim para-
graph just below? That’s far more questionable.
Words matter. And for writers, our words are our livelihoods,
which is why we take charges of plagiarism very, very seriously. And
you should, too.
So what about cases where we aren’t talking about words—we’re
talking about ideas? That’s when things get even more complicated.
First, it’s important to understand the concept of tropes. Let’s say
you love Harry Potter more than anything, and you want to write a
book about a kid with magical powers who is the “chosen one” and
destined to save the world.

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 Is that plagiarism? Should you be expecting a call from J. K.
Rowling’s lawyer? Of course not. If that were the case, then a bunch of
other authors would have gotten in trouble long before now. Including
J. K. Rowling herself.
Why? Because no one author owns the concept of “the chosen one.”
No one author could ever own the idea of magic. Those things existed
long before J. K. Rowling, and they will exist long after.
But if you were to write about an orphan who finds out he’s a wiz-
ard and then is taken to wizard school on a big scarlet train and then
he learns to play soccer on broomsticks and fights a troll and has a best
friend with red hair, etc., etc., then you might be in a totally different
situation.
You see, J. K. Rowling doesn’t own wizards, but she does own
Harry Potter.
She doesn’t own boarding schools, but she does own Hogwarts.
If that’s confusing, you’re not alone. I remember several years ago
I was working on my fifth Gallagher Girls book, Out of Sight, Out of
Time, and I really wanted to give my main character amnesia because I
love an amnesia story more than anything.
But one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Alias, had done a spy-
with-amnesia story line not long before. So had The Bourne Identity. And
a movie called The Long Kiss Goodnight. (And probably several others.)
I was talking with my friend Jennifer Lynn Barnes, telling her how
I really wanted to give my heroine amnesia but I couldn’t because Alias
had already done it.
“So?” Jen said.
“So I don’t want to plagiarize all those other stories,” I told her.

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 Then Jen said something that really made the pieces fall into place
for me: “If you can name a half dozen stories that have already done it,
then you aren’t plagiarizing any of them. You’re just writing a trope
of the genre.”
So, yes, read. Read a lot. Watch movies. Binge TV. Devour comic
books. Get inspired. Get exposed to things you never knew existed or
things you never knew you loved—that’s what reading is for! Then take
your new love of boarding schools or magical swords or amnesia and
write about them. Most important, make these tropes your own, and put
your own spin on them. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter
where your inspiration comes from. It matters what you do with it.

In your professional opinion, what is the right age to

begin a writing career?
Authors hear questions like this a lot. There are so many teens out
there who love writing and want to make a career of it—they want to
make a career of it RIGHT NOW! And I can’t blame them. It is a great
career.
But so many teens want to jump right to the getting-published part
(which is why I do tackle the “Will publishers take us seriously if we’re
just teens?” question in the Publishing Your Book section a little later).
I like how this question is worded, though: What is the right age
to begin a publishing career? The answer is: Whatever age you are right
now is the right age to start your career. Why? Because your career
starts with writing.
You can’t query an agent for a book you haven’t written. You can’t
get a publisher for a book you haven’t written. You can’t promote or

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market or sell movie rights to a book you haven’t written. And writing
a book that’s worth publishing takes time. Lots and lots of time. And
practice. And heartbreak. And probably more than a few missteps and
false starts.
You might not get published in your teens, but that’s a great time to
begin your career. It’s a great time to start writing!

DEAR KODY KEPLINGER,

You were really young when you started writing— and
publishing! What was that like, and do you have any
advice for teens who are looking to do the same?
My first novel, The DUFF, sold to a publisher when I was
seventeen, right before I left for college. It was, of course,
an incredibly exciting time in my life. I’d always dreamed of
being a writer, and I was doing it! I was getting started in my
career! It wasn’t all easy, though. Once I started college, I had
both schoolwork and writing work to do. I had deadlines to
meet while also trying to keep high grades so I could hold on
to my scholarships.
I didn’t sleep nearly enough, and I had almost no social
life in college. Many times my friends would ask me to go out
with them and I had to decline because I had work to get
done. I missed out on a lot of college experiences because
I already had a career that took up a lot of time and energy.
I don’t regret pursuing publication young, but I do wish
I’d been more prepared for what that meant. So when teen-
agers hoping to publish young ask me for advice, I always

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tell them to really consider what they are pursuing. Getting
published isn’t just about getting a book on the shelf at your
favorite bookstore. It’s a job. It takes a lot of time and energy
and patience. Once you write a book, the work has only
just begun. It’s not something to enter into without a lot of
thought.
My other piece of advice to teenagers who want to get
published young is to just enjoy the work you’re doing. If
you’re only writing to get published, you’ll kill your passion
for it early. Once you sell a book, there’s a lot of pressure.
There are edits and deadlines and all sorts of other work
to be done. So before you get there, have fun. Enjoy draft-
ing. Remind yourself every day why you love to write. Take
risks and make mistakes and learn from them all. Don’t put
pressure on yourself—the world will put enough on you as
it is—and instead let writing be something that makes you
happy. When you think you’re ready to pursue publication,
go for it! But until then, let writing be the outlet that brings
you joy, not an obligation.
Maybe you’ll be published as a teenager, and maybe you
won’t. It’s okay either way. What’s most important is that the
first book you publish be one you love and are proud to have
written.

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