“So, I had this idea…”
I’ve heard that line more times than I can count. From the plumber who spotted one of my novels on the kitchen counter. From old school mates who’ve tracked me down on Facebook after three decades of radio silence.
What follows is usually a novel the person has been thinking about for years. A story they swear is different from anything else out there. A character they can’t stop picturing.
Roughly one in five is something else. A memoir. The life they’d get down on paper if only they had the time, because what they’ve been through is wilder than most, and if they don’t write it, all that raw material goes to the grave with them.
Whichever of the two it is, the pitch tends to arrive the same way — somewhere between hope and embarrassment, because deep down they know they’ll probably never write it.
I’m a full-time novelist. Twenty novels, over a million books sold, ten years of this as a day job. If you asked me which question I get asked most, it isn’t “how do you come up with your ideas?” or “how do you get published?” It’s some version of “I’ve got this idea for a book, should I actually write it?”
The honest answer is: probably not. But possibly yes. And that “possibly” is what this article is about.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody seems to want to say out loud. Roughly 60% of British adults (six in ten) would like to be an author. That’s the finding of a YouGov survey, and it’s a staggering number once you sit with it. Two out of every three people you pass on the high street are quietly harbouring the ambition to write a book. Of those who start, 97% never finish. The manuscript stalls somewhere around chapter four or eleven, the file gets buried in a folder, and the aspiring novelist quietly returns to being someone who talks about writing a book rather than doing it.
That isn’t a criticism. It’s arithmetic. Writing a book is hard in a way most people don’t grasp until they’ve tried it, and trying it is where most would-be novelists lose the war.
So this piece isn’t the cheerleading “you can do it!” nonsense that clogs up the rest of the internet on this topic. There are hundreds of those. You’ve probably read six of them already, which is part of why you’re still on the fence. What I’m going to do instead is walk you through the honest picture. What writing a book actually involves. What qualifications you don’t need. What decisions matter before you type a single word. And what the two kinds of first-time author look like, because there are two, and if you don’t know which one you are, you’ll end up being neither.
At the end, if you’ve decided you still want to write the bloody thing, I’ll tell you how a bloke with no degree, no creative writing qualification, and a £20 drunken bet ended up with twenty novels on Amazon and a career he never predicted.
Let’s start with the numbers. Because the numbers will either put you off entirely, or they won’t. And knowing which camp you fall into is the first useful thing this article can do for you.
The numbers most people don’t want to hear
A typical novel runs to around 90,000 words. That’s the commercial sweet spot for most genres, and roughly double the length of an average non-fiction book. Memoirs are usually shorter, somewhere between 60,000 and 85,000, but the principle holds. This is a serious piece of work. Not a weekend project. Not something you knock out during the summer holidays. A proper, sustained undertaking.
At a realistic output of 500 words a day (what most people manage when they’re fitting writing around a job, a family, and everything else), that’s 180 days of solid work. Six months without a weekend off, a holiday, or an evening where you decide watching Gogglebox counts as research.
In practice, almost nobody writes every day. Life intervenes. The boiler breaks down and you’ve not hot water for three days. You lose a fortnight to a sinus infection that turns your brain into porridge. A realistic timeline for a first book, working around a full-time job, is nine to twelve months. And that’s just the first draft.
After the first draft comes the second. Then possibly a third. Then editing. Then more editing. Then proofreading. The gap between a finished first draft and a manuscript ready for the world isn’t a tidy-up. It’s a rebuild. The 90,000 words you write first time round are not the 90,000 words that end up in the finished book.
Total time investment from first sentence to publishable manuscript, for a first-time author, is somewhere between a year and eighteen months. Minimum. That’s assuming you’re one of the 3%.
If that timeline puts you off, this article has already done its job. Not because writing a book isn’t worth it; it often is. The first thing worth knowing is simply how much of your life you’re actually signing away.
Still reading?
Good.
“But I’m not a writer”
Before we go further, there’s something worth addressing. It stops more people than a lack of ideas, a lack of time, or a lack of ability. It’s the voice at the back of the head that says: who the hell am I to write a book?
You didn’t study English literature. You haven’t got a creative writing degree. You haven’t spent years crafting short stories for obscure literary journals that nobody reads. You’re not the sort of person who writes books. That’s for other people. Clever people. People who know what a dangling modifier is.
If any of that sounds familiar, let me tell you about myself.
I was born in 1971 on a sprawling council estate in South-West Surrey. My dad worked as a porter for a removals company; my mum worked in a café. Six of us lived in a terraced house. Clothes came from jumble sales. My school lunchbox contained a cheese sandwich and a solitary digestive biscuit. Regularly.
I left school in 1988 with a smattering of GCSEs. College didn’t happen; my parents couldn’t afford to support me through two more years of education. As for university, my dad reckoned it didn’t apply to “folks like us.” So I got a job.
No degree. No A-levels. No background in the arts, literature, or anything vaguely creative. I spent the next couple of decades doing various jobs that had nothing to do with writing, ending up as a director of a property company before becoming a freelance marketing consultant. Not exactly the CV of a future novelist.
I’ve attended exactly one creative writing event in my life. It happened at a literary festival. A man in a linen jacket spent forty minutes explaining the importance of “earned pathos.” I went to the bar.
The qualification myth is powerful because it gives people a ready-made excuse not to start. Charles Dickens left school at twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory. Mark Twain left at eleven. Jane Austen had no formal schooling beyond the age of eleven. Harper Lee studied law. Terry Pratchett left at seventeen with five O-levels. Between them they’ve sold over a billion books, and not one of them had a creative writing qualification.
E.L. James is the most instructive modern example. She studied history at the University of Kent, then spent twenty-five years in television production. She didn’t start writing until her mid-forties, and when she did, she wrote fan fiction based on the Twilight novels, posted online under the name Snowqueens Icedragon. That fan fiction turned into Fifty Shades of Grey. The trilogy has since sold more than 165 million copies. You can be sniffy about the subject matter. You can question the prose. You cannot look at 165 million copies and tell me a history graduate with no writing credentials can’t write a book that sells.
Meanwhile, I know a man with an English degree, a postgraduate qualification in creative writing, and a novel that has precisely one Amazon review four years after publication. That isn’t a dig. It’s a data point.
A creative writing course teaches you about writing. It doesn’t teach you about readers, markets, covers, blurbs, algorithms, or any of the dozen other things that determine whether a book sells. And it doesn’t guarantee what you produce at the end of it will be any good. Plenty of formally trained writers produce work that’s technically competent and commercially beige. Plenty of untrained writers produce work that’s rough around the edges and sells by the lorry-load.
The qualification you actually need is stubbornness. The willingness to be terrible at something for long enough to get less terrible. That has nothing to do with your school, your degree, or whether you understand the difference between an em-dash and a hyphen.
Novels and memoirs: the same fork, different road
Approximately one in five of the book ideas pitched to me are memoirs rather than novels. They deserve a separate word, because they come with their own particular set of delusions.
The memoir pitch usually arrives wrapped in some version of: “my life has been mental, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through, I really need to get it down before I forget.” Sometimes it’s a specific era (the divorce, the illness, the gap year). Sometimes it’s a whole life. Occasionally it’s a relative’s life, because a grandfather flew Lancasters, or an aunt disappeared in Marrakesh in 1973 and never resurfaced.
I want to be honest with you. Most of these memoirs, if written, wouldn’t sell. Memoir-hopefuls are, in my experience, mainly deluded. That sounds harsh. Let me explain why.
There’s a simple test for whether a memoir will sell. Either the reader already knows who you are (celebrity, politician, reality television survivor, retired serial killer), or the story itself is extraordinary enough that the subject matter alone compels strangers to pick it up (surviving a plane crash, escaping a cult). Prose good enough to transcend the subject entirely is a third route. Books like Tara Westover’s Educated or Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am work because the writing itself is exceptional, not because the events alone are uniquely interesting. But few memoirs pull that off. Very few.
“My divorce was absolute chaos” isn’t a book. “My time at British Gas in the nineties” isn’t a book. “The things my nan used to say” isn’t a book. “Six months I spent backpacking around South-East Asia at twenty-two” really isn’t a book. These might make lovely chapters in a family keepsake, and they’re absolutely worth writing for your children and grandchildren to read. But they won’t sell to strangers. Strangers don’t know you. They have no investment in your nan.
The honest test is this: if someone in Stockport who has never met you picks up your memoir, is there anything in it they’ll read, remember, and tell their sister about a week later? If the answer is “my life,” the answer is probably no. If the answer is “what I went through when X happened to me, because one in fifty people go through the same thing and nobody’s written about it honestly,” you might have something worth a serious go.
Everything else in this article, from here on, applies equally to novels and memoirs. The time investment. The qualification myth (which you’ve already read). The fork in the road.
Especially the fork in the road.
The decision nobody tells you to make
There are, broadly, two reasons to write a book.
The first: because you’ve always wanted to. The idea has been rattling around your head for years, maybe decades, and you want to get it out. You want to hold a finished book with your name on the cover. You want to know what it feels like to type ‘The End’ and sit back and think: I actually did this. If the book sells twelve copies, ten of which go to family members, that’s fine. You did the thing. You joined the 3% who finished. You achieved something most people who said they wanted to write a book will never manage.
The second: because you want to write for a living. You’ve done the sums. You’ve read about indie authors earning enough to quit their day job. You’ve imagined a life where you wake up, make a coffee, and spend the morning doing something you love instead of something you tolerate. Writing isn’t just the dream. It’s the business plan.
Both are perfectly valid. Neither is wrong.
But they lead to very different books, and the problems start when you don’t decide which path you’re on before you begin.
Here’s what happens more often than not. Someone sits down to write their first book without consciously choosing either path. They don’t think of themselves as a one-book writer, because that sounds like limiting themselves. They don’t commit to the career path either, because that feels presumptuous. So they split the difference. They’ll write the book, put it out there, and see how it goes.
This is the worst possible starting position.
“See how it goes” sounds reasonable. It sounds humble. It’s also a recipe for making decisions that serve neither goal. The book ends up too niche to build a career on, but too compromised to be the passion project they actually wanted. The genre ends up half-hearted. The cover comes in cheap but not cheap enough to be disposable. They spent three months on marketing that went nowhere because the book wasn’t written with a readership in mind, and the readership it accidentally attracted wasn’t large enough to sustain a career.
If you sit down without deciding, you’ll make a hundred small choices over the next year, and each one will be a coin flip between personal satisfaction and commercial viability. By the time you finish, you’ll have a manuscript that doesn’t fully commit to either.
The one-book writer can write whatever they want. A literary novel about a retired librarian coming to terms with her estranged daughter? Lovely. A genre-bending mystery that’s half police procedural, half magical realism? Go for it. Nobody’s expecting a follow-up. Nobody’s expecting you to build a brand. Write the book you want to read, and if twelve people buy it, you’ve still accomplished something most people never will.
The career writer has to think differently. Not cynically. Differently. If you want to write for a living, book one isn’t just a book. It’s the foundation stone. It needs to sit in a genre with a large, identifiable readership. It needs to leave room for a series, or at least a second book that appeals to the same audience. Before you’ve written word one, you need to be thinking about word 90,001, which is the first word of book two.
That’s not selling out. That’s understanding what “writing for a living” actually requires.
For the one-book writer, spending £2,000 on a professional edit and a decent cover is an indulgence. The price of realising a dream, no different from paying for a skydive or an expensive holiday. If the money never comes back, so what? You weren’t expecting it to.
For the career writer, that £2,000 is a business investment, and it needs to generate a return, because you’ll need to spend it again on book two. And book three. Professional editing, cover design, advertising; the costs don’t stop at one book. A career indie author runs a small business, and like any small business, the early investments need to pay for themselves or the whole thing collapses before it gains traction.
The mistake isn’t choosing one path over the other. The mistake is not choosing at all. Because if you don’t decide before you start, the decision gets made for you, by the market, by your bank balance, and by the slow erosion of enthusiasm that comes from writing a book that wasn’t quite the passion project you wanted and wasn’t quite the commercial prospect you needed.
One path or the other. Both are worth walking.
But you have to pick one first.
Four questions before you type a word
By this point, if you’re still reading, you’re more serious than most. Most people bailed at the 97% figure. Plenty more bailed at the memoir section. What you have in front of you now is a short list of questions worth sitting with before you open a blank document.
These aren’t writing exercises. They’re not designed to inspire you or get you into a creative flow state. They’re designed to save you twelve months.
One: do you actually enjoy writing, or just the idea of being an author?
There’s a significant difference. Writing a book is months of sitting alone in a room, staring at a blinking cursor, re-reading yesterday’s work and wincing. Being an author is a life that exists somewhere beyond that room, largely in your head. Plenty of people want the latter without having much interest in the former. If the thought of spending a Saturday afternoon writing fills you with dread, the thought of spending 180 of them will break you.
Two: can you be terrible at something long enough to get less terrible?
Your first draft will be appalling. This is universal, not personal. Every author I know described their first draft as ‘a bit shit’. The difference between the 3% and the 97% isn’t talent, or luck, or a muse whispering in their ear. It’s the willingness to keep showing up while the work is still bad, in the quiet faith that it will, eventually, improve.
Three: are you prepared to spend 400 hours before anyone reads a word?
Writing a first draft takes roughly 400 hours of actual time at the desk. For comparison, that’s almost three months of a full-time job, walking the entire length of Great Britain, or sitting through 1,090 episodes of Friends. Not metaphorically. Literally. That’s what you’re signing up for, and no amount of enthusiasm at the outset survives month four without a reason to keep going.
Four: would you still do it if you knew nobody but your mum would read it?
This is the one that separates the one-book writer from the career writer. If the answer is yes, you’re a one-book writer, which is perfectly fine. If the answer is no, you’re aiming at a career, and everything in the previous section applies. The point isn’t that one answer is right and the other wrong. The point is that knowing which one you are changes absolutely everything about how you approach the project.
If you answered yes to all four, you’re probably ready. If you answered no to any of them, either don’t start, or change your answer before you do.
Why I’m telling you any of this
I’ve made a career out of something I had no right to attempt. No English degree. No creative writing qualification. No pedigree, no literary family, no Oxford tutor who spotted something in me. Just an itch I couldn’t ignore, and a £20 bet I couldn’t face losing.
My debut novel, The ’86 Fix, isn’t a literary masterpiece. I’ll be the first to tell you that. It broke half a dozen rules I didn’t even know existed. I dumped backstory at the beginning because nobody had told me not to. I ended it on a cliffhanger because I’d recently rewatched The Italian Job. I had no grasp of three-act structure and I’m reasonably sure I still couldn’t explain it properly.
What the book did do, for me, is prove something no creative writing course could have proved. That the thing I’d been carrying around in my head for years could actually exist in the world. That I could finish it. That someone, somewhere, might even buy it.
If the thing you’re wrestling with is that feeling of standing in Waterstones, looking at the literary piles stacked up on the front tables, and feeling like you’re not allowed in, I understand it completely. I felt it too. I still feel it occasionally, twenty novels later.
Here’s my suggestion, such as it is.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Read my first novel instead. Read the book a bloke with nothing going for him somehow cobbled together during a six-month downturn in his day job. It’s called The ’86 Fix. It’s on Amazon, it’s not expensive, and it’s a perfectly reasonable way to spend a few evenings. And as you read it, ask yourself a simple question: could I write something at least as good as this?
If the answer is yes, you’ve got your permission slip. Writing courses can’t give you one. Agents can’t give you one. The literary establishment won’t. But a paperback in your hands (or on your Kindle), written by someone with fewer qualifications than you probably have, is as good a reason to start as any you’re likely to find.
One last question
Every chapter of my (unpublished) non-fiction book on writing ends with a single question. It’s a habit I’ve picked up. Not a prompt or an exercise, just a question, because sometimes the act of sitting with one is more useful than any amount of advice.
So here’s yours.
You’ve read about the 97%. You’ve read about the 400 hours. You know what qualifications you don’t need, and you know the fork in the road. You know what a memoir that sells has to do, and you know the difference between wanting to write a book and wanting to have written one.
Knowing all of that, and being honest with yourself, not with me:
Are you still going to write it?
Recap Questions
Do I need a degree to write a book?
No. Dickens, Austen, Twain, Harper Lee, Terry Pratchett and E.L. James collectively sold more than a billion books without a creative writing qualification between them. What you need is stubbornness and the willingness to be terrible at something long enough to get less terrible. No university teaches that.
How long does it take to write a book?
A realistic first draft of a 90,000-word novel takes between nine and twelve months when you’re fitting it around a full-time job. After the draft comes editing, rewriting, and proofreading, which adds another three to six months at minimum. From first sentence to publishable manuscript, budget a year to eighteen months for a first-time author. Memoirs are usually shorter, but the timeline isn’t much quicker.
Should I write a novel or a memoir?
Write whichever you genuinely want to read. If you’re considering a memoir, apply the honest test: if a stranger in Stockport who has never met you picks it up, is there anything in it they’ll read, remember, and tell their sister about? If the answer is “my life,” your memoir probably won’t sell to strangers. Keep it as a family keepsake. If the answer is “what happened when X,” you might have something.
How do I know if I should write a book or not?
Ask yourself whether you enjoy the act of writing itself, or just the idea of being an author. Ask whether you can be bad at something for months before you get less bad. Ask whether you’d still do it if the only reader were your mum. If yes to all three, you’re probably ready. If no to any of them, change the answer before you start, or don’t start.
Can I write a book with no writing experience?
Yes. Most first-time authors have no experience. I didn’t. My first novel stood as the first long-form fiction I’d ever attempted, and I’d barely read a novel before my fortieth birthday. The experience comes from writing the book, not from having written one already. The first draft is where you learn, not where you demonstrate what you’ve learned.
Is writing a book worth it if hardly anyone reads it?
For the one-book writer, absolutely. Finishing a book puts you ahead of 97% of people who said they wanted to write one. Whether anyone reads it matters less than whether you did it. For the career writer, obscurity is a different problem entirely, which is why the career path needs a different kind of planning from the outset. Decide which one you are before you start.