Does anyone know how to write a book?

[haele]

16. Funk and White's Elements of Style...

The best advice I ever had from a writer who was also teaching my English Composition class was to read a lot.
For Non-Fiction, research and write a few essays on the topic you want to write about. 10 - 15 pages; the normal "chapter" size.
After you've finished, put them away and read other authors on your topic. After you've finished, read your essays *aloud* to yourself.
If your essays "flow" from point to point in a logical order and don't continue to re-hash personal opinions as concepts or seem repetitious or as if you were presenting "bullet points" to hammer your audience with, then you have a good chance to flesh out the subject and be able to flesh out the draft outline you will need to create to bound your Non-Fiction presentation into a book (rather than a lecture).

If you're a fiction writer, write a few "short stories" in the style of your favorite authors with their characters, and compare the differences in the "read". If your plot and characterization seem to be something that writer would have come up with, then you've got a good idea on your writing capabilities.
The most common "how did you learn to write" explanation I've read from successful authors I like was - "as a child, I used to write continuing adventures of characters in the books I liked..."
That, and not self-editing too much. Back in the 90's (Before the Cloud), I had a friend who wanted to write historical romance and actually finished a draft manuscript she was going to send out to an editor. It was pretty good; she researched the time period and developed well rounded characters that weren't "anachronistic", her main and sub-plots were reasonable for the time period, and her dialog did not go into exposition too much.
She had just started shopping agents - and after a first rejection from an agent that dealt with History Non-Fiction, she decided to tweak the plot a bit for the Romance Novel agents; after all, Romance "trilogies" and series make lots of money, right? (She loved the Brother Cadfell novels, ignoring the fact that after the sixth book in the series, the author was pretty much rehashing the same basic plots along with the interspersing of history...)

Since she had fallen in love with her main hero character (always a risk, especially after a divorce..), she decided to put a bit more of herself into her heroine; completely turning both characters into 20th century idealized stand-ins...
...and she re-wrote over her 300+ page final draft (instead of saving it to a floppy first) and by the time she started sending out her manuscript to fiction agents, all she got was "won't sell, needs a lot more work, needs research, just not balanced between plot and characters..."

And what would have been a really nice historical adventure-romance turned into FanFic that would only be sold either in the back Sci-Fi/Fantesy errata corner of a local comic book shop or at conventions.

Anyway, Good Luck. And whether the book is Fiction or Non-Fiction - don't fall in love with your main characters!

Haele