Back when I started writing, well, it was in my dining room in Willingboro, New Jersey when I was in 1st Grade. Yup, I wrote my very first story in while I was attending Midvale Elementary school (Armand! What’s going on? How ya been?). Most kids in my class were still learning to read. I was writing.
I wrote on and off most of my life. I never had a single book or lesson in it. No advice from anyone. I knew a guy in Newport who wrote like me, but in many ways he was a nay-sayer, because he never gave me any advice, but would listen to my ideas and shrug and say, “Who’s going to like that?”
It was great that the 2Guys Movies production company actually cast him for a role in my first movie script. Apparently, someone did like the idea!
I’ve now got a lot of books on Screenplay Writing and Book writing, and I’ve learned a lot about writing novels. What six things do I wish someone had told me when I was first starting out?
- Write Every day. Yup, that one’s a big one. I could have been published years ago if I’d just known this. Every time you sit and write something new, you learn. Things happen. Your character occasionally does something unexpected. I can’t explain it. If you’re just trying to write a single novel within a genre, with a different character every time, things happen a little slower. But even in mysteries, where you expect the protagonist to remain unchanged, they sometimes end up doing something different, and it surprises you.
- Write different genres. I’ve read one article where someone actually advises you find your own genre, and stick with that. It may work for them… but I’ve found that you’re going to write within your genre the most anyway. But when I tried working on Screenplays (my second medium, so to speak), I found my fiction writing dramatically improved. When I began putting together ideas for non-fiction, it improved my writing. All this benefits your writing overall ,but mostly in your genre!
- Your first draft you can skimp on words to open scenes. I often end up setting up a scene just with “so and so is sitting at a desk.” Okay, by no means is that anything resembling good writing. But, I need to get words on paper, and that’s my “drop it and run” line.
- Rewrite your novels. Ywriter got me in this habit. Both Ywriter and Scrivener have status labels, allowing you to call something “Rough draft”. That’s a clue. I go a level further and call it “raw draft” for my first. Then “Rough” is the second, for me, once I’ve finished putting in real scene openers.
- Embrace procrastination.This one I got from Jerry Jenkins.Your mind needs to hum and tick on your story, before you start hitting keys. Don’t take too long with it, but you may find the first month of writing punctuated with brief pauses. Let your mind work! Once it hits a span of four days, you’re now wasting time. Write!
- Buy Scrivener. Trust me on this. Night and day. That novel you’re not finishing would be done in Scrivener already, and you’d be working on book 3 or 7 by now.
Conclusion
The above advice would have helped me a lot through the 70’s and 80’s, where I wrote very little, except in six month segments, where I’d start novels and abandon them. Absorb that which is useful to you, discard the rest, and WRITE!
