Writing a novel is not easy. If it was easy, everyone could do it.
How many writers have tried to write a novel? You turn on Microsoft Word, stare at a blank screen, then give up after ten minutes. Others can plunge into a page, maybe two… then it all falls apart.
Why?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Task One: Plan Your Novel
I’ve written several times about how I interviewed every writer at a local writer’s convention. I asked questions about their work process. Of all of them, only one was a pants’er. All of them considered themselves pants’ers except one, but their work flows admittedly required “extensive planning.”
My experience is that less than ten percent of successful writers actually are pants’ers. This is a much smaller number than we’re given to believe. Indeed, by the criteria I’ve read- I’m a pants’er, even though I have four separate planning stages.
If pants’ing worked for everybody, everybody would write novels. There’d be maybe three books on the market on “how to write a novel.”
If you can’t write three novels in 90 days with zero planning, pants’ing is not your workflow.
Plan your work, work your plan. Try to write out what every scene in your novel is about. You need to know three things –
- what happened before
- what must happen in this scene
- what must happen in the next scene
If you can do this fifty times on one sheet of paper – you have everything you need to write a novel.
Task two: Stop questioning yourself
Surgeons never wonder if they’re really surgeons. They just operate, then charge you a lot of money.
You want to be a writer. Do this for yourself – don’t ask yourself if it’s any good. Can you imagine someone stopping a movie thirty seconds in, and asking the audience if it’s any good? You have no idea. You just got into it. You won’t know until it’s almost over.
Bingo.
Your novel is the same. A single scene in a novel is not a basis to judge if it’s any good or not.
Just write. Write to see what happens. You’ll be amazed how often your novel goes in directions you never anticipated. That’s good – let it.
What you expect writing the novel is what the reader will expect reading it. Share on XTrust me, if the book is going it’s own direction, and you’re typing furiously to see where it’s going… the book is great.
Task Three: You must edit your novel
I know, it’s my favorite daydream. Everyone tells you your raw draft is perfect, and needs no editing.
In reality, I can tell you it’s just not possible (although a writer’s forum thought my raw draft was an edited one, but I’m not falling into that trap).
At the very least, you need to go through your novel and make sure there are no filter words.
You need to know if your novel fulfilled all promises. Ever read a published novel and wonder whatever happened to the hanging plot thread that never got finished? That’s why you need to edit, and edit extensively.
You need to make sure there was character growth.
You need to make sure that you followed the three act story, and that your novel fits genre standards. Yes, there is a word count for your genre, yes you need to follow it, and yes there is a simple math formula that any fourth grader can figure out to tell you if your novel is boring or not.
Some people actually spend an entire year editing. This is extreme, but having had my first novel stretch out at an ungainly 210,000 words, I knew mine would easily take that amount of time.
Last but not least, DO NOT send out an unedited text!
Conclusion
failure to follow these three simple procedures will doom your novel. You’ll lose all your friends. Your goldfish will ignore you. Well, maybe not that bad, but any dream you had of seeing your name in print will remain just that – a dream.
Dreams are best lived. Not dreamed.
