Writing Your First Novel: What I’ve Learned In Two Years
Or, a long meandering post about a long hopeful book written by a long English bloke.
Just start
You can read about driving a car for as long as you want, but you won’t learn how to do it until you get behind the wheel and turn the key. Writing is no different.
Just start. You can only learn by doing. You can’t learn by doing if you don’t do. Or, more eloquently put:
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” —Stephen King.
Find places you like to write
That King quote has always stuck with me. I’ve gotten a hell of a lot more done in the two years spent grappling with this book than I did in the five I spent thinking about it.
That being said, I’ve found places where I get a lot more writing done than anywhere else. I’m that guy in the corner of a coffee shop on his laptop. Some people roll their eyes at this as if it’s performative. Those people don’t know that writing is kind of lonely. A coffee shop for me is somewhere balanced between home and an office. I’m here to work. That’s it. But it’s somewhere I enjoy being, so I get into a relaxed flow.
It’s a psychological trick: pairing something you enjoy with something that’s a challenge will make you work on it more often. Some people only listen to their favourite podcast at the gym or smoke weed before Sunday church, I write in cafés.
So, no, you shouldn’t need things to be just so in order to write. Write wherever and whenever you can. But if you find a place that works for you, stick with it.
Read a lot
Duh. Reading something compelling will get you excited and feeling creative. I find if I slack and don’t read most days that my brain gets sluggish, and my writing suffers.
You need to know the story before the story
Whether it all comes into play or not, knowing the history of your constructed characters and world will help you immensely in getting words down on the page. Context is king. Why do your characters do what they do? What past failing is pulling their strings in the present?
I wasn’t missing character backstories. What I did neglect for a long time was what brought us to the start of the story. What was the status quo of the world before like? What’s the fallout of it being smashed? Writing without this knowledge will leave your story flat. It won’t have any substance. It will just be a lot of things happening.
In the 1995 film Se7en, the serial killer has a creepy workshop and a shelf full of journals where the character wrote all of his mad ramblings. About 0.001% of what’s in those journals actually appears onscreen. But David Fincher had the props department fill every one of those journals with detailed insanity in the name of authenticity. I used to think that was a pointless waste of time if their work never made it into a shot.
Maybe demanding such insane attention to detail is why David Fincher is one of the finest directors working today and why Se7en (sesevenen) is one of the best crime thrillers of all time. You have to think about before the story and after, all the edges of the map, all the stuff in between…
Worldbuilding is hard work
J.R.R. Tolkien spent his whole life (and a substantial portion of his death) building one world. I thought you could throw in a wrinkle here and a bit of imagined history there and do the same thing. It’s actually quite hard, creating whole worlds out of nothing. Who knew? But it is satisfying and can be done concisely. Not everyone needs to write in the difference between the Calaquendi and the Moriquendi plus all of their assorted race wars, am I right nerds? Not to speak ill of the master.
Which leads me to…
Don’t bite off more than you can chew
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being ambitious, but if I could tell my 26-year-old self that 5 worlds, 5 genres, and 6 points of view are quite a few starters and I might get a bit stuffed… I would. But I’m a dog who’s chased this car for two years, so I’m going to keep on until I catch it. See your projects through.
“You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” — Neil Gaiman
Do a little and often until it becomes a habit
One of my favourite reviewers once said that if George R.R. Martin had only written 150 words a day, he would have had his next book written by now. This was at least three years ago. And George writes such large books that they split them in two. I found this idea incredibly inspiring. 150 words is nothing. It’s a few sentences. Sad as it makes me about my favourite book series seeing its end, it stuck in my head and got me to 150,000 words.
In the first year, I wrote a reminder into my phone that said, “Write 300,” and set it to repeat every day. I think this is the perfect wordcount to aim for if you’re a first-time novelist. It’s just enough to be worth it but little enough that you’ll probably go over it every time and get a little dopamine buzz for being a good student. That will help to make it a habit. Also, if you’re committed to doing it, even if it’s 11 o’clock at night and you’re bone tired, you can always pull out 300 flaky lumps of crap and transfer them to the page, blocked little writer though you are. Hank Moody reference.
Writing out of order is fine, but you’ll have holes to plug
If you have a particular scene in mind that excites you, get it down before that inspiration slips away. However, if you do this for an entire novel, you’ll find you have a lot of missing pieces when you come to edit. Different styles work for different writers. I’ve found noticing the gaps and figuring out what to fill them with a fun challenge, but it’s definitely added to my editing time.
Read aloud when you’re editing
Having to physically read a chapter aloud will let you know if it flows, is repetitive, overlong, or if certain lines hit the ear wrong. It offers a fresh perspective outside of all the context you hold within your head as the writer.
Use milestones as fuel
I didn’t set out with a wordcount in mind, but I knew this book was going to be long, based on the aforementioned ambitiousness of the thing. But when I hit 10,000 words, I got excited. And every now and then when I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere, I’ll open up every document relating to the book and throw the word count at the bottom of each page into a calculator. I’m now at 150,000 words total for books one and two.
I use this infographic on the wordcounts of famous books to visualise just what size my book will be. Right now, I’m somewhere between a Hobbit and a Prisoner of Azkaban for book one. Considering the complexity I mentioned earlier, that seems like a good zone to be in. If I start seeing Order of the Phoenix numbers ahead, I’ll know I’ve lost the plot and rein it in.
Write a sequel if it feels authentic
I had a lot of material written and was really deep in the story. I was churning through chapters but had this weird nagging feeling. It turned out that that moment I had written was big enough to function as a climax, and everything I wrote after it felt like resetting the board. Then it clicked: I was already writing book two.
Write the book only you can write
Someone clever said this to me a few months before I started writing this wandering tome and it stuck with me. I’ve heard others say it — it’s probably in the Gaiman quote page I linked above — but sometimes you need a reminder, a refresher, or to hear the same thing in a new context before it clicks.
Pour your weirdness onto the page. Do not write for an audience, except yourself. When you give it to test readers, they can tell you if it makes any sense.
Take inspiration from everywhere
You don’t want to floor someone in 5 sentences if you can do it with 5 words. If you listen to whichever artist you consider a lyrical genius, you know it’s possible. Musicians who put the hours in to craft every line of a song are like novelists concentrated. They can teach us a lot about being concise and emotive.
“Hello, love, my invincible friend.” –Ben Howard
“How you suffered for your sanity.” —Don McLean
“There will not be a send-off, a funeral or mass
Just a pathetic little vodka from a dirty little glass.” —Paul Heaton“My love, you should know
The best of me left hours ago so.”—Scott Hutchison
Watching Ethan Cohen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth recently gave me a brain boner because of the way Shakespeare expresses things through descriptive language, even if that’s not how I’d write today. Experiencing Shakespeare is always a mental workout in translating my native tongue too.
Seeing a woman in a coffee shop sitting and talking to herself while sipping her drink initially sparked a kneejerk thought that she was weird. Then I thought maybe she just got kicked out and has nowhere to go. Maybe she’s off her meds because pharmaceuticals are expensive. Maybe she’s completely normal, whatever that means, and just likes to puzzle things out aloud to herself. Either way, everyone has a story if you care to look for it.
Do it for the love of it
“If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.“ –Charles Bukowski
I could quote any line from that poem “So You Want to Be a Writer?” to make this point. I recently watched Salman Rushdie’s Masterclass, and he earnestly pleaded with his audience to please choose another career path if they have another option. I think he said it took him 12 years to get his first book published after completing it. Neil Gaiman is more in the camp of, everyone should write for the love of it, but be realistic about your chances of making a living out of it.
I write for a living as a copywriter. It’s mostly blog articles, advertisements, and webpages. A lot of it is soul sucking, but I’d rather be doing this than working admin or in finance, even if they would pay better. The best parts of my job are being paid to become a better writer, studying the internal mechanics of language, being able to turn dry subject matter into something engaging through writing tricks, or the rare occasions I actually get to tell someone’s story. A lot of it is grind. That’s what writing for a living is for most people. It’s a better-than-average job with a probably lower-than-average salary attached.
But, when I write my own stuff, it’s incredibly satisfying. Figuring out everything I’ve listed here over the last two years has been a hell of a journey. It’s all stuff that any number of writers out there have said, but some things you need to learn for yourself. I’ve thought from day one that if I write a novel, even if it sits gathering dust and no one ever reads it, that would be enough for me. I’ve loved writing it.
If writing stories is something you’re pretty good at, you don’t really enjoy it, but you think it will make you money or get you famous or if you won’t be satisfied unless you get published, do something else.
If you’ve made it this far, you can see other things I’ve written here.
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