How to Become a Great Novelist, in 11 Steps

1. Put writing first. Victor Hugo said our duties are (in this order) duty to God, duty to self, duty to neighbor, and duty to community. If you’ve been given the gift, writing is a duty to God.
2. Get rid of anyone and anything that keeps you from writing. Spouses, lovers, family, friends, job, worldly success, reputation as a sane human being — if any of these stand in the way, throw them on the trash heap.
3. Ignore all writing advice. Especially be careful to ignore advice that tells you how hard and painful writing is, or how you have to write on a schedule, or how writing blocks are inevitable, or how you have to ask other people’s opinion before you submit your work, or you have to get a degree. All great writers are self-taught.
4. Take note: if you are a writer by vocation, writing is easier than doing anything else. As for writing blocks, listen to the advice of Vincent Van Gogh, who (more or less) said, “When you hear that voice inside you that says you can’t paint, by all means pick up your brush and paint.”
5. Learn to distinguish the voices in your mind. It is essential that you be able to distinguish your own voice from the world’s and the devil’s. When your own inner voice tells you to stop writing, it’s probably because you haven’t sufficiently imagined what is to come next. Thinking, fantasizing, and letting your mind go wherever it wills are as much a part of writing as writing itself. As somebody rather unpleasantly put it, “Writers are always working, even when their wives think they are staring out the window.”
6. Don’t force anything. You are not in charge; God is. He gives you inspiration, or he doesn’t. If he isn’t in the mood to inspire you, put down your pen and read somebody else’s work. Otherwise you will waste a ton of time.
7. Write with pen and paper, not a computer. Your brain works differently, and better, when the hand is more directly connected to the brain.
8. Write first, edit later. Do not try to edit words before you put them on paper; put down the words exactly as they come to you. This was amazingly hard for me and took years of practice.
9. “Write drunk, edit sober,” as Hemingway said. Writing and editing require entirely different kinds of thinking — and one is just as fun as the other. Your editor self may crumple up fifty pages and throw them on the floor, sending your novel in an entirely new and much better direction.
10. Read your betters constantly. This is the self-taught author’s BFA, MFA, and Ph.D. Your betters are Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Mew, Dostoevsky, and P. G. Wodehouse. There are others. In my childhood, there was Edward Eager, A. A. Milne (Once On a Time), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and Astrid Lindgren (the Pippi Longstocking books). Don’t ever read bad writing.
11. Chin up, and keep writing, no matter what.