7 Novel-Writing Tips for Beginner Novelists

The following 7 novel-writing tips will help you write better and faster.

You might be thinking,”why not just sit down and start writing?”

That’s an often heard piece of advice to aspiring writers — to write a lot and write every day.

Well, you’ll never become a novelist (even a bad one) if you don’t write every day, but writing just to write, writing with no purpose or direction, has limited value.

Follow the tips below to make sure your writing has a purpose when you sit down to write.

1. Create an Outline of Your novel

Outlines can be sparse and basic or highly detailed.

Choose the type that best fits your own temperament and the way you like to work. But do create an outline.

Writing a novel outline will increase your chances of

1. Finishing your novel
2. Having readers enjoy it when it’s done

Ernest Hemingway once said that he never stopped writing until he knew what would happen next.

An outline tells you what happens next.

That way, when you come back to your novel, you’ll know exactly where to begin.

No fussing around that way. No wondering what to write. Just…start writing.

Other benefits to an outline are that it helps you

• write fast
• stay organized
• Make sure you’ve got everything in the book that needs to be there
• Get through the “middle build” of your novel

The middle build, as editor Shawn Coyne terms it, is that long stretch of the novel between your beginning and your ending that has to be filled with interesting characters, fascinating plot twists, and an arc that ascends logically to a climax.

Some writers (they’re called pantsers) prefer to “fly by the seat of their pants.”

They just start writing and see where the writing takes them.

Your safest course, though, especially when you’re starting out, is to be a “plotter.”

And to be a good plotter, you need an outline.

2. Learn Your Category

Writing your novel outline will go better if you know what category your novel belongs to.

Category is simply the kind of novel you’re writing.

A customary classification of novels is into the broad categories of

• Genre fiction
• Mainstream fiction
• Literary fiction

What is genre fiction

Examples of genre fiction are

• Crime fiction (or mysteries)
• Science fiction
• Romance fiction
• Horror fiction

Each of these genres has highly specific formulas according to which they’re written. That’s because readers of genre fiction are looking for a highly specific experience when they read.

The writer’s task is to deploy the formulas of the genre in a creative enough way to guarantee readers the experience they are seeking but without being trite or predictable in the delivery of that experience..

Author Savanna Roberts breaks down genre fiction as follows:

The overarching genre is defined by the age of a novel’s audience:

• Middle-grade
• Young adult
• Adult

Novels of all kinds can be written for each of these audiences. For instance,

• Young adult
• Science fiction/fantasy
• Romance
• Mystery
• Horror

And so on for each age group and each type of novel.

Each genre is defined by certain conventions and obligatory scenes that set readers’ expectations of the experience they’ll be having.

For instance, a house in a crime or mystery novel is likely to be just a house.

At most it will be a mansion set in expensive grounds to show the wealth and power of a character.

But a house in a gothic Romance novel must be spooky, set in a remote, forbidding country side.

It must have some reputation for ghosts and often a secret doorway.

Such a house in a simple crime novel would seem unnecessary to the events, and its presence in the novel would almost certainly confuse the reader about what kind of experience he is to expect your novel.

You must be clear about the kind of novel you’re writing so you can avoid such elementary, audience-confusing errors.

But what if you don’t want to write a mystery or a romance or a fantasy?

What is mainstream fiction?

Mainstream fiction is not so tightly limited by genre conventions as genre fiction is. More emphasis is put on character development than in genre fiction.

Some mainstream fiction, though, contains elements of the more highly defined genres mentioned above. It often combines more complex characterization with plots organized much as they would be in genre fiction.

What is literary fiction?

The most important difference between literary fiction and the other categories is that both author and reader of this type of fiction put more emphasis on language and style than the other two types.

Literary fiction emphasizes character, but the characterization goes deeper and shows more complexity in the character than you’ll find in mainstream fiction.

Literary fiction also explores large ideas and confronts the reader with moral complexity or dilemmas.

You see that each of these novel types has its own characteristics.

So before you start outlining your novel, you will find it useful to become familiar with the various categories and decide what kind of a novel would best allow you to carry out your idea.

3. Let Your Characters Live

Sometimes fictional characters begin to move and talk by themselves, as if the writer is not so much creating them as watching them as if they were real people.

This is a good thing.

A character that comes to life in the process of writing will also come to life for a reader.

When this happens, you can adjust your novel’s outline to accommodate your character’s sudden unruliness by incorporating the change in a way that will be consistent with your original idea and outline.

4.Do your Research

Part of developing true to life characters is to know about relevant aspects of a character’s everyday life.

For instance, in Chapter 1 of Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim, Bellow’s main character, Asa Leventhal gets an hysterical call from his sister-in-law, asking him to leave work and come to help her with a sick child.

To build this scene, Bellow needs to know

• What kind of job Leventhal has (he’s an editor at a small trade magazine.)
• Where he works (in lower Manhattan.)
• What he’s occupied with when his sister-in-law calls (he’s busy. “A pile of unchecked proof lay before him.”)
• Physical details of the office and who’s there with Leventhal. (There’s a girl at a switchboard to whom he announces he’s going to tell his boss he has to leave.)

It’s not enough to say that Leventhal received a call from his sister-in-law to come help her with her sick child and this irritated Leventhal because he was busy at work.

If you’re basing your characters on people you know, you can probably do a lot of research first hand by interviewing the people they’re based on or maybe “shadowing” them at work.

If your idea lends itself to historical fiction, the bulk of your research will probably be reading.

Reading about the time and place in which your novel is set can make a huge contribution to your creativity when it’s time for you to sit down and write.

Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire, for instance, tells the story of the Spartan stand against the invading Persian armies at Thermopylae in 480 BC. It grew out of Pressfield’s reading and his intense interest in the society of ancient Sparta.

So vivid and true to life is Pressfield’s evocation of the Spartan “warrior ethos”, and of a battle fought over 2,500 years ago, that Gates of Fire is required reading at officer training schools at West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the U.S. Marine Basic Course.

Important as research is, though, don’t let research keep you from writing.

5. Create Your Writing Habit

Without writing every day, you will never write a novel.

Especially for a beginning writer, forming the habit of writing daily can be difficult.

Some may attribute this to “writer’s block,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Psychologist (and former screenwriter) Steven Pritzker believes that writer’s block is “an artificial construct that basically justifies a discipline problem.”

Poet William Stafford, who wrote every day, advises “There’s no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.”

That is, get something on the page. You can work with it later.

Author and writing coach Jerrold Mundis defines writing as “the simple act of putting words on paper.”

You can do that, right?

If, every day, you can perform this simple act, you can form your own habit of writing every day..

Start to create your writing habit by writing just ten minutes a day (preferably at the same time.)

Do this until you want to add more minutes.

Later, you’ll write more.

But first, commit yourself to creating your writing habit.

That’s a task in itself.

Don’t wait for “motivation,” which comes and goes.

Create your writing habit to keep you writing when motivation goes.

6. Get Feedback

Writers customarily get feedback on their writing because they know it makes their work better.

But the following caution by writer Jerrold Mundis is worth keeping in mind:

“Be careful to whom you show your work. Even close friends may have their own agendas, and respond from those, consciously or unconsciously, under the guise of giving you objective feedback.”

He recommends choosing two people, at most, whom you believe support you in your writing and will assess your work without hidden jealousies.

You will need feedback on your writing to get distance from it and to learn how another person experiences your novel.

Three Steps to Getting Feedback

• Know what you want feedback on. Ask specific questions about your draft that you’d like your reader(s) to answer.

Many writer’s groups are more casual than this, and so are the comments made on each other’s work. You may not wish to impose a more demanding task on them if it would change the dynamic of the group, but the more specific feedback you can get on your work, the more valuable you’ll find it.

• Be open to the feedback you get. For feedback to be valuable, your reader may have to make some statements you find hard to take.

You don’t have to agree with what your readers say, but it’s important to be open to their responses. Either ask for written feedback or take notes.

That way you can put the responses away for a day or two and come back to evaluate them with a cooler mind.

• Make any improvements to your work suggested by the feedback.

7. Listen to Your Editor

When you come to that day your novel’s attracted the attention of a publisher, and an editor has been assigned to work with you on your manuscript, remember the words of Stephen King in his third foreword to his book On Writing:

“The editor is always right.”

Few writers will believe that the editor is always right, but that’s the way to bet.

The editor’s job is to take a promising novel that might not be “quite there” and help the writer get it there.

Don’t believe romantic baloney about the writer’s sticking to his guns against the editor’s advice.

A woman I once knew believed such romantic baloney.

She was retired and had written a modest memoir about her life and work as a librarian.

Not hot stuff, but good enough to capture the attention of a publishing house, and she was assigned an editor to help her get it into final shape.

Apparently thinking she was carrying the torch of artistic integrity, she turned up her nose at her editor’s suggestions.

Her memoir was never published.

Sign up for the long haul!

Most novels take at least months to write and can take years.

And yet, people like you, who were once beginners themselves, write them.

And so can you.

Picture your novel appearing

• On Amazon.com
• In Barnes and Noble
• In local bookstores

Feel that.

The tips above will give you everything you need to get started, to continue the adventure, and to complete the journey of writing your first novel.

Begin now to become the novelist you aspire to be!