Writing a Novel

One thing I’ve always wanted to do is write a novel. I’m sure I’m not alone. You always hear people say how they want to get around to writing that novel, or maybe they take some time off to write their very first masterpiece. It’s one of those things that you say you want to do and that you will someday, but never seem to get around to it.

As much as you wish you had forever to write a novel, or do anything for that matter, you don’t. So, of course, my first piece of advice for writing a novel is to just write. No excuses. Don’t excuse yourself to anyone because you will only lose their respect. If you’ve only made excuses to yourself, then you’ve lost self-respect. If you can’t respect yourself, you might as well live in a hole.

These are the critical steps to writing a novel:

1. Plan it out

You can start writing a novel with as little as one small idea and decide to build on it as you go, but this will only hurt you. As you go with this approach, you will find yourself losing interest, changing your mind, messing things up, or it might turn out so horrible that you give up on it all together. By choosing not to plan, you will only make it harder and more aggravating for yourself.

When you plan, you first should decide on your characters, plot, conflict, and just the basic overall structure. You can move on from this by creating a more detailed outline. Decide what the basic chapters will be and what will happen next. With this outline, you can just continue to add detail. For instance, after planning out the chapters in general, take each chapter individually and decide what to put into them.

How detailed you make your plan and outline is up to you. You can always change things as much as you want as you go. It’s your novel; you get to make the decisions.

2. Your first draft

Once you’ve planned out your novel, writing it we’ll much easier. Not easy, just easier. Writing will never be easy. It should be enjoyable, but there is a difference between enjoyable and easy. It’s the challenge that make sit worth it.

Just follow your plan and write your best. You can change things if they don’t work out. Try not to do too much editing on hand, just keep writing. Try to stick to a schedule, maybe writing a certain amount of pages every day. I think this is a better idea than writing for a certain amount of time because

3. Revise, revise, revise

Revising your work is probably one of the most important steps in writing a novel. Remember how I said not to fix mistakes while you’re writing? I did not mean you will never need to fix it. The point was to keep you from breaking your flow and getting things done.

Go through your entire novel. You may decide to take one chapter at a time and revise it, but you might find you need to change things that affect large parts of the novel which will mean revising multiple chapters at once.

You must read every word. You will be correcting spelling and grammar, as well as large parts of your novel. It may feel tedious and not be what you want to do, but it is completely necessary. Editors and readers do not want to read anything that not only isn’t engaging, but also that looks like it was rushed and lack effort.

4. The last step

The revision process should continue for the next few steps, but I will refrain from copying and pasting step three over and over. The last step is to step back and admire your work. Once you feel it is complete, you are finished. Of course, there could and should be more beyond this. If you want to be published, you will need to seek out publishers and literary agents that like your work. You may decide to give it to a friend to read for their opinion.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you first congratulate yourself on finally finishing that novel. As hard as it may have seemed, writing a novel is really made up of basic and simple steps. It’s getting it done that is the hard part.

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