Hey everyone,
I have been in deadline hell this week and I don’t generally mind that when it’s my own shoddy organizational skills that have led to it, but this time I was going along great and count ‘em, three sources vanished at the last minute. Between chasing them and making sure my editors had the copy when I’d promised to deliver it, I’ve been scrambling.
(I did get a couple of new assignments this week, though, including my first $1-a-word story with this new byline from a publication I’ve never written for before. Score!)
All this to say that I happily crossed the halfway mark on my novel and have now come to a standstill. It doesn’t help that I was in the middle of writing some of the more difficult scenes of this book and I’m not exactly dying to get back to it, you know?
I remember this feeling from my first novel. Not wanting to return to the book because there’s a lot of climbing uphill ahead of you. When the writing is easy, the scenes are flowing and you know what happens next, it’s easier to keep going back to a manuscript. But when you know you’re returning to a major headache, well, you procrastinate. The problem is that with first novels, or at least with mine, everything was difficult. I didn’t have the skill and I certainly didn’t have the confidence. Going back each time felt like a challenge. And it was.
I made so many mistakes in the writing of that first book. Looking back, there are so many things I would do differently and so many things I wish I’d known. It took me seven years when really, I could have done it much faster and with a lot less angst had I understood a few basic truths. I’ll share them with you here, and I’d love to hear some of yours, too.
For the record, I haven’t yet sold a novel so this isn’t about what it takes to sell (how would I know?) I have written two, though, and the second was a lot easier, including emotionally. I’m now on my third and I really wish I’d known how fun this process could be and how to make it so.
The Two Ways Novels Begin
In my opinion, most first novels begin in one of two ways:
One, the writer thinks they really want to write a novel but haven’t yet figured out what they want to write about, so they just sit down and start trying to figure it out, and two, a writer has an incredible story (possibly their own) that they want to tell in the form of a novel. Sometimes, it’s a bit of both.
The hurdle to overcome for the first writer is often a lack of clarity. I don’t mean a lack of direction—writing without knowing how a story shapes up or ends is completely legit and a very popular way of writing. I’m talking aobut clarity of story. What is this novel about? What is the world my characters inhabit? Am I writing a romance or a murder mystery?
This sort of thing can take years to overcome, especially for a first novel. The first novel I ever finished (I’d had several failed attempts before that) started out as a book about female friendship told from the POV of three women, except that when I started writing, the first woman just would not stop going on and on (and on) about her mother. So I eventually ran with her exclusively, but it took two years to get to the heart of the story and figure out what she (and I) was trying to say.
This sort of meandering and discovery can be necessary for some writers and some books, but it can take years. We get attached to that first idea and then have a lot of resistance in letting it go. Because there’s no clarity, it can take a lot of time to figure out what the story is and this results in incredible amounts of frustration and self doubt.
The second way novels begin—an amazing story that needs to be told—is often the best way to start a novel. So much passion! So much energy! You know how the story begins and often, ends. The trouble, in a writer’s head anyway, is of representation. Am I doing this story justice? Who am I to tell it? Will people be mad at me if I tell the truth of what happened?
These questions create high expectation and low-level anxiety because every word that you put to paper is precious. It has to be because you don’t want to let down the story or the people involved in it. You feel hesitant to take risks with the narrative because you don’t want to accidentally misreprsent and twist facts even though you’re perfectly aware that this is fiction.
So a story that should have been relatively simple and straightforward to write ends up creating a fair bit of angst and staring out of windows.
It’s also how so many writers fall into the endless-research trap.
(There are more ways novels begin, of course, and nuances to the two I’ve mentioned, but I’m trying to keep it simple for the sake of clarity and brevity, so I’m painting with broad strokes here.)
Getting Out Of Your Own Way To Finish Your Novel
My first novel fell into the bit-of-both category. Understanding the following things helped me finally get out of my own way and made writing fiction a lot easier:
1. You will suck at the beginning; almost everyone does. This is even more reason to keep writing because the more you do, the better it gets.
2. Your taste is better than your current capabilities. The goal is to keep bridging that gap slowly over time. (Also? It’s likely you never will completely.)
3. If you know what you’re trying to say, saying it becomes a whole lot easier. Think like a journalist—when you know what happens and what you need to say, don’t you fly through the writing? Do that for each scene.
4. The first draft of an 80,000-word novel will take anywhere between 80 and 160 hours, on average, to write. You can spread those hours over two decades or two months, that’s up to you.
5. If you can understand why you resist, you can find ways to overcome that resistance.
6. Daily word count goals on their own are entirely useless if you haven’t first figured out the basics—what is your story, who are your characters, etc. Writing for the sake of word count is pointless if you’re not, first, writing for the sake of the story.
7. They’re just words. They can be fixed. They can be thrown out. Some should be thrown out. Become comfortable with the throwing out.
8. Don’t write a novel. Tell a story.
9. Your process is unique, different, individual to you. Listen to advice from other writers, experiment with it, then see which bits are relevant to you that you want to keep. (This includes everything in my list above).
Cheers,
Natasha