Everybody who has written a novel has their own way of going about it. This is what has worked for me and it all starts with . . .
The Dreaded Blank Page
There was a huge rainstorm. A massive gray blanket covering the sky dropped billions of buckets of water at once, continuously. I was in a grocery store and had all my stuff in a buggy. Many people were waiting in the foyer for the rain to subside. Not me, I just went right into the rain. There wasn’t any lightning or hail. It was just pouring rain. Yes, I got soaked and no, I didn’t mind. This could be the old soldier in me. I remember standing guard in South Korea as a private in the middle of monsoon season. The thing is that no matter how much rain gear you have on, you’re getting wet.
That’s how I handle my mornings too. I don’t spend too much time snoozing. The way I wake up is by getting my feet on the ground and moving. That is how I get past the blank page. Rough drafts will need to be cleaned up more than once, so while the first pages of a novel are extremely important, I don’t try to get it perfect right out of the gate. I hammer out that opening scene and doll it up later.
How many words a day?
It’s funny, isn’t it? We want to write, so we worry about the math. This is a good motivator. Got to win battles before winning the war. The genre I write usually falls under speculative fiction and the word count for that genre can be 75,000 and up. You may not want to go too far up though. I’m a slacker so I stick with 75K as my target. It’s not a big deal to go over that number. If I’m a little short, no problem because a rough draft will be missing details. So if I want to finish my rough draft in 90 days, the word count is 834 words a day (1250 for 60 days). Here’s the thing, the dreaded blank page is an everyday thing. You may feel like you have no idea what to write next, so I’ll tell you how I work through that next
What to write
That is the question! Here’s the thing. I usually have an idea of where I want to go with the story. Maybe all I have is a compass and a general direction to an interesting destination. With this type of writing, I don’t know what I’ll run into along the way. Authors who write like this are called “pantsers”. They write by the seat of their pants. Other writers make an outline, so rather than just having a compass, they have a map to bring with them. There are pros and cons to each of these methods. If I only have a compass and I’m heading east, expecting to find a mountain to climb (rising action to the climax–<aren’t I clever>–), I may find myself at the end of a cliff where a deep chasm separates me from the end of my story. I can see the destination but can’t reach it, so I must choose to backtrack or climb down that cliff. The issue with outlining is a little different. With a map, I may miss out on the cliffs, the rivers, and key sites along the way. I miss out on more adventures.
I tend to employ both methods. I just started writing Almost Paradise. I knew where I wanted to start and where to go immediately following the start, but as far as where it ended, I had no idea where it would take me. But last weekend I had a day where I couldn’t really sit down and work on it. So I picked up a notebook and started to summarize the chapters I have written thus far. When I finished those, I went on to the next chapters. I kept at this, and the results are that I now have an outline for the novel. I may not stick with it entirely. While it is a pretty solid road map, I may take scenic routes along the way. This usually leads to more short story ideas.
So that day when I couldn’t write allowed me to produce material that will give me a boost on days when starting on new chapters. If I’m in the middle of a chapter and have kind of lost my way, what I do is I go back and edit. I may go all the way back to chapter one and start reading it. I’ll fix simple grammar errors of course. I’ll take notes if I feel I must. I may find developmental errors where I wrote illogical things. There are places where things need to be revised and remembered. Details may need to be filled in or removed. More setting. Less setting. Is it important to know what a particular character is thinking at a particular moment? This is very important so if you feel stuck try that. Eventually, you’ll be ready to pick up where you were blazing the trail to the end of the rough draft.
Per Sis Tence
GET ER DONE! They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same goes for a novel. It takes persistent action to complete the work. If you take a week off from writing, you may fall off the wagon and have to trudge along for a while to catch up. When I find myself getting away from my writing goals, I start feeling a need to get back on it. From May 15th through June 16th I had only written a little over 3000 words. That would amount to 36,000 a year. I wasn’t loving my progress, so from June 16th through June 28th, I’ve written almost 10,000 words. What helped me was finally setting a deadline to finish the rough draft.
The Editing
Once I finish a rough draft, I figure it’s not too rough because I had gone back and worked on this and that along the way. Regardless, it needs to happen several times over. It’s not like what I did in school. I don’t write a rough draft, make a few revisions, and then turn it in. I go over everything many times. How many? Depends. I can’t tell you how many times I edited and revised Infernal Fall. I lost count. It’s a good idea to look hard at every single chapter. I work on a synopsis for each chapter as I do this. I don’t just look for grammar errors. I don’t just look for errors. I look for things I should cut and things I should include. If I find myself making a lot of changes, I know I’ll need to go over it again. After I’ve read the entire novel and edited every chapter too many times, I do the unthinkable. I read it all again, reading several chapters together. This helps you find long-range errors such as “Bobby lost his shoes in Chapter 3 so why is he wearing them in Chapter 7?”
Seek Professional Help
Because writing a novel is crazy. What was I thinking? I could’ve written the most wonderful thing I’ve ever read, but it’s imperative to let a real editor get a hold of my story and rip it to shreds before the general public does. Here’s the kicker. Even after all this, I still find more to do. At some point, I have to let go and turn my work loose. Then, for some bonkers reason, I’ll start over with this insanity.