I’m feeling contagious this week. I got emails from two long-time writer friends on the same day saying they were inspired by my sales to make their own writing a higher priority. And my husband has been bitten by the bug and started a novel. His second, he actually tried once before and had the “I have no idea what I’m doing” realization and stopped after 10 chapters.
I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried to write a novel, either. And it doesn’t help when you come across pointers like “There are three rules for writing the novel, but nobody knows what they are,” (Somerset Maugham) and “Writing a book is like driving in the dark with no headlights,” (E.L. Doctorow).
Fortunately, it isn’t quite that bad. A lot of the rules of a novel become ingrained just by being an avid reader. You gain a sense of what does and doesn’t work, common conventions, genre specific points. The intuitive knowlege of novel ingredients is all stored away in the unconscious mind, which is why you shouldn’t worry if your conscious mind has no idea what to do. To soothe the conscious mind, though, there are plenty of workshops and books and conferences that teach elements of fiction writing and can add handy tools to aid your intuition.
Ideally, the intuitive part of the mind and the tool-using part of the mind work together to get the thing done. How? Well, there are three rules, but nobody knows what they are. Just kidding. Sort of. The truth is, how this process works differs for different people.
Which is why I blog about what works for me and how I do it. What works for me might work for somebody else, too. If not, they can at least cross something off the list and keep looking for something that will help.
In general, I do these things: I write the piece as quickly as I can, not necessarily in terms of daily page count but in terms of speed per page. I do this because I’ve learned that if I go slowly, I think too much about what I’m doing. Generally when I’m onto something good, it’s scary and if I let myself think about that, I will want to back away from what feels scary and tone it down to something that doesn’t make me uncomfortable.
I use music to get the right mindset for a piece. The science of music and how it affects the human brain is fascinating, but it can be distilled into this fact: music alters brain waves. Find the music that puts your brain waves in the right place and it can help your writing session. Although I can’t listen while I work, many people do. I just listen beforehand and in the middle if I start to feel stuck.
I don’t write in sequential order, necessarily. Software makes it really easy to put scenes and chapters where they belong sequentially after they’re written.
I don’t work from a detailed outline. I work from whatever basic idea I started with and whatever research that basic idea made necessary. I write the synopsis when I’m finished, because until the end I don’t know what all is going to happen or how the characters will unfold. Or even what length it will be. Usually things mushroom on me and get bigger, but in the case of my last story, it did the reverse.
I tell myself repeatedly that I can fix it in revision while I’m writing when something bothers me. I don’t write sloppy, but I also try not to stop to look up different words to avoid being repetitive, or read back over my scene to see if I left out sensory detail or some physical action. I look for those things later and fix them after the story is down. The main thing when I’m writing is to just get the bones of the story down. I can flesh out anything I need to afterwards.
I end up adding to my word count in revision instead of cutting, because I do tend to write the bones and then paint in the faces later, but this seems less wasteful to me then throwing away pages and pages of good prose. However, if it takes throwing away 40 or more pages to produce a good book, I’d go with it because what matters in the end is that you have a good piece of work, not how you got there.
Which sums it all up. Whatever helps you get words on the page, whatever helps you cross the finish line and type in “the end”, those are your rules for writing the novel. There is no one right way to write. There are just lots of tools and tips and tricks that work for different people at different times.
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