So You Want To Write A Novel… (Just a little encouragement)

Like many other writers, I have wanted to write a novel for a long time. Also like many other writers, I have sought the advice of those who have managed to do just that, and guess what? Some of that advice helps me in my efforts, and some of it doesn’t.

For a little background on myself (and I’m sure you’re all just dying to know more about me, right?), I am the type of person that does, rather than the type that plans before doing; I tend to open my word processor, and write. That’s it. I don’t outline, or create background stories, or spend any time developing characters.

What has been the fruit of this method of mine? Short stories, that’s what. No novels, no epics, just short stories and drabbles.

If you’re a short story writer, please do not take offense to my remarks; there’s plenty good to be said about short stories. In fact, I enjoy them immensely. The trouble is: I want to write novels.

So how does someone who doesn’t plan, edits as he goes, allows new story ides to cloud his concentration to the point of writing them in the hopes of not forgetting them, and lets the story take him to its conclusion, rather than him taking the story to its conclusion, manage to write a full-length novel? The answer is: He doesn’t (at least in my case, he doesn’t).

I have spent too many hours, days, and weeks cobbling together incomplete novels that had to be shelved due to my own loss of interest, to assume that my (up until recently) current method of novel writing is actually conducive to novel writing.

I’ve searched the internet, read the blogs, nodded my head in agreement to the oh-so-simple tips handed out like candy at Halloween, and then … did nothing with them (after all, I can write a story! Anyone can, right? Anyone can form an idea, and then write it down, so why would I need tips?), and continued to wallow in the mire of half-written stories and ideas.

That’s what has happened, until recently. In my pride, I had refused to give up ‘my way’ of doing things, and suffered the consequences. Well, in my most recent attempt to write a novel, I threw away the notion that I didn’t need to change my ways in order to complete a novel, and actually wrote a brief story line, character descriptions and histories, and guess what happened? You don’t really have to guess, because I’m going to tell you.

I have managed to pen 60+ pages of a novel with little to no struggle, in a matter of a few weeks (not months, weeks). Can my efforts be put in the same class as those renowned literary classics of our time? No, not even close, but I’m not trying to be the next Dickens, or Twain, or even King; I’m trying to be the first ‘Me’.

The experience with this latest work has me convinced that not only will I finish this novel, but that there will be more following it, and that confidence allows me to smile when I think about my writing.

Although I have not yet finished my novel, I am going to give a bit of advice of my own to those aspiring authors out there that are struggling with similar issues in their methods: Don’t be afraid to change (just a little bit) to achieve your dream, because that fear is what is truly holding you back.