How to Write a Novel

Photo by C. A. Bridges

• Think of an idea.
• Laugh joyfully at the wonderfulness and originality of your idea, and a few great scenes you thought of.
• Start immediately to work out what your Hugo/Bram Stoker/Newberry/Pulitzer acceptance speech will be.
• Fire up Scrivener, start adding index cards. Opening, scenes you know you want, general arcs.
• Write your dedication page with confidence.
• Realize you don’t actually have a solid ending. Decide you’ll work toward it and let the story and characters move you along.
• Start writing.
• Realize three chapters in that you should have been writing in 3rd-person and not 1st. Go back and rewrite.
• Realize after two more chapters that no, 1st-person was better, but now you’ve added other POV scenes and you like them and also your plot seems to have changed a bit.
• Begin drinking.
• Rewrite from scratch with 1st-person, try to work in the new bits you liked anyway, get frustrated.
• Write three more chapters.
• Realize all of the characters sound like you. Go back and decide which of your friends/family/favorite movie characters should be the inspiration for each character. Google for images to put in the Scrivener character sheets. Hit all the baby-name websites to choose better character names. Spend a disturbing amount of time on this.
• Think of another amazing scene, start writing toward it.
• Realize you’re now heading away from your original plans and some of your original great scenes are non-starters and now you have a whole unplanned book in front of you.
• Drink more.
• Skip ahead and write a future scene you want in the book, and think of some foreshadowing for it you can put in the early chapters. Rewrite the first few chapters again so the foreshadowing makes sense.
• Realize there’s a whole subtheme that would be perfect and start to make notes about it.
• As you’re falling asleep one night, think of a new angle on the subtheme that would not only tie things together, it would also add some observations on contemporary politics/gender issues/race that would make the whole work multilayered, relevant and important. This thought is so earth-shattering and obvious that there’s no way you will forget it. Go to sleep happy.
• Completely and totally forget the observation the next morning, but remember that you had one because otherwise it wouldn’t torture you for years.
• Put your manuscript away and wait for inspiration to strike, understanding that it may take months or years before you’re ready to write the story you want to write.
• The next day, pull it out again and read over the 4 or 5 complete versions you have by now, decide to rewrite an amalgamation of all of them.
• See other books already out or coming out with ideas similar enough to yours to worry you that your idea, when you finally get it out there, will be seen as derivative. Write faster.
• Get three chapters into the rewrite, get sidetracked by another great idea for a different book/story/script. Get excited about that idea instead.
• Put this idea aside for now since you’re clearly not ready, throw yourself totally into new idea.
• Start immediately to work out what your Hugo/Bram Stoker/Newberry/Pulitzer acceptance speech will be for the new idea.
• Pull this one back out six months later, fall in love with original idea again. Decide it really should be a screenplay/play/musical. Start rewriting from scratch in new format.
• Rinse. Repeat.

At least that’s how I assume it goes.