Somewhat to my surprise, I seem to be writing a new novel. Given my currently not-so-great circumstances, it's hard to say exactly what the point is, but somehow it seems like the most reasonable of a whole bunch of unreasonable options. At any rate, that's inevitably got me thinking about the process, and the lessons I've learned over the course of doing this more than a dozen times already. And since I haven't altogether given up on the pretence that this blog is about my writing, I thought sharing some of that might be worthwhile.
This won't be anything so presumptuous as telling anyone how they should go about writing a book, because there are a million ways of doing that and any number of them are right. (Also, I'm pretty sure I already did that post way back when!) The most I can offer is a few conclusions I've come to after having tried numerous approaches to a greater or lesser extent, and given how much nearer I am to the beginning than the end of the process - past the 60'000 word mark, but this promises to be substantially heftier than anything else I've done - there's a definite theme here, centred around how to keep moving as it starts to sink in just what an enormous task you've set yourself. So, with that in mind...
Don't Rush In
Of everything here, I imagine this is the point most likely to be widely ignored, because many people absolutely swear by rushing in, and presumably it works for at least some of them. And, look, I'm not saying you have to have a detailed plan, though personally I can no longer imagine how I'd go about writing a novel without one, any more than I'd think of waking up one day and thinking "Hmm, maybe I'll climb Everest today" and setting out in my pyjamas. Still, not everyone's a planner, I get that, and planning isn't necessarily what I'm talking about. I guess it's more to do with facing up to those points where whatever concept has you so fired up feels that bit too sketchy. Maybe they'll have sorted themselves out by the time you get to them, but maybe they won't, and confronting them without the stress of weeks of work depending on the results can be a lot easier. What I've found is that ultimately I tend to reach a point where I know I'm ready to go, and mostly it's a sense that I haven't left any towering brick walls for myself to dash headfirst into at the worst possible moments.
Don't Sacrifice Your Momentum
This one probably depends on whether you've followed the previous suggestion: if you've charged in without much of a plan, chances are that eventually you're going to run out of steam, and when that happens, your best bet may well be to step back for a week or two and figure out where you're heading. Planning is always going to happen sometime, and if you'd rather do it in the middle than at the start, or in chunks along the way, then each to their own. But let's assume for the moment that you do have a plan and that it's basically sturdy. If that's the case, I've come to think the best approach in a first draft is to keep moving forward for as long as it's remotely feasible to do so, and hopefully right through to the end. If your plot's absolutely crumbling in your fingers then, sure, stop and take a breather, but if your plot's merely wobbling a bit, that ought to be a problem for the next draft. And while there's a definite appeal to heavily editing alongside your first draft, my conclusion is that it's better to keep that to a minimum. This time through, I'm experimenting with starting the day by doing a quick polish of yesterday's work, and that's definitely proving positive, but more than that and I suspect I'd just be trashing my confidence and risking skidding to a halt.
Don't Bore Yourself
This is more of a general point, and applies to all writing, no matter the length, but it's also one of the most important conclusions I've reached over the years, so let's include it. If there's a type of scene you don't like writing, there's a fair chance you won't write it well; if you find action a slog, or dialogue is something you want to hammer through to reach the good stuff, odds are that a reader's bound to notice that lack of engagement. And the best way to deal with this is to ask yourself what it would take for you to be excited by those sequences. Would you get more out of writing that dialogue if it was faster and peppier, or maybe if there were more character beats mixed in? What if you could shift the focus off the mechanical aspects of the action and onto the psychological effects, or vice versa? If you're feeling disengaged, it's vital to figure out why and even make that work to your advantage, because the alternative is great swathes of novel that you'll return to and be mortified by how visibly the energy levels plummet.
Avoid Feast and Famine
It's awfully tempting to push your luck when you're on a roll. Some days, the words won't stop coming, and why wouldn't you lean into that? Well, there's one reason, and that's how easy it is for your reach to exceed your grasp. I'm sure there are people whose wells never run dry, but for me, what I find is that a run of prolific days will inevitably result in a harsh crash. Writing is an enormously subconscious-driven task, and your subconscious can only do so much advance work; I have a theory that getting too far ahead of it is a big part of what people refer to as writer's block, a condition I've mostly been fortunate enough to steer clear of. But whichever way you look at it, novel writing is marathon running, and too many sprints will burn you out in no time. Add to that how easy it is to make wild mistakes or churn out seriously unpolished prose if you're caught up in mad dashes and it generally makes more sense to keep to a steady pace.
Don't Freak Out
There's nothing quite like the unadulterated panic of getting deep into a major project only to realise you've got something enormously, irreparably wrong. Or, I guess there is one thing like it, and that's when the same happens on a smaller, less horrifying scale: you're midway through a chapter and it hits you that this is where you ought to have started it, or that character you've spent three pages introducing is just taking up space and serving a purpose your existing cast were more than capable of covering. If you're anything like me, your first reaction will be to try and fix the problem as quickly and painlessly as possible, and your second reaction, once it's sunk in that quick and painless aren't on the table, is to run around shrieking and then hide under the bed. And I'm not saying that's a wrong response (okay, obviously it's a terrible response) but there are better options. And most of them revolve around hanging onto your calm and, if possible, deferring the problem until you've had time to properly digest it.
Don't Ignore the Small Achievements
Writing a novel is a major thing. It's easy to forget that, when there are so many trillions of books out there, but producing yet one more is still a herculean task. And if you're planning to wait until the very end before you permit yourself a pat on the back, you're going to be waiting a long time. Getting a chapter down is a big deal. Getting ten thousands words in the bag is a big deal. Heck, these days, making it out of bed and all the way to the computer without collapsing in a sludgy mound of despair is a big deal. In one sense, novel writing is very much an all or nothing exercise, in that, unless you're both extremely famous and dead, nobody's ever going to be interested in your unfinished opus. But in another sense, every step along the way counts toward the total, and you're fully justified in allowing yourself a dash of excitement, or even a small reward, at surviving another lap.
-oOo-
Okay, sure, that was more for my benefit than anyone else's. But while this might be mostly about me reminding myself that I'm near the start of a long road and need to hold the line for a good while longer without letting those brain-goblins devour my frontal cortex, I hope there are one or two other people out there who might find something useful here!
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