Writing: Day One
Okay – you’ve decided what story you want tell, what genre it is (and so what the rules are for telling that story), the world in which the story is set, and you’ve chosen your characters and how you’re going to narrate your story. Now all you’ve got to do it write it. Simple.
Here’s the challenge: literally millions of people all over the world start a novel but only a very few actually finish the darned thing. What can you do to make sure that you’re one of them?
Maybe the most important thing is to make sure that you’re disciplined about it and that you write something every day. Yes, EVERY DAY! You MUST write something, whether you feel like it or not, even if it’s complete and utter rubbish. In fact, I’d go further and actually say that rubbish is fine. To start with, it’s quantity rather than quality. The quality bit comes later (unless you’re a complete genius, which you may well be).
We all want to believe that we’ve got it right first time but, as the old saying goes, writing is re-writing. You improve your text with every edit. You need the quantity because you can’t improve what isn’t there. When you read it back, you may reject a lot of it but I guarantee that you won’t reject all of it.
The next important thing is to write quickly. Keep moving! Don’t get bogged-down – write the following instead [DETAILS NEEDED HERE], with the capital letters and square brackets so you won’t miss it when you go back, and move on. Flesh it out after a bit of thought or research but don’t do it in the middle of a writing session or you’ll interrupt the flow and almost certainly forget bigger and more important things.
At this point, I have to confess that I know many other writers who do the exact opposite. They write slowly and make sure that each word is ‘Le Mot Juste’. That’s great too but I get bored unless I’m at least jogging through the process, even if I’m not sprinting. It’s a matter of individual taste. You must find what you have time for and what works for you. That said, I don’t think any writer on the planet would disagree with the advice that follows…
Have a notebook on your bedside table so that you can do a brain-dump every night before you go to sleep, because this is often the time when great ideas bubble up to the surface. Indeed, they might even keep you awake unless you can get them down on paper. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’ll remember everything in the morning if you don’t write it down. You won’t.
Oddly, ideas will often follow this pattern and appear when it’s really hard or even impossible to record them, like when you’re in the shower or driving. What it reveals, I suspect, is that our brains, at a deeper level than our immediate consciousness, are always busy processing what we’re working on, even when we’re thinking about something else. That’s why ideas seem to spring from nowhere. It's actually not ‘nowhere’ at all.
Keep a notebook with you wherever you are and whatever you do. You’ll always believe that the best ideas you’ve ever had are the ones that got away because you didn’t manage to record them (even if they weren’t the best ideas – but you’ll never know, will you?)
And that’s it – the rest is up to you. There will be good days and bad days but you’ve got just got to keep going. Write every day and you’ll get there. You will finish your novel.
Even if you don’t think it straight away, one day, when you look back at what you’ve produced, you’ll be surprised. “Did I write that? It’s actually pretty good.” Then you’ll re-work it and it will become even better.
Next time, we’ll consider a truly troubling question: how long is a novel? Happy writing!