Quick Tips for Writing Your First Novel from the Girl Who Learned the Hard Way

Since 2011, I’ve been trying to write a novel. Until 2017, I failed epically. The first book I ever wrote was an embarrassing, hand-scribbled disaster that is currently collecting dust in the darkest corner of my closet, never to see the light of day again. My second attempt was little better. At least I typed that one on the computer, so it’s only collecting virtual dust. As I have come to learn, it’s actually quite normal to have abandoned drafts and false starts. These are often referred to as practice novels. Nobody is ever going to see mine, but I don’t consider them a waste of time — by doing everything wrong when I was younger, I’ve started to learn how to do a few things right now. Probably the most important lesson I’ve learned from my past failures is how to tell the difference between a piece of my own work that’s worth sticking with and one that isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with letting go of a story that’s not worth the effort it takes to write it, especially if you’re not emotionally invested in it.

After doing a whole lot of letting go of both short stories and novels, I finally got a book off the ground. The rough draft was, of course, a mess. It’s been so thoroughly changed, reworked, and edited that I really consider it my third practice novel, with subsequent drafts being the “real” novel. With each draft following the practice one, I’ve put another layer into the characters and another facet into the story. Now, I’ve finally worked it into a piece I’m no longer embarrassed to show editors and test readers. It’s not ready for publishing yet, but I hope with another few drafts, it will eventually become the first installment in a multi-book series. I’m also hoping the next installments will prove easier to produce than the first one.

Writing anything is a struggle, and the first time always comes with a learning curve. This is especially true with novels because you have to keep a large cast of characters and a complicated plot straight, make your readers care about those characters and become interested in what happens to them, figure out which pieces of your book are necessary and which can be cut, keep the rules of your world consistent (especially in fantasy/sci-fi), complete perhaps years-worth of research, and deal with a host of other challenges unique to writing long-form fiction.

With all that in mind, I thought that I would write a post with a few tips for budding authors who are where I was a few years ago. To be sure, I’m still learning and I’m nowhere near what I would call success, but I’ve come a long way from where I was and gained a lot of valuable knowledge from trial-and-error that might be useful for you if you’re just starting out. These tips aren’t a comprehensive list of advice for completing your first novel draft; they’re just lessons I’ve learned along the way to completing mine. I hope to post much more on this subject as I continue on my journey towards finishing a novel I can be proud of, but for now, here’s my lessons-learned report from the last nine years.

Be a Plantser

There are two basic types of novelists: plotters and pantsers. Plotters typically outline their entire book from start to finish, with varying degrees of detail, so that they know the major events of their novel, how the plot resolves, and where the main characters end up. Pantsers are the opposite: they fly by the seat of their pants. These writers know their characters really well, and they just sit down at the computer every day to see what these characters will do.

Each of these strategies has its own advantage and disadvantages. I don’t have the first clue about being a pantser. I know it works for a lot of writers, but for me, it always sounded like a good way to write a bunch of character bios without actually writing a book. I have the opposite problem: I’m a big, ole plotter, so I tend to write books with living props rather than real characters. In the first few drafts of my current novel, some of the most important characters didn’t even have names. If you plan out every little detail of the plot, it can sometimes lead to characters feeling hollow or doing things that don’t make sense for them. However, just writing with no sense of where you’ll end up is a good recipe for writer’s block or writing yourself into a corner. That’s why it’s important — whether you’re a natural plotter or a natural pantser — to consciously strive to occupy the middle ground. Pantsers, don’t ignore how important it is for your story to be going somewhere. Plotters, character is vital; no matter how unpredictable and exciting your story is, nobody’s gonna be interested if your characters are boring, flat (i.e. one-dimensional), or clearly exist for no other reason than to facilitate the plot.

Let Your Mind Wander

A lot of people say writers should have a schedule: sit down at your desk from X time to X time and make yourself write something. That’s great advice for editing. When you’re creating, however, this is terrible advice that will not only lead you to produce a bunch of worthless scribble, but will also eventually cause you to associate writing time with boredom and frustration rather than catharsis and contentment. Never underestimate the power of association. If you repeat a negative writing experience too many times, you run the risk of your brain eventually deciding “sitting down to write = misery.” Once that happens, it can be hard to overcome.

Just like you can’t bust insomnia by staying in bed awake for hours on end because it teaches your brain to associate the bed with feelings of wakefulness, anxiety, and frustration, you can’t bust writer’s block by staring at a blank screen or writing crap you know you’re never going to use. Most members of your audience will be able to look at your book and tell if your attitude was “I have to write now even though I really don’t want to be here” versus “oh man, I can’t write now cause I have to go do stuff.” No matter how much you edit later, your underlying mindset will come across on the page.

I’m of the persuasion that if you have writer’s block, it’s because you’re not ready to write. You don’t know your characters well enough. You haven’t nailed down your plot firmly enough. So instead of wasting time staring at a blank page, spend some time in your own head.

Get to know your characters, not just “what they would do” in the context of their plot, but how they’d be in real life. What would they think of the TV show your watching? How would they feel about the current state of the world? What would they do if they were sitting in your living room right now? None of this is stuff you need to write down, but it will help you learn to understand the people you’re writing and how they’ll eventually interact with each other and the world you’re creating.

As far as plotting goes, there’s no right way to do it. Whatever environment you can create that allows you to spend a good chunk of time imagining without interruption, that’s what you should do. I like to sit on my porch swing, put loud music in my earbuds, and close my body’s eyes so I can better envision my mind’s eye. This allows me to focus entirely and go over scenes, dialogue, plot points, and whatever else I want to flesh out. I can get sucked in for hours and not even realize it if I let myself.

However you choose to eliminate distraction, it’s important to make a habit of spending time with your characters and in your world, either on the page or off it. This is doubly true if you wind up doing more staring at the blank page than filling it during your writing sessions. In my experience, if you immerse yourself in your own imagination long enough, the story will eventually just come pouring out of you.

Be Persistent

There’s one thing about writing you have to learn right off the bat: you’re going to fail. You will probably toss your first novel in the trash — and maybe your second and maybe even your third. Not only will you likely throw out your first novel, once you actually have a book worth keeping, you’ll have to draft and draft and draft some more. You’ll be lucky if your number of drafts stays in the single digits.

Once you’ve completed your rewrites, you’ll have to do in-depth editing. To me, there’s a difference between rewriting, which is majorly overhauling a rough draft, and editing, which is going through line-by-line and fine-tuning things. To edit my own work, I like to finish a draft, take a break, and come back after maybe a month or two to look at it with a fresh set of eyes. However, your own eyes aren’t ever going to catch everything. You’ll need editors and outside readers to look at your reworked draft, and you’ll have to make changes based on their feedback. Don’t be intimidated by this; it is normal. Nobody writes a masterpiece in a single draft, and that’s just the way it is. The best thing to do is make your peace with that before you start and be prepared to persist in your drafting process until you get it right.

Do Your Research

There are very few novels that require no research whatsoever. If yours doesn’t need any at all, you might ask yourself if you’re really stepping far enough outside of your comfort zone for your novel to be all that interesting. Sure, you don’t have to plot out a novel that requires you to sift through hundreds of sources on dozens of different topics, take multiple investigative trips abroad, and learn a second language (like I did). But unless you’re writing a novel that’s little more than a thinly veiled autobiography, you’re probably going to need to do some research.

If you’re writing a novel that has anything to do with science, history, politics, current events, or any subject really, the best thing to do is just assume you know nothing, even if you think you’re familiar with the subject matter. I didn’t start researching until after I wrote the very unfortunate rough draft of my current novel. When I finally did start researching, I was astounded at how much of my “knowledge” of my time period was based on myth, misinformation, and the United States’ well-established habit of intentionally mischaracterizing its enemies, both past and present. Because of this, I had to introduce new characters, significantly alter or flat-out delete a ton of major plot points, and basically overhaul the entire draft. I could have saved myself all that trouble if I’d done more research to begin with. Never assume you know about something you’re not a trained expert in because a lot of the “facts” we think of as common knowledge are really just frequently repeated misinformation.

Since the odds are you’re going to be doing research, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, you need to understand how to distinguish credible sources from unreliable ones. The OWL at Purdue has a great intro to get you started. I generally try to stick only to academic papers, publications from credible institutions (aka a blog kept by an accredited university or reputable organization/individual), and books published by legitimate distributors (such as established publishing houses and university presses). If I find an interesting piece of information from a source that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, I’ll use Google Scholar, JSTOR, or another academic search engine to see if I can find a more reputable source that backs it up. If I can’t, I just assume it’s another piece of internet BS unless I can prove otherwise. Another good trick to find sources is to look at Wikipedia’s citations at the bottom of every article. Wikipedia itself isn’t a great resource because anyone can edit it, but their source lists are often very helpful.

Second, it’s important to hold onto your sources in case you need them later. You can do this a number of ways: spreadsheets, search engine profiles, browser bookmarks, etc. I like to copy/paste all my URLs into a simple Word list and just label what they are. If I need to find a source, I can just look at the headings or hit Ctrl+F to access it. You can also use Word’s comments feature in your novel itself: every time a fact you got from your research crops up in your story, you can tag it with a comment containing the link to and/or title of your source.

Stay Organized

I’ve come to believe that a lack of organization is one of the reasons my first novels failed. My initial creative bursts are always huge and messy, but until recently, I never really found a way to clean them up. Through reading about the craft of novel writing, I’ve learned that there are a ton of things you need to do to keep your novel straight besides plain old outlines. At the very least, you also need a timeline to keep your plot dates straight, a character bible, a tech/world bible (for sci-fi and fantasy genres), and a source catalog (see above).

As far as the bibles go, I like to use Excel and have a separate tab for each character (character bible) and each piece of fictional technology (tech bible). You’ll have to be the one to decide what information is relevant and how much to put into your bibles. Just keep in mind that the whole point is for you to use them while you’re drafting so you can be aware of information relevant to each scene and the novel as a whole.

In the character bible, at the minimum, I give all my major characters a backstory, likes, dislikes, strengths, flaws, motivations, and obstacles. Some people say you should do this for all characters in your books, but if you do it for every single one, down to the most minuscule and insignificant background people, you can wind up wasting a lot of time. My general rule is if they get a name and a real function in the story, they get a tab. If not, they don’t.

In the sci-fi-specific tech bible, at the minimum, I keep up with what each piece of tech is for, what it can do, what its limitations are, what it looks like, and what it’s made of. If you’re working in the fantasy genre, the bible concept can apply to the worlds and civilizations you’re building as well, helping you keep up with the peoples populating your universes along with their languages, histories, cultural habits, political leanings, etc. Bible spreadsheets are one of the best ways to keep track of all your character arcs and interactions and ensure all the rules of your world are consistent.

Keep Meticulous Backups

I have a saying: keep a backup for your backup’s backup. If you write on a computer (and who doesn’t nowadays?), the odds are that you’re going to lose your work at some point. Processors burn out; users download viruses; hard drives crash; devices get stolen; files get corrupted; literally anything can happen. When I was a freshman, my parents’ house got struck by lightning while I had my laptop plugged directly into the wall, and it fried my whole PC, along with every bit of the coursework on that hard drive. Luckily, I had a few assignments on a flash drive because I used the campus computers along with my own, and I was able to save some — but not all — of my stuff. Needless to say, I bought a surge protector the next day and started backing up all my files all the time from that point on.

I suggest you keep several backups in case something happens to more than one of them. For instance, if you have one version of your documents in secure cloud storage and another on your PC, and you accidentally download ransomware, it’s possible for it to infect both your PC and make use of network maps and other vulnerable points to encrypt your cloud backups as well. If that happens and you haven’t got a third, disconnected backup, you’re totally screwed. This is only one of the many ways in which your files can be lost. It’s also super easy for your latest draft to become corrupted during the saving process. If you backup by replacing each draft rather than saving as a new one, then you’ve just erased your old, uncorrupted file and replaced it with a new, corrupt one.

The way to avert disaster is twofold. First: have multiple backups of all your data (not just your novel) in multiple safe locations, and keep them up to date. At least one of these safe locations should be a drive that is disconnected from all networks at all times (except when it’s being updated, of course). I have both an encrypted flash drive that I incrementally back up every day and an encrypted external hard drive that I incrementally back up one to two times a month. So, if I do wind up with ransomware, I’ll have at least one uninfected backup. By the same token, if my house burns down and I lose all my physical backups, I’m still safe because I have secure cloud storage. The second thing you need to do to keep your files safe is save each updated draft individually. I name them for the date I saved them and keep each one in a separate folder with the corresponding date so I can find all of the documents I updated on that given day in one spot and I can also know for certain I am working in the most current file.

I know this section especially seems tedious and uncreative, but it’s important for you to be aware that you’re always at high risk for losing your files if you don’t back them up. As the saying goes: “data you don’t back up is data you don’t care about.”

Know Your Reasons

If you’re writing to be famous, to live the “writer’s life,” to get rich, or for basically any other reason besides you just can’t help yourself, I’d suggest questioning whether you’re wasting your time. I know it doesn’t happen this way for everyone, but all of the fiction I’ve ever written that’s ever been worth anything has been, at its core, the product of my intense fantasizing clawing its way out of my head. At the height of my creative spurts, I’m pumping out 10,000+ words a day. Not many of them are pure gold. A lot of them get cut. All of them get edited heavily. However, never have I ever written for fame, fortune, notoriety, or to achieve some kind of idealized version of Earnest Hemingway’s lifestyle. Would I like to become a famous author someday? Sure. What writer wouldn’t? However, the reality is that if you want fame and fortune, in the 21st century, writing a book ain’t the way to get it.

If you’re going to write a novel, the incentive has to be internal. You have to do it because creating this work of art is a reward in and of itself. If you’re doing it for any other reason, it’s just going to lead to disappointment, a lot of wasted time, and a crappy book. A reader can always tell an author who created their book out of devotion to their story and love for their characters from an author who created their book because they “wanted recognition” or they thought they had “something really important to say.” The author’s true motives for writing are inscribed into every word of every page of every book.