So after a long and hard days work you stare at your tired reflection in the coffee before you, wondering how the hell you ended up where you are: You're tired of the workaday life and in a surreal epiphany you realise that the source to finding a truly fruitful existence, is to create something instead. Sound familiar? If so then you might decide to write for a change, taking inspiration from all your favourite authors, years of experience, ideas that you've had since you were five years old and mixing it all together in the writers cauldron. This may seem the best starting point, pulling up the Mac screen with a preferred beverage and a small plate of biscuits and pouring forth all of that accumulated experience. Many authors do this and it is sometimes very effective for us, but be warned, for the road to completing a novel is perilous, filled with potholes, traps and dead ends and so I feel that I should share some tips that I have learned from my own -quite limited- experience.
PART 1: READ, READ, READ
Yes, it's cliche and yes you've probably heard this from far more seasoned authors than I, but if a point's good, it's worth repeating. Being an author who doesn't read is like a musician who says that he can't stand music, or a film director who never goes to the movies. I'd like to think that those who were inspired to write a novel were inspired probably by a book that they once read, but I can attest to the idea that a great deal of my writing was not born of the inspiration from novels, but from films, games, art and music, so I can sympathise with those who gather experience from other areas of media, but if you want to get the style down, halfway there is as far as you're ever going to get without reading around your genre and in its subgenres. But don't stop there either, because the more good writing you read, the better writer you will become, which means reading non-fiction as well, especially true for those characters in possession of knowledge that you yourself do not possess, such as detectives, scientists and military types (unless of course you have experience in those fields.)
In order to test the previous point: do what you were going to do and write say a prologue or first chapter of a novel and go away, read something of that genre and go back to it. Notice how shit it was? That's because you have made a mistake and thinking those thoughts of your previous writing can only be a good thing, because it shows that you have learned something. But simply reading is the preliminary work, not the meat of the job, which is why you also need to
PART 2: PLAN, PLAN & PLAN AGAIN
This is where your novel must take shape but unlike the previous point, this is disputed. There are some authors out there who write novels as the inspiration waxes and wanes, throwing all caution to the wind as it were; then there are others who plot out absolutely every scene, every encounter and every facet of the story to test straight away if the plot will work or not. Personally I dither between the two, with a general outline planned and some pivotal scenes preconceived in my mind, but without planning exhaustively every single scene in the book; most of the other scenes are written out with freedom in attempts to keep the action fresh and off-the-cuff in order to allow for flexibility with the story just in case what I'd planned wasn't very good. This is a classic case of each to his own I guess and you should ideally do whatever works for you, but if you do take the first route, be warned, for writing with no plan whatsoever requires a great deal of mental agility in order to write your way out of potholes before they overwhelm the action, which is why unless you are absolutely certain that you can make a story work despite unexpected complications that almost certainly will rise, then I would advise that you tread the path well trodden, rather than running naked into the dark forest of uncertainty.
PART 3: IT CAN'T DO ANY HARM TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL
Before you write your novel it might do good to relearn all that grammar stuff from school, just so you know how to construct time dimensions to keep up momentum and how to place sentences together to keep the action high i.e. a good, well-executed mixture of short- and complex-sentences. You can do all of this by simply picking up a good book on English grammar, one from university presses e.g. OUP, should suffice.
PART 4: HAVE FUN!
This is by far the most important step, because writing a novel is not easy and will kick you in the balls from time to time in frustration; it's not pleasant and things almost certainly will go wrong the first time you try it, even if you follow all the precautions and plan down to the last detail, there will be times where inertia rears it's ugly head, where doubt sets in and self-criticism bullies you. It's fine, just get back to work and forget your anxieties, because a book that isn't finished is one that will never sell or even see a glimpse of daylight. This brings me to a final point, which is to not dream too much, because -despite the hype- writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme where authors churn out book after book and rake in millions. Yes, King, Rowling, Tolkien etc. are big names in fiction that -even after death in Tolkien's case- generate massive revenues. These are exceptions to the rule, less than one percent of books published each year, which means that the only reason you should write, should be for enjoyment, to say that you have done something that few will ever do. Of those that try to, most will fail, which makes it all the greater to finish something so massive, and shows a great amount of determination and wherewithal.
If you wish for more writing advice, I would highly recommend the book How NOT to Write a Novel, that I reviewed last year. Good luck!
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