The Best Habits for New Novelists

There has always been one thing standing in the way of every person that wants to be a novelist: writing the damn novel. Any aspiring writer will tell you that they have endless false starts and half written novels clogging up their laptop. Scribbled notes in copybooks, ideas in their head they haven’t mustered the spirit to put on paper – often times the hardest part about being a writer is the writing. Writers can develop a complex after so many failed attempts. They start to think that they just don’t have what it takes. In reality, they just haven’t given themselves the best chance to succeed. Here are the best habits for all those chasing the two most elusive words in the English language: ‘The End.’

1. Write

Writing every day is a discipline that many people don’t have. It can be difficult to find the inspiration to get behind a keyboard. When you do bring yourself to write, you can struggle with finding a rhythm. Your sentence structure is clunky. You find yourself rewriting the same sentence over and over again. The best way to rid yourself of this is by writing every day. Even if you can only manage to write 100 words one day, make the time to do it.

2. Establish a Ritual

To help strengthen your writing habits, it’s a good idea to create a ritual out of it. Choose to write just after breakfast. Get a coffee mug that you only use when you’re working on the novel. Put on a certain music playlist (something without lyrics, preferably). Where do you write? Pick a place, free of distraction to designate your place to get work done. It can be difficult to write in the room where you typically watch TV or eat. Consider a local coffee shop, a place where you will be free of the million other little things you should be doing around the house.

3. Outline Your Novel

Outlining is tricky. Some writers love outlines. Some writers hate them. All writers need them. You don’t need an outline when you first start writing, but once you know where you you’re your story to go, put it down on paper. There are many different ways to outline your story. It is just a matter of finding the best way for you. A great practice is to break up your novel into acts. This way you can outline your story in sections. Mark the beginning of your story on the outline, then mark the end. If your story was a TV show with three seasons, what would happen in the first season finale? Make that the end point of your first act. Create as detailed an outline of your first act as you feel comfortable. Then, revisit the second and third act of your outline once you’ve written all of the first. Keep in mind that just because you put something in the outline, doesn’t mean it’s written in stone. Nearly all novels have diverted from the original outline in one way or another.

4. Get to Know Your Characters

If you’re writing something, then you presumably want someone to read it. You want your readers to be invested and care – you want them to love or hate your characters. Take the time to develop your characters before you write them into your story. You know that your protagonist is the charming, sarcastic anti-hero type. Why is he that way? Where did he grow up? What was his dad like? Has he ever loved before? Picture him going to the grocery store. What would he buy? How would he treat the cashier? If he found a wallet on the ground, would he keep it or turn it in? Maybe he pockets the cash and then turns it in.

4 ½. Smell Your Setting

One of the easiest ways to get taken out of your story is when suddenly a new element to the setting was introduced that they were not expecting.

It’s snowing? I pictured a warm summer day.

Whenever you introduce a new setting in your story, think of what it might smell like and work from there. Smell is the sense tied closest to memory, but also the last sense in mind when reading a book on the couch. A well described smell can teleport a reader from their bedroom to a dank, marshy swamp or an old rusty spaceship in an instant.

5. Don’t Edit

Writing and editing are two completely different things. They require a different mindset. Do not edit when you should be writing. It can be tempting to go back and tidy up some dialogue that you wrote the day before, but you should avoid it as best you can. The quickest way to disrupt your flow and your vision is to go back and chop up what you worked on mid project. Keep your head down and forge ahead. There will be moments where you don’t feel that your writing is at its best, but it is more important to get the words down than it is to get them down perfectly. There will be time for that later.

6. Cut to the Chase

If you’re not interested in writing about something, how can you expect your audience to be interested in reading about it? There will be times when you find that you’re writing a scene that in all reality is inconsequential to the story and whatever point you’re trying to make. Feel free to leave it all out of there. Is your protagonist having some profound thought on their drive home from work? Did they witness something on the road or learn something significant from a radio broadcast? If not, you should consider leaving it out. There are times when you get into a rhythm and you’re practically typing faster than you can think of the words. Take a beat, step back, and think about the importance of what you’re writing.

7. You’re Done! Now You Can Edit Your Novel

You did it! You sat down every day and banged on the keys until you finally wrote ‘happily ever after,’ or ‘they were never heard from again.’ Of course, that’s not it. While the hard part may be over, you still have a long road ahead. It’s time to rip your story apart. How do you write a good story? You write a bad story and make it better.

When you start to make edits to your story, the first thing you want to do is put it down. Close the laptop and leave it alone for a little while.  A few weeks? Months? That’s up to you, but the important thing is to put some space between you and your baby. You want to be able to look over your work with fresh and relatively new eyes. Once you’re ready to bust out the red pen, consider printing out your story – one sided and double spaced. You’ll feel accomplished holding the draft in your hands, but it’s also good to read it like someone would read a book. Try reading your story aloud. It’s easier to skip over misspellings or miss awkward sounding sentences when you read in your head. Don’t be afraid to run out of ink in that red pen. If you don’t have enough notes, you’re not a good editor. Once you’ve made your notes, go back and fix them. Print out the draft, and edit again.