Writing a novel - Day 1
I write tabletop roleplaying games for a living, but that was a career that I sort of slid sideways into by accident. My background - and my first and enduring love - is in fiction. I studied creative writing at undergrad and postgrad, and for years I wrote short stories and tried to sell them with limited success.
Looking back at my emails from 2011/12, which was the period in which I took that endeavour the most seriously, itās clear that I came very close to actually breaking into short fiction and that if I hadnāt stopped trying I would have had some better succedd. I have personalised rejections from venues like Asimovās, FS&S, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld - magazines that are famously hard to sell to, and that donāt tend to send out personal rejections. I was close.
The reason I stopped, ironically, was that I went back to university to finish my degree. My degree in creative writing. I didnāt start writing for pleasure again until 2016, when I was doing my MA and also happened to get back into playing D&D, and that writing was focused on RPGs. It turns out Iām pretty good at that, and Iāve managed to forge a career at it thatās very successful. But I miss writing fiction, and for years Iāve been telling myself that Iāll get back to it.
What I really want, what Iāve always aspired to, is to be a novelist. And Iāve made plenty of attempts at it over the years. I wrote many novels when I was an actual child, and I āwonā NaNoWriMo a couple of times in the mid-to-late 00s. But as with most people who want to do the thing but donāt actually do the thing, Iāve started move novels than Iāve ever come close to finishing.
Recently I became fascinated by the field of web novels. Iāve started to read a couple of them and wasnāt particularly impressed by the quality of the writing, frankly. but what I was impressed by - astonished by, really - is the sheer scope of them. How does a writer put out 20k words a week every single week with no end in sight? How is this even physically possible?
I went down an ADHD-fuelled rabbithole that ultimately led me to a book by Monica Leonelle called Writer Better Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day. This is drenched in āgrowth hackingā language that I find very distasteful and off-putting, but hiddin in there is some solid advice and a lot of things that Iām already doing as a full-time writer because theyāre just good practice. The main takeaways from her book are:
- Create a writing routine and stick to it. Do the work, every day.
- Track your writing to figure out what works for you and what doesnāt, and adjust accordingly
- As well as tracking quantatively in a spreadsheet, track things qualitatively by journaling every day
- Use things like the Pomodoro method to held turn off your inner editor and just get words on the page
- Start from a good outline, so that you always know what youāre writing
She also advocates for dictating your work rather than typing or hand-writing it, because you can speak faster than you can type. I know that this isnāt something that works for me because speech comes from a very different part of my brain than the part that I use for creative work. My written voice is vastly different to my spoken voice. Iāve triend and failed to dictate work in the past, and I know that itās not for me.
But Iām not that interested in āgrowth hackingā in order to hit 10k words a day, frankly. I already know that I can churn out volume if I need to. The bit of advice in this book that stuck out to me was the power of starting from a good outline. Her method resembles the famous snowflake method, where you start with a simple description of each chapter or scene and slowly build it out into more and more detail until you have a draft. By sitting down with a clear goal in mind you donāt have to do as much problem solving while writing, and so you donāt get stuck as often. In theory.
Because I have ADHD and because that ADHD is unmedicated, I can be quite impulsive. I went down this rabbithole because Iād become fascinated by web novels, and I came out of it thinking, āwhat if I applied these techniques and started writing a web novel that was actually well written, because I know Iām a good writerā.
Spoiler alert: Iām not going to do that. I donāt know anything about the landscape of web novels, I donāt know what readers want, and I donāt particularly want to spend my life churning out hundreds of thousands of words on a story thatās never going to end. I like standalone books with a tight story that has a proper conclusion, and thatās what Iāve always aimed to write. Itās also the height of arrogance to learn about an entire field and decide after a day that I can do it better than the very successful people who have been doing it for years. Plus, I have a full time writing career already. I donāt need to be trying to start a second one that, by all accounts, is in itself a full time job.
But what I realised, after Iād talked myself down from the āstart an entire new career!ā precipice, was that I can try to apply some of these techniques to writing an Actual Novel.
Iāve always considered myself a āpantserā, someone who doesnāt outline their work, but itās clear - based on my lack of finished novels - that this doesnāt really work for me. And when I look at my RPG work, that always starts from a solid outline, even if itās just making a table of contents for the book. Drawing a dungeon map and rolling up random keys for it that you then write is, at its most basic level, making an outline.
Iāve dabbled with outlining fiction in the past, because Iām fairly self-aware and Iāve known for a long time that discovery writing doesnāt work for me once a piece becomes longer than a short story, but what tends to happen is that I get bogged down in the āpre-productionā phase and never actually start writing. Or what happens is that I create an outline and start writing but, as it turns out, the outline wasnāt really fit for purpose. This is where Ms Leonelleās snowflake-esque technique seems like it will be useful.
Part of the reason for this, I think, is that I just donāt know what a good outline really looks like because Iāve never bothered to learn it. And Iāve also never given myself anything like a deadline for outlining. Iām going to try to fix both of those things.
As a young writer I went through that phase of buying lots of books on the craft of fiction that I never read. I think weāve all done that, alongside collecting notepads. One book Iāve owned for years that it seems is still quite well-regarded is James Scott Bellās Super Structure (as well as his earlier book Plot & Structure, which Iāve definitely read at some point in my life because I annotated it). Monica Leonelle also recommends Larry Brooksā Story Engineering as being the best book on outlining sheās ever read, and though I see lots of responses to it online that say itās simply teaching the basic three act structure, Iām going to pick it up anyway and see.
My plan is this. Over the rest of this week Iām going to look at Story Engineering, Plot and Structure, and Super Structure and figure out some things about making a good outline. Over this coming weekend Iām going to actually outline a novel, chapter by chapter. Iām only allowing myself Saturday and Sunday to do this. Come Monday, I start writing.
I obviously canāt allow the writing to cannibalise time from my actual job, and right now I have a lot of massive deadlines looming. It would be easy to say āIāll start next month when my workload is lowerā, but thatās just classic procrastination and nothing will get done. So I start writing on Monda. Iām going to give myself roughly an hour at the start of each work day to write, in three 20 minute Pomodoro blocks. Then I set it aside and do my actual work. Iām going to track it all in a spreadsheet, and Iām going to journal about it every day in the form of this blog.
This is the first journal entry. Letās see if I can get a novel written this year.