How to get started writing a novel?
I've always wanted to write a novel, but I do not understand where to start. Everything I find online is complicated and unhelpful. Can someone give me some advice on how to get this journey started?
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Answers ( 2 )
It all depends on where you're really starting.
If you know you want to write a novel, but don't yet have a story to tell, the first step is to read! Read, read, read, and then read some more. Read things that you know will interest you, but also read things that are outside your comfort zone. Get your brain going and get a good understanding of what that appeals. Ask yourself what it is that you like about those books. Think about genres, characters, settings, tropes, and styles that interested you. And I do mean you - unless you're an established writer with a literary image to maintain, don't worry about what's popular or what sells yet.
Next, try freewriting. Just scribble or away until you say something that interests you! I find that writing by hand slows you down and gives you time to think while you write. Don't edit yourself or try to go in a certain direction, just keep on writing and when you run out of steam, go back and see what sparks your imagination. Maybe it was a great scenario or character. Maybe it was a really beautiful turn of phrase. Whatever. Grab it, run with it, and see what else it can do for you. Freewrite from your freewriting.
Then, go for short stories. I highly recommend reedsy prompts. There are more than enough prompts to get you going and has the added benefit of a wonderful and encouraging community of writers. As an added bonus, reedsy offers free writing courses as well as book production services. It's really a one-stop shop. I wrote a few short stories for reedsy that barely met the minimum requirements, but before I knew it, my shortest idea was a novella. It just grew into its own thing and couldn't be crammed into a short story. That's when I knew I was ready to write longer stories.
Once you've gotten the hang of writing engaging short format stories, you can go back to freewriting (or prompts, or a plot generator, or genre tropes, whatever gets you going) and see if the right story comes to you. It will probably take a few tries. Getting to the point of starting a novel is a long process with plenty of failure along the way, but also a nice stack of short and medium length stories, too. Keep them. There might be some good stuff in there that you can use later.
Now that you have a plot you want to explore, write a skeleton. For me, this is just a bullet pointed list in which I jot down the most general outline of the story. It's maybe a thousand words and it's very train of thought. Flesh it out, ask yourself questions and answer them in text (Why does the villain want to destroy the world? Because he...blah blah blah). Go back and clean up your skeleton until there's a story that's fun for you to play with. After all, you'll spend hundreds of hours in this world, so make sure it's something that's interesting for YOU. This is a good time to take a break and read more. Never ever stop reading.
Once you have your skeleton, go ahead and build some characters. Get into their heads. See how they interact with each other. Maybe this changes your skeleton, maybe it doesn't. There are lots of good resources on how to make believable, well-rounded characters.
By now you have some material to work with and the story is ready for you to build. The resources and advice you're seeing online will be useful to you now, so go back to those sites. Hopefully, you're no longer intimidated by the flashing cursor at the top of a blank word document.
Okay, this is a really good question, but not for the reason you might think.
If none of the artticles or videos on writing has struck as spark in you, you may just really not be able to write a novel.
I don't mean that to be mean, just writers mostly have two way they write - there's an idea crawling out their ears and they need to get it out or they are being paid to writer so they write. If you can come up with an idea, don't know how to start, reading about writing isn't motivated you...it's a good indication that writing some theorretical thing you'd like to do, not an act of effort and will that you are in the act of doing, even when you're doing something else. As I sit here, typing to you, I am working on an article and two stories in the back of my head. ^_^
So why do you want to write a novel? Why not a short story. Or a poem? Or...anything.
The way all novelists start is that they sit down...and start writing.