10 Tips to Write a Novel

In my opinion, you’ll never complete your book if you base your actions on the presence or absence of motivation. I would even add that one will never complete any major project that way. Why? Because motivation will disappear after a week, a month, a year… When exactly depends on people, but it will disappear, and it is then willpower and discipline that will lead you through.

I will quote here Dan Millman talking about someone who wants to quit smoking, fight a phobia or who finds himself in any other situation that seems already lost (and this truly is the feeling you’ll have when you end up in the middle of your tale and realize you have months and months of writing left…): it actually only boils down to a succession of small choices, such as to light up that cigarette or not, to get closer or not to that ledge while suffering from fear of heights, to sit down and write that page or not… And it’s the same small choice that keeps coming back again and again until the day we all of a sudden have stopped smoking/overcome our fear/completed our book.

Writing a whole book may seem discouraging once the initial motivation has vanished, and especially when writing some transition parts that are not really interesting but necessary to link the story. But is it truly that hard to write a page a day? As an author, this simple choice will keep coming back: to write or to do something else. And the temptation for the latter will be strong, especially since the consequences of your choice won’t be immediately obvious (“if I don’t write today, what difference does it make?”). But in a lengthy project, it is indeed this small choice, repeated countless times, that matters.

You must understand that the previous 9 tips are perfectly useless without such discipline. A book is, after all, a huge pile of text, and the process is long. That’s it. And besides, is there anything of value in this world that does not demand time?

In my case, if writing the “Chronicles of Galadria” took 7 years, it’s because 4 years passed between the creation of the first 15 chapters (written in only a couple of weeks) and the rest, which itself took 3 years of uninterrupted work, at a rate of about 1 page a day. 4 years during which I kept the story and characters in mind, I piled up ideas and found inspiration, but without getting seriously on the writing part.

On the other hand it wasn’t such a bad thing since the difference between the writing skills of a 13 years old boy and a 17 years old teenager (who then became a young adult of 20) is huge, and the tale became nicer to read and more mature.

So in short, define a minimum number of pages to write per day, and when the time comes to choose, choose to write, every time; you will reach the end.