Starting to Write Your First Novel

I’ve ALWAYS wanted to write a novel, well, I have ever since I learned what a novel was. But now I’m 40 and have I managed to actually write said novel? Of course I haven’t! 

I think it’s fear, mostly, that has stopped me. I mean, novels are pretty big, aren’t they? Have you ever seen Magician by Raymond E Feist? It’s pretty chonky! I’m not sure I could ever write anything that could sustain a single idea for that number of words.

But this year, following the success of my short story collection, Talking to Lobsters, I’ve finally broken the barrier that’s been holding me back for all this time.

I think it was writing the short stories that helped me to get past the fear. For a start, it gave me experience in planning stories out and developing characters and concepts, but it also inspired further ideas that I could explore in a larger work.

As I wrote one short story, it gave me ideas for what I could do in a second story in the same world. This then gave me ideas for a third story in that world, and eventually, I found myself having ideas for chapters that could go between the short stories and link them together. I made notes of all these ideas on my phone, and slowly, a narrative began to build up in my mind that felt like it could genuinely become a novel. 

I still had to finish my short story collection, however, so I let all this rumble around my brain for a few months while Talking to Lobsters got finished and I had a break over Christmas. Then in January, I finally felt ready and started writing the novel I’ve always wanted to.

The only way I managed to get to this stage was by coming up with the narrative slowly; firstly through short stories and then through making sporadic notes as ideas. Finally, now I’m actually at the writing stage, it feels like all I’m doing is assembling the building blocks that have spent the last six months or so rumbling around my head, and I don’t feel daunted about how big a novel has to be anymore.

Assuming that no major emergencies stop me from completing this first attempt at novel writing, I think I’ll go through the same process again when writing the second one, also assuming that I’m going to do a second one. It’s really helped me to get over this sense that writing a novel is an enormous, daunting, unscalable mountain. 

Having said that, I have a friend who has just finished writing his first novel and he looked confused when I told him about how scared I was of the sheer scale of writing my own. It turned out that his problem was keeping himself concise so that he didn’t lose the reader in too many words rather than having trouble writing enough to fill a book.

So, I guess the moral of the story here isn’t that MY METHOD OF WRITING NOVELS IS THE PERFECT METHOD AND YOU SHOULD ALL START DOING EXACTLY AS I DO IF YOU WANT TO BE NOVEL WRITERS. Instead, I think the takeaway here should be that if you identify what it is that’s stopping you from starting writing, and you can focus on finding a solution to that problem, then there’ll be no stopping you. Your problem and your solution will be personal to you, so don’t let anyone tell you to do it their way, it has to be yours. So go on, go and write a novel!