Novel Writing

Last time I looked at ways to help you get productive with your writing. Today I’m going to look at a few ways to get yourself organised, enough at least so that you can get writing easily even if your head is swimming with ideas and you don’t know which one to write about.

1. Organise. Most writers cannot concentrate productively on more than one idea at a time. But most writers are also afflicted with the dreaded Plot Bunnies, those fiendish animals that breed and breed until you are overwhelmed with different ideas. To stay in control you need to write notes on these ideas when they pop up in your mind, and keep them safe in their own project folder. By purging your mind of other ideas you can concentrate on finishing your current project. Once you have finished your current project, the ideas you stored away safely will all be there in their own project folders for you to use.
2. Write an Outline. A lot of new writers trying to write a first novel see an outline as something unnecessary that gets in the way of the ‘real work’ of writing the actual novel. But imagine this: struggling through the writing of 100,000 words of a novel and then trying to work out how to improve it, which bits don’t work, are all the plot elements present and resolved, etc. Now imagine yourself writing a 3,000 word outline of your novel, and then being able to see the entire novel laid out from start to finish so that you can spot all the broken bits, dead ends and weaknesses in the structure of the outline. All you have to do to improve the entire book is work on the weak parts of the outline. Those 97,000 words you saved can then be put to much better use once you have a better idea of what you want them to do. Fix the outline, not the whole book.
3. Write ANYTHING rather than nothing. Like a runner that does not run, a swimmer that does not swim, or a …. well, I think you get the idea. A writer that does not write will not improve and will actually stagnate, eventually getting worse. If you leave it long enough, not writing will turn you into someone who is not a writer. The answer? Write! It doesn’t matter how bad it is, you must write in order to be a writer. Write something every day and you will always feel in touch with your current project. So put a note in your diary, a knot in your handkerchief, or write it in lipstick on your mirror: I will write each and every day, even if it is just one sentence!

Next time I’ll be taking a look at what you can do if the ideas just won’t come. Be sure to pop back here and look for that post soon!

Technorati Tags: first novel, new novels, novel summary, novel writing