How to Write a Novel: Little by Little

Since I was a child, I wanted to be a novelist. I also wanted to be an actress, but that's another blog. The problem was that I thought novelists sat down and did not get up again till their novel was complete.

I think I imagined that novelists practiced automatic writing, where the words came to them by supernatural inspiration. Never did it enter my mind that writing is no different, in many ways, from any other activity. That is, it has a beginning, a long middle and an end (like Monty Python's Anne Elk's Brontosaurus theory).

Of course I knew that the papers you write at college are not written in one burst of creativity (unless you've left it till 1 AM of the day it's due, and you write in a hot fever, getting down some words on the page and hoping for the best). I knew that I could write a multi-page research paper a little at a time.

As I got older, I started writing articles for newspapers, blogs and newsletters. All these short pieces might be written in one sitting, but polished over many hours. I should have figured out by then that writing is a process, not a finished product that just needs transcribing, but I still believed that a full-length novel would be written rather mysteriously, as a work of art received from a muse. Anything less than that was not worth writing.

That is, until I reread Stephen King's On Writing. Somehow when I first read it about 10 years ago, I missed the part where he described his own writing routine. How does this highly-successful novelist write his books? A little bit at a time, every day.

So a few years ago, I decided to give it a try. Get up at 7 AM and write till 9 AM, more or less--1000 to 2000 words a day. Before I knew it, I had nearly 35,000 words, about 80 pages. This is nothing short of a miracle.

Does the muse guide my writing? Yes, indeed. Each time I opened the file, I was as eager to find out what Elizabeth would do today as Elizabeth herself. And each time, my muse did not fail me. (and by the way, those hours of writing produced a novel, which I published in 2016: Prague for Beginners)

Here I am, putting a copy of Prague for Beginners in the Little Free Library!

So . . . if you are dreaming of writing your own novel, give it a try. Carve an hour of two out of every day and write. As the words mount up and you become intimate with your characters, you'll discover the joys of creating a work of art, little by little.