Well, here I am again. Did you think I had abandoned this project? After one week, really? Well, I didn't. I might have if something better came along, but it didn't.
Hehe...
"I just don't think I could do something like that. It's too big of a project, too complicated. I wouldn't know where to start."
I've been told by several people that they couldn't ever write a novel for various reasons, including lack of imagination and an inability to write "well" (whatever that means). Both excuses are, of course, ridiculous because all people have imaginations and all speaking adults can tell stories. A novel isn't good because someone had a good imagination or because they have some magical ability to craft words, a novel is good because an author takes the time to make it that way. Which leads me to the most common reason for not writing a novel: "It's just too big."
I can't think of a single "small" thing in life that's worth doing. Go ahead, try.
What did you come up with? Did you say, "telling someone you love them?" Did you say, "going for a brisk walk?" Did you say, "learning something new?"
Well, those are good things to do, and they are small. But, taken alone, those things are meaningless. What point is there in telling someone you love them a single time without building a relationship? What good is a single walk when it's not a part of developing a healthy habit? Learning a single fact without understanding the context in which it exists is trivial.
Did you say, "writing a single page?"
It is confoundingly (apparently that's not a word according to spell check... it should be) common to hear authors telling new authors they need to "write every single day." I won't go into why that's not always the best advice because Jennifer Mattern of AllIndieWriters already did, but I can see why that advice has such traction. Writing every day is just another way of building a habit, and a habit is necessary when writing a novel requires not one large effort, but countless single pages of writing and editing.
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
-Vincent van Gogh
By now you can probably see the writing on the wall. I'm going to say that writing a book is as simple as breaking it down into easily managed parts. Got it? Ok, we're moving on.
It still feels like you have an entire mountain to climb, doesn't it? That's how I felt when I set out to finish a novel for the first time. I had started novels before, but for one reason or another, I never finished. Before I set out to make a complete novel, I needed a plan. So, I made a plan, and then another, and then another. I created a detailed plot outline, character biographies, notes on mystery elements and locations... But I was no closer to starting a novel when those things were done.
What finally worked was to boil the entire process down into something anyone can do in less than five minutes (though, hopefully, you'd spend longer than that). I wrote SIX sentences, boiling my story down to a paragraph of less than 100 words. Each of those sentences became an "act" and each act was then divided into "Scenes." Each act was simply an expansion of a single sentence. Under each act, every scene was explained again with just one sentence. There were sixty-two scenes in total. I assigned each scene a word allotment, then started the next day with Act-1, Scene-1.
Here's what I had for my very first scene (minor spoilers):
Act-1, Scene 1: Jessica drives to a party to reunite with her estranged friends while thinking about the failures of the last five years. 1250 words.
You see that "1250 words" comment? That's all I had to write. Not 100,000 words telling a story with complex characters, plot, mystery elements and locations... just 1250 words. Anyone can do that.
My scene-by-scene outline was eventually cut to shreds, though the acts remained until I began my first editing round. Those 1250 words became 388 in the final version of my story by the time I had edited everything over and over. Writing the first draft, the part most people never finish, is only about 20% of the effort. But once you've got that 20% complete, I'd imagine your chances of finishing the thing go from 1 in 1000, to about 1 in 2.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to work on the outline for my second novel.
-J.
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