Four Essential Writing Tips

I finished a draft of my forth novel today, fifth if you count the one that’s been abandoned in a computer folder somewhere, a botched attempt at a book that will never be. This draft has much work ahead of it still.

It’s a skeleton of the book it will one day become, and yet as I typed the final few lines onto the page, and sat blissfully back in my chair to admire my work, I felt the same irrepressible sensation that I always do at this point in the writing process, exhilaration over having accomplished such an enormous task, excitement over what lies ahead, and a debilitating sense of dread: What happens if no one likes it?

I never would have guessed ten years ago that at this point in my life I’d be the author of two published novels with more on the way. I was working as a high school history teacher, newly married and expecting my first child. I’d loved to write my entire life, but it wasn’t until I decided to leave my teaching career to care for my newborn daughter that I was able to make that dream a reality by squandering away whatever free time I could while my daughter was napping to write my first novel, The Good Girl.

It was a long shot; I knew the odds of publishing a novel were not in my favor. I knew no one in the publishing industry, my creative writing education was lacking, and I had no writer friends or critique partners, no one to read my work before I sent it off to agents, sight unseen. But what I had was a love of writing. It didn’t matter so much to me if I found an agent to represent me, or a publisher to buy my book.

I was going to write because I had a story to tell, and so I did. The characters of The Good Girl consumed me. They haunted my dreams; they spoke to me at all hours of the day and night, insistent that I get their story down. It was a five year long labor of love that paid off in the end.

Ten years later, many things have changed and yet nothing has changed at all. I still love to write. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years:

Find a style of writing that suits you. Be willing to adapt to suit a novel’s needs. By necessity, my writing style has changed over the years. Where I used to be the type of writer who meticulously edited as I wrote so that by the time I reached the end of a novel it was clean, time constraints have taught me to write faster. Now I scurry quickly and sometimes haphazardly to get my thoughts down on paper, constantly moving forward and never looking back until I get to the final page. Then I go back and revise.

Love your characters. Truly love them. As an author, you’ll spend a great quantity of time with these characters, and they should never feel fabricated or fictional to you; they should be real. If you’re anything like me, you will think about these characters during the day, and you’ll dream about them at night. You’ll plot out their lives while you fold laundry or grocery shop, and sometimes, as I’ve done, you’ll lie sleepless in bed trying to decide whether a certain character should live or die, cogitating on it for days.

I try not to think of myself as a puppeteer, manipulating my characters to do this and that throughout the pages of a novel, but to give them free reign to do whatever they please. Characters are stubborn beings and though they are the products of an author’s imagination, they have a funny way of getting us to make them do what they want. It’s an amazing thing. When I start a novel a character is merely a name, perhaps some physical traits – height, eye color, general demeanor – but by the end they are a genuine human being.

Write your words like they will never be seen. Don’t be guarded or circumspect. Try not to ponder what others will think, but write for you and only you. That said, I still cringe when my loved ones read my novels, and my husband is forbidden from reading my works-in-progress while I’m in the same room. But during the writing process I let these fears fall by the wayside, and allow my words to be audacious and bold.

Love the process. Be excited to write. For me, writing is a job, and yet it’s not often that it feels like a job. I write in the early mornings, and each night before bed, sense the excitement start to seep in, the anticipation that come morning I’ll be able to wake to a quiet home, while the rest of the family is still asleep, and rejoin my characters in their world. Writing a novel is herculean task. It doesn’t happen overnight, but takes months or years to complete. Books get written and rewritten, and sometimes they get scrapped. But by loving the process, it lessens the angst over what happens when that manuscript leaves the safe confines of your computer’s hard drive, and makes its way into others’ hands.

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Category: How To and Tips