The One Thing I Wish I’d Known Before Writing a Novel
I never thought the simplest part would be the hardest.
When I decided I was going to finally write and finish my first novel, I thought the hardest part about the process was going to be revising, editing, finding a publisher, and many other small steps that were going to come later on in the process.
Little did I know that the hardest part about writing my novel… was actually sitting down and writing it.
Sure I had thought about my characters before. I’d littered my entire desk with sticky notes with ideas and scenes and things I didn’t want to forget to include in my novel, but over time that’s all they were.
Just notes sitting around and gathering dust as I never got around to bringing myself to put the words onto a page.
I had the time, and if I didn’t I would have found a way to make it, but every time I told myself that this was the day I was going to sit down and at least get through the first chapter of my novel, my head would run blank of everything that I had needed to write. I started to stress about all of the rules I had learned… you need to open your story in a compelling scene, the first sentence has to be an attention grabber.
There had been so many books that I had read that put nothing but a major important emphasis on this first page that it got stuck inside of me every time I would try to get it out. So I didn’t.
I must have written and erased that first line so many times my backspace button must have been just about to fall through the other side of my keyboard.
Instead of the joy I usually felt when I was dabbling in fanfiction or writing short stories for the sole purpose of entertaining myself I felt immense pressure, gut-wrenching anxiety, and a fear of doing the thing I loved more than anything in the world. (Other than my little black kitten Midnight who glares at me from the floor as if she knows exactly what I just typed.)
I wanted that first novel to be perfect, I wanted to prove the stigma wrong that I was going to become a household name, spoken about on the Best Sellers list, and featured front and center in every book store I walked into… before I had even written the book.
In order to write my book, I had to let go of expectations and just write. It couldn’t be about writing a wonderful novel, it had to just be about telling the story I wanted to read.
As soon as I learned to write for myself as my own audience things became a little easier.
They weren’t perfect and the doubt and anxiety still clung to me like a fly on a horse, but over time I learned to manage my own expectations, not lose my focus, and take an exorbitant amount of kitten cuddle breaks when things became too much.
I honestly should have dedicated that first novel to her, but then my parents on the other hand did bring me into this world and they might have been just a little upset with that fact… unlike the novel sarcastically dedicated to my fifth-grade math teacher who had nine year old me stand in the front of the class and say, “You can’t wear shorts like that.” In our 100 degree classroom in June because “too much of your legs touch the seat. Amanda can wear them, Victoria can wear them, but you don’t have the body like theirs to wear shorts like that.”
Hello, years of never wearing shorts again, until high school when my sister bought my first pair since so we could have matching outfits for some summer trip to an amusement park.
They were ok with that dedication and wanted me to mail her a copy.
Most writers won’t tell you that the hardest about being an author is the writing, but some days it is. The days where you’d rather lay in bed for another hour instead of getting up to sit at your computer or the days where the laundry and the chores have seemed to reach a sky-high proportion.
Writing is sometimes the last thing you want to do and you have to physically drag yourself to the computer on all fours with your legs dragging out behind you in some sort of pathetic zombie imitation.
But you have to get it done.
Maybe not every day, it’s ok to take breaks. However, you have to write at least most of the time even when you don’t want to.
If you’ve been putting it off and are using this article as a distraction for your writing, put down your phone or close out of this page and get to writing. It can be one sentence, one paragraph, one page, or as many as you can get in your allotted writing time, but you can’t keep putting it off.
A manuscript that’s never written can never be published as it’s really hard for an editor or publisher to print the story while it’s still wrapped up in your head.
Get to writing,
I know you can do it.
Best,
B.K