Writing a novel is difficult. It’s incredibly taxing on your skills as a writer, your patience, and yourself as a person because whatever you write about is going to come from you, and if it doesn’t go so well you feel like a failure. It’s good to know that if you don’t finish the novel you’re working on you are, by no means, a failure. Practically every writer has started a novel and been unable to see it to the finish, and ended up scraping it. Some writers even write to the finish only to have today’s publishers deem their novel unmarketable. That’s okay. These things happen and they are not a total waste. You learn from them. Writing is a process. It builds and builds and builds. There is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing or a perfect writer.

Most writers can’t handle the novel length, which is normally 60,000 words to 90,000 words but can be an upwards of 120,000+. It’s just too long and we end up being bored by the story, or things aren’t going exactly as you thought it would. The characters are all sounding the same, the plot keeps going in circles or isn’t consistent. You want to start over-no, instead, you want to start something entirely different, a fresh new idea. So you do, and a couple of months later, you’re faced with the same problem.

Some writers don’t even know what a novel is really supposed to be like. It sounds silly, but novels do have a structure and certain things in the plot and characters do have to come up that, by the end of the novel, are ultimately solved. I’m mainly talking about the beginning, middle, and end of a novel, as well as the conflict and sub-conflicts, all of which have to be resolved at or before (in terms of sub-conflicts) the end of the novel. Writers staring down at a blank screen are like that because they don’t know much about the novel itself, never mind the actual writing.

Other writers just don’t yet have the skills to tackle a novel. Too many beginner writers want to make it as great novelists and so start with their first novel idea and find, at the end of writing it, that the novel is far too autobiographical. This is common for beginner writers, who are usually young and therefore lack the experience and the necessary skills to write a thought-provoking and overall powerful novel. The best advice to these beginner novelists is to write short stories first, one finished short story a week. And if you don’t like writing short stories, for whatever reason, write scenes, anything that comes to mind or that interests you that you wish to explore (even if you haven’t explored it in your life personally-whatever, be creative). At the same time, read the latest and the best in the genre you’re most interested in writing. Get used to the different styles, and the words and characters other writers have used so you can a) avoid them and start developing your own style and characters, and b) familiarize yourself with an actual finished product of what you ultimately want to do. Then, when you’ve done all that for about six months to a year, come back here and read the rest of this article.

Most of the difficulties of tackling a novel can be solved if you read more and write more. But there’s still that problem that writing a novel is too much for you to handle. You get bored and you’re having a difficult time keeping track of all the story’s elements (plot, character, setting, conflict, etc.). You’re constantly at arms against writer’s block. The good news is there’s something you can do about all of this. Below are several tips on how best to tackle a novel so you a) finish it, and b) finish it in such a way publishers will want to publish it.

Outlining

Have an outline of the entire novel. The outline should be simple and easy to follow. It should have your novel separated into scenes along with who the point of view character is going to be for that scene. By outlining your novel in scenes you get rid of doing too much narration and not enough exposition. Scenes make the novel. If you’re not writing scenes, you’re not writing fiction. Write articles or essays if you can’t wrap your head around scenes.

There are writers who don’t like to write up outlines and just go with the flow of writing. Sometimes this can work, but only with a writer who is truly devoted to what she’s writing, who is used to doing things spontaneously, and who has a very good grasp of the story and characters she is writing about. In other words, they do have an outline, only it’s all in their head and they stick to it. Most of us aren’t like this, and the writer who tries to be like this ends up losing track of what she’s doing and becomes frustrated. So, by all means, do an outline.

Then again, there are writers who just don’t like to outline and think that outlining is problematic. Outlining is only bad when you over outline and plan every meticulous detail in the maps, setting and character histories, and family trees. Once everything is planned out the writer cannot seem to sit down and write the novel regardless of all this planning. The novel is there, it’s staring at her in the face, but she cannot seem to write. It’s as if, in all this outlining, she’s already written it.

An outline should take no more than two weeks, tops. And it’s a simple outline, one that does not include all the specifics-that’ll come when you’re actually writing. The purpose of the outline is only to provide you with an easy to follow guideline on the plot and characters so you know what’s going to happen, what the characters are faced with, and how they overcome it. Spend about a week working out the characters, the conflict, and the setting, including history and maps. These should not be overly detailed. A little bit on each, perhaps a paragraph or two, and rudimentary drawn maps will suffice. Then spend about a week outlining all the scenes in a 3-5 sentence paragraph, more sentences if it’s a particularly large and important scene and less if it’s a small one.

The reason you don’t want to overly plan is because your characters will change from what you’ve planned once you start writing the novel. It’s weird, but you’ll find your characters will end up writing themselves, taking on their own personalities, and interacting in the world you created the way they want to. This is where the “go with the flow” is acceptable, but, if you do feel you’re getting sidetracked a little, you’ll always have your simple outline to get you centred. You may even find you have to make a few changes in the outline to suit the characters. That’s fine, too. The changes won’t be anything too big. Your characters may not be exactly what you planned, but they won’t change so drastically as to be unaccommodating.

Scripts to Scenes

An outline doesn’t make writing a novel any easier. That’s not the purpose of the outline. All the outline has to do is give you something to move forward with. It’s a manual to your novel. You still have to contend with having to make a story out of all this planning. This can be overwhelming and you will find yourself staring at the blank screen wondering how best to start, rewriting the beginning over and over and over…

Now that you have your scenes written out in small 3-5 sentence paragraphs, the next step is to write scripts to these scenes. These scripts are rough, should be mostly comprised of dialogue, but should also tell you what you should be writing, what the characters are thinking about, what the characters are doing. It’s simple. Think of it as a baby step towards the finished product.

These scripts are mostly dialogue but that doesn’t mean your novel should be nothing but character chitchat. The reason dialogue takes up most of the script space is because the other information you’ll be including in the script, like what the character’s are doing or thinking at that time, should be nothing more than a simple sentence that you’ll be able to understand. For example: “Main protagonist thinks about relationship with love interest,” or, “Main character has a fist fight with villain.” Nothing spectacular. It’s just there to let you know what you have to write when you get to it. It’s a baby step. Baby steps are easy, and so will writing your novel.

Spend a day or two writing the script for the scenes in one chapter and then spend the remaining five or six days writing the chapter. You’ll be surprised how quickly your writing becomes. You no longer have to think about what you’re writing. You’ve done all the thinking necessary. All you have to do is add in the details. You don’t even have to worry about the dialogue. It’s there. If you want to change it because you suddenly realize it’ll sound better this way than the way you originally had it, change it. It’s as if the script is the first draft of your novel and when you actually write the scene from the script, it comes off as the second draft.

You might be thinking that this takes too much time, that you’d much rather skip this step and just write what you have from your one or two week outline that you made. What you’ll soon come to find, however, is a repeat of all those problems you were suffering from: boredom, getting sidetracked, writer’s block, and having to continuously go back and rereading what you wrote, unsure of it. By doing scripts to scenes you’ll be able to avoid these problems, or at the very least lessen them considerably. It doesn’t take as much time as you think. Try it, and if you still think it takes too much time, think about all the time you waste in writer’s block land.