Do not fear what you hear (or read)
Your next (first?) novel is not going to be cooked up using a recipe. You must make sure of that. It must be all you — an outpouring of your creativity. Writers write in ways that best suit them or, at least, they drift towards a certain way of doing things. Discover it. There are many roadblocks that interfere with the direction you want to take. Drive right over them.
This was written to encourage you to write, not read.
Writing novels is an activity often smothered with ‘expert’- created rules — too many to list in their entirety and, all too frequently, more than can be of value. The result is dozens, maybe hundreds or a gazillion ways to get to a 'first draft'. We are forced to agonise over whether we want to be guided by followers of three act plotting, the snowflake method, mind mapping and so on. “When to start”, “how to start” and “where to start” — your first experience of signs in the roadblock maze.
At the other extreme, where it is best to be, are the writers who throw a bucket of words onto pages and begin wrapping scenes, characters, and devious plot lines into various chapters, on paper or electronic, and take things from there. Which are you going to be? Choose wisely or you will stall your writing career for eons while you consume vast quantities of quality literature available to you. Literature, written in good faith, to help get you underway.
As a writer, new to writing a full novel, there is no way of knowing what will be good for you.
So best you just get on with it. Write your first draft, or a bunch of paragraphs that form the nucleus of your first draft. Surely you have some ideas about what genre you want to be in for this upcoming novel. You would have daydreamed about some of the characters and locations they will visit, things that will happen to them, and things they will do to others or to your neatly laid out scenery.
Write and write and write until your brain gets puffed. Stop, read it, think about where to go next, and go. Write loads of words, spewing out what you had in mind when you were energised into delivering your story to the world.
Be warned that you should not spend days and days planning, plotting and fretting, squeezing all the spontaneity out of your novel — leaving it in unrecognisable dribbles on the floor. Your mind must be freed up to allow flashes of brilliance which can totally change the direction of what you have written. Do not be shy. It is not the complete work, nor is it likely to be anything like that work when you finally decide to publish.
Don’t be too worried about correctness and lose the idea of producing a wonderful story. Commas are there to give someone something to show how smart they are when you begin editing — a long way from this point in time.
Have a quick look over a few ideas to begin the process but, mostly, just have a go. Get started — that is the most important thing to do for your sanity and to get you into something productive. The only way to be a successful writer is to write.
P.S. I’ll just give you two examples, of many, that made me wonder about writing advice. I’ll camouflage it somewhat, so I don’t get flamed, even though I like many of the thoughts in the article. I am just recommending that until you get some idea of what writing a lot of words is like, you cannot choose what suits you.
So, this version of “how to” takes you from picking up your writing gear (it has a spelling error in one of the key words at the 31st word) and hitting “go” — just like the duckling, kayaker or signatory above. Anyway, then follows step 2, step 3, …, and finally, at step 12 we read “Draft one”. Step 12?? Are you kidding? “Draft one” should read “Pick up pen/tablet/laptop and start writing.”
The second example is a list of some of the methods you could use to outline your story.
Here are the steps for how to outline a book:
Use a book outline template
Use a mind map book outline
Simple book outline
Chapter-by-chapter outline
Sketched book outline
Outline with Scrivener
Basic outline
Post-it note outline method
The snowflake method
The skeletal outline
Novel outline template
The reverse outline