You have decided to give the writing journey a shot. Great decision. Apart from worrying about perfection before you start — please do not do that — you need to work on any way possible to maintain the momentum of your writing once you begin. Especially in the early stages.

If your novel is in production, you want to spend as much of your valuable time on it as you possibly can. Distractions must be dealt with swiftly, and binned. As you write, you will find scenes and characters and plots trying to persuade you to include them in your action. They want to become embedded in your current writing. Recognize when they have a rightful claim and when they should be placed on hold for a future work.

A recent blog suggested we can sometimes become distracted by all manner of wonderful advice on how to start writing a novel. The volume and wildly varying quality of material advising aspiring authors can be overwhelming. Where to start? Where does the best advice hide out?

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.

Today we will explore ways to expand the scene you have already written and begin to think of strategies to integrate it into what will become your novel. These are a few suggestions designed to get your creative drive flowing. The number of stratagems available to you will increase as the volume of the work expands. Please don’t think that what we mess about with today are the only solutions. There are as many as you can imagine. Therefore, no limits.

Imagine writing a whole scene and then discovering a building should be on the other side of the street because your characters could not move around it to create the suspense you were looking for. It changes so many relationships. At this stage, that would be easy. As a writer you can move mountains, rivers, time, but it must all end up as a smooth-flowing storyscape.

We finished our last session with valuable notes that we are going to use to get started on your novel. I hope you are as excited as I am. The next few sessions are going to be intense and full of opportunity for you to see just how good an author you are. Fabulous. Let’s get on then.

Are you stuck on the first line? Have you googled all manner of tips about writing? Did they make you start your work with enlightened enthusiasm, or just shake your head in frustration?

Fiction bulges with characters. Some fleeting glimpses, some holding our attention for pages. They wander and, at times, race between the lines gluing scenes together — constructing a world of your design, piece by piece.

I have been a writer ever since I used poop to create a brilliant poem on the wall. Few understood it, fewer read it, and no one was looking forward to the next piece. But now, now I have transitioned away from writer. Now I am an author, and what a change that makes. Weird and wonderful.