Dreaming of becoming a writer fills quiet moments of people from all walks of society. The visions of what it means for each individual to become a writer are as varied as the stories in all the books held in all the libraries throughout the world. Billions of books. Billions of ideas. How success as a writer is internally gauged is almost as bewildering.

Why not feel good about what you do? Writing is a creative process. Impossible to say otherwise. ‘Creative process’ describes the work of writers and other artists who work their magic in platforms built by the need to express — platforms with scope expanded by imagination. Those two words invoke thoughts of passion, pain and outpouring as artists bring whatever is in their mind to a life of its own.

Writing is a 24/7 activity. You never know when or where inspiration comes to you. Be ready and be prepared for whenever that inspiration arrives. Artists frequently carry a book in which to sketch scenes and outline elements for possible use in future works. They spend time capturing vignettes from their day — small tokens of experience or experiment.

You dream of becoming an author but are stalled at the start, worried about the acceptance of your final product. Sentences chatter and sputter as you try to bring characters to life. Characters who trip and stumble from scene to scene, leaving readers perplexed and bored. Is that what it feels like to you? Time to be realistic.

So, who is going to read your book? Who will form the biggest crowds at your book concert? If you write teen romance, is it worth writing in the language and style that suits someone who reads non-fiction books about car maintenance? No? Why not? Genre boundaries are not clear-cut. However, each genre has a set of norms to guide you. Make sure you know what they are, right up to the fence-line.

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.