A Leap of Fatih: How To Start A Novel

 My advice to a student was to END IT.

I had a student when I was teaching a creative writing class at ACC ask me how to begin her novel. She kept trying to begin it in different places and it wasn’t working. She’d tried and tried and tried.  She was discouraged. She felt lost. She had never gotten past page three in her novel.

     “Just end it,” I said.

     “It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. 

     “You have to,” I insisted.

     “No really. I’d prefer not to. I’m only nineteen.”

     “You have to.”

     “I could always be a lawyer, ” she said.  “A lot of my friends are going to be lawyers.”

     “You can end it. You’ll feel better.”

     “I don’t want to die.”

     “The book,” I said.

     “What?”

    “End it.”

     The above is a fictional dramatization, of course, because I’m a fiction writer and sometimes it’s just more fun to write the scene you want than what really happened. But the gist is there. Like a lot of writers this writer keeps starting over because she knows the beginning isn’t right and she’s worried about starting in the wrong place. But here ‘s the thing. We mostly start in the wrong place. It might be almost right or it might be very wrong. We can’t know until we write many pages.  And really, whether this happens on the first or second draft, you can’t know until you write the words THE END at the end of the manuscript.

You have to struggle through your first draft, telling yourself again and again that you know that many things are wrong. When you write THE END you suddenly have a destination. Then you can go back and work on all those wrong turns you made. Put content in and take content out. Find your way to the end with points in your story, each moving the story or/and the character forward toward an ending that will seem inevitable to the reader.

It wasn’t. You find it and you make it inevitable by revising plot points and character and sometimes setting. 

So don’t worry about beginning in the right or the wrong place. Begin. Add to that beginning and keep adding to it and when you get to the end you will have a novel. Often my first drafts are short, like maybe 20-30k. They have a beginning and some kind of end though. That’s what I focus on. Then I get down to the work that really matters. 

The truth is if you’re a discovery writer you need that first draft to discover your novel. If you’re an outliner you need to do the work on your outline. Either way starting a novel can feel overwhelming and frightening. Give yourself permission to find your way.

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What I’m up to in my writing life. Writing the final draft of book 2 of the Old Men In Space series, Billy’s and Johnny’s Road Trip To The Hidden Planet. Book 1 is here if you want to take a look: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F66SVMCW

I admit that every time I start a new novel I have that trigger: how will I ever finish this story, where is the beginning taking me, how can I do this? It’s funny that I’ve written over thirty novels and I still have the feeling. It takes a leap of faith. Trust yourself. Just write.

Brian