Well, Happy New Year and welcome to 2024. For the Word Guardians series, book 4 is in progress and I’ve recently reached a crunch point where the characters know the depth of the problem they’re facing and a plan to hopefully resolve it. Now I’m writing my way towards the next way point now, which is the start of execution of their plan to resolve the problem, but little do they know… yes, there’ll be another twist in store.
For those of you embarking on New Year’s resolutions, good luck. I also thought that for anyone wanting to set out and write a novel I’d share a few things I’ve learnt along the way while writing and publishing my first three Word Guardian series books. I hope the ideas are useful:
Find a low barrier and enjoyable way to start
There’s lots of great advice about researching writing styles and how to plan where your story is set, who the main characters are and what the storyline is. The problemand worry about the right way to write and not getting it wrong, the chances are you’ll never start, or you’ll constrain your own writing process and lose the creativity along the way. I’m not saying that these aren’t valuable, it’s just that to get started, I think it’s better to focus on starting a practice, regular time per week where you do something you enjoy. You can add the rest later once the practice is in place.
I started by just carving out an hour each week and spending that time in front of a laptop and a Word document and just writing. I had a rough plan for the first novel, to about half of the way through and I just started to write. I quickly found that writing took me into a flow state and I enjoyed the process of sitting and telling a story that was playing out in my mind.
Make the writing a sustainable practice
It doesn’t matter how slow you go as long as you do it regularly.
For me an hour a week is my minimum. Sometimes it’s more, occasionally I miss a week because of other family commitments, but the key is to make it a regular practice. I’ve found that the enjoyment of being in a flow state, writing, brings me back to the practice.
Encourage and allow your creativity
For books 2 to 4, I’ve found that I start with a rough plan (a set of way points that I want to hit and a rough idea of what should go in between them) but then I quickly go off piste about a third of the way through. What happens is that I sit down with an idea of the next scene to write and then new ideas come intuitively and the story goes off on a slightly different, but in my opinion always better, direction. I’ve done it enough that I go with it and trust the process. Somehow, I’m guided to bring it all together in the end and it works. It might be different for others but I find that allowing the creativity to flow is what keeps my enjoyment and passion for it high, and with that I’m able to sustain the process.
Now, it’s worth stating that if you compare what I’ve said above with advice from experienced best seller writers, they’ll recommend a lot more upfront planning, plot structure, character design. I’m still learning on these and am open to improving my practice and style. My point here though is that to start, just focus on what you enjoy and how to employ your imagination. Once you become proficient at that you can add in other structure that you find you’re missing.
Don’t set goals
I’ve heard of other writers setting goals of writing 1000 words a day or week or making sure that they write so much before bedtime. That’s great if it motivates you, but it doesn’t work for me because it again starts to become less free and feels as though I’m constraining my creativity. Some weeks I sit down and a scene and the story flows and I make good progress. Other weeks I write something, it doesn’t quite feel right, hasn’t flowed the same way and I might end up re-writing all or part of it. The key is not beating yourself up, and just allowing the process. I do find that practicing being in a flow state is key to good writing sessions, which brings me back again to keeping the practice something you can sustain week in, week out. Don’t set a deadline either, just keep practicing and allow it to define when you reach the end.
Develop your own practice and style
Finally, to caveat all of the above, I write, I publish but I’m not a bestseller (yet), by a long way. However, I consider myself successful in that I’ve been through the process of writing, reviewing, publishing and marketing, a few times.
In my view, the three important things are:
- Figuring out what makes the process enjoyable, fulfilling, satisfying for you, and key to this is:
- Leading with your creativity, so putting as few restraints on this as possible.
- Lastly, and probably most importantly, making the practice sustainable, something that you can come back to week on week and realise that in continuing the practice you’re writing a novel (and not the other way around)!
If the above doesn’t resonate for you, that’s absolutely fine. But please set some time aside and try. As with all things in life, practising enables us to identify what doesn’t work for us and what does.
I wish you the very best in your endeavours.
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