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Writing A Novel - A Beginner's Guide
No one is born a novelist. But almost anyone who has the desire and passion can write a novel. As with any craft, writing a novel requires an understanding of the rules (which you're free to break once you understand what you're doing) and a good imagination. Think of drawing, or painting, even creative cooking. It's an art. It should be enjoyed. It should be liberating. What can make it difficult isn't the writing but how the process of writing is perceived. If you see it as a difficult task requiring super human effort and secret knowledge ... well, you're going to find the process nearly impossible. If you relax, enjoy yourself and learn as you go, you're not only going to have fun, you're going to have a novel when you're done. The first key to writing a novel is exercising your innate ability to imagine. Think back to when you were little and everything was an adventure in imagination. If you're a girl, you probably played house; a boy probably imagined himself as a super hero. There were no limitations. You could be anyone you wanted, do anything you wanted. Writing a novel is imagination put into words. You close your eyes and let your thoughts drift while creating a web of consequential ideas, then you put them on paper. The second key to writing is formulating the premise of your novel. This is basically a rough idea of what your novel will be about. It should be anchored in character. A man wakes up one morning to discover he no longer has legs. Not bad, but you want to explore the character a little further. If he were a world champion sprinter that would be a completely different story from one that was about a computer geek working on artificial intelligence. So your premise involves and idea plus a character.   If you want to become a novelist, a good one, and you’re not sure what you must to do to develop the skills you need, Andrea Rains Waggener wants to help you. A novelist who sold her first novel for a nice advance to one of the biggest publishers in the world, Bantam Dell, Andrea Rains Waggener has created a plan that makes it easy to go from novel idea to completed, publishable novel. The third key is getting all your spontaneous ideas on paper. This is a stream of consciousness process, a brainstorming process, however you want to refer to it. This is a session where you allow all your ideas, no matter how crazy or preposterous their place on the drawing board. There's no forcing in this process. There's no rejecting of ideas or characters or scenes. Everything has value at this stage. It should be fun, liberating, spontaneous, Next, organize all the ideas you've come up. Put scenes in a squence. Put characters in a character file and work on an arc (how they'll change from the beginning to the end of the novel) for each of them. Make notes for your settings and dialogue and structure. Again, this should be fun. You can't make any mistakes here. You're just toying with your idea, introducing yourself to your characters, fleshing out your original vision. Once you're comfortable with the premise, your main characters, and your rough notes, give it a shot. Write the first page of your novel. Call up that imagination that gave you the idea in the first place and run with it. No stopping. No over thinking. No editing. Just write a complete page. That's about 250 to 300 words. Let them flow. When you finish that page, do it again. When page two is done, do it again. Make every page an adventure. Laugh out loud. Cry at the tragedies you create. Feel the knot in your stomach when the tension is at its highest. Live your story and don't let writing a novel intimidate you for a moment!
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