10 Tips to Help You Finish Writing Your Novel
BY ANN ROSCOPF ALLEN
1. Set aside a time to write and keep it sacred.
Make this a time when you know
you are at your best and feel most creative — Saturday
mornings, late at night, whatever works for you. Make writing
a priority and arrange other parts of your schedule around it.
2. Remove all distractions while you
write.
Turn off the television. Don't
answer the phone. You may need to set your writing time at a
time when no one else is around to help you avoid being
distracted.
3. Outline your plot.
Know generally where you want
your story to go. Sometimes stories and characters develop in
unexpected ways, and you need to allow for that. But keep your
guiding plan in mind.
4. Avoid the intimidation of a blank
computer screen.
Just start writing. Try
freewriting about the plot of the story or a character to get
"the flow" started. Begin a dialogue between two characters
and see where your flow takes you. Sometimes that ends up in
an embarrassingly bad scene, but that bad scene may just have
the seeds of something a lot better in it. Once you've got
something written, you can always improve it, but you have to
get something, anything, written first.
5. Keep a draft mentality.
Nothing you write has to be
permanent. Everything can change. If you get into a good flow
and there's a word that you just can't think of, don't
interrupt the flow by pondering over the word or going to the
thesaurus. Leave a blank space and keep writing. There will
always be time to go back and look up that word. At this
stage, spelling and grammar don't matter; just write and
create.
6. Don't feel compelled to begin at
the beginning.
You don't have to write your
story in chronological order during the drafting phase,
especially if you know the main events you want your novel to
cover. Work on the chapter you feel like working on. The first
sentence and the first chapter will probably require the most
work, so don't get frustrated by trying to get them perfect
before you write anything else.
7. Organize your files, especially if
you are not going to write in order.
Create a different file for
each chapter you write. That way you can dip in and fool
around with a few words or draft a scene and then save it,
close it up, and move on to a different section of the story.
When you can easily work on what you want, you are also
preventing writer's block.
8. Revise, revise, revise.
Someone once said, "Writing is
revising." Change and polish and delete and rearrange and
change some more until you like the sound of the words. Often
the best way to revise a sentence is to delete it.
9. Don't be afraid of putting yourself
out there.
Make a list of writers who
have written mediocre books (the incentive: "If HE can do it,
so can I.") Be emboldened by writers whose works don't impress
you much. The only thing they have over you is their
persistence. There will always be critics, but you have to
separate the wheat from the chaff: some people's criticism
means something; most people's criticism is just so much
noise. People keep writing novels despite the criticism. You
might as well be one of them.
10. Only you can determine when you
are finished.
Show your writing to a trusted
friend, preferably one who knows about writing. Friends are
likely to tell you how wonderful your novel is, as friends
will do, and this of course is not helpful at all. Read
between the lines of their compliments. Ultimately, you have
to be the judge of your own writing.
Make up your mind to finish
your novel, and you can do it. The only thing standing in the
way is you.
Ann Roscopf Allen is a college
writing instructor and the author of the historical novel
A Serpent Cherished, based on the true story of an 1891
Memphis murder. Visit
her website.
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