How to Keep Writing

Ever since I was a kid, I liked to write. My favorite classes in school were English or anything to do with Social Studies. Writing assignments, especially, gave me a rush of excitement. I still have a lot of those assignments stored away for nostalgia's sake.

When I was around fourteen or fifteen, I made my first attempt at writing a full-length fantasy novel.

And...

I lost about 5,000 words of progress, which was about a third of my work. After that, I sort of gave up my endeavor.

However, I wrote shorter stories and poems throughout my time in high school, and spent a lot of my time on Wattpad before it became overridden with ads. I took creative writing classes and joined clubs. Through it all, the desire to write a novel of my own never left.

Writing a novel takes a lot of planning and discipline, and I tend to avoid both of those things, preferring to just go with the flow. That may work in doing fun things with friends on a free Saturday, but it doesn't work when you're trying to write, edit, and publish a minimum of 100,000 words.

I've started another novel-writing attempt. Here's what I learned so far in my journey!

Find the Plot

The first thing I learned was that I would quickly become burned out when I didn't know the direction of my story.

I can recall many different times where I would start writing with no direction or no basic plan for the beginning, middle, and end of my story. I might make it three or four chapters, only to find that I didn't know where to go next. However, I was notoriously averse to outlining, thinking that I would stop my creative juices from flowing.

The fact of the matter is, many writers take a solid amount of time to plan their story before even writing!

I started out by following the Three Act Structure, one of several ways to plan out the plot of a novel.

This time around, I took several weeks of just writing out my ideas and figuring out at least the basic skeleton of my story before starting my rough draft. I didn't make a complete plot outline with all of the events that would happen. That let me have freedom to let the story move where it wanted to while have a little roadmap.

Research, but not too much

Another trap I almost fell into was the research and world building trap. I don't want to go into what my story is about until the draft is almost finished, but it takes place in a fantasy setting. So, my desire was to develop all of the lore surrounding the characters and the world, and all that good stuff.

I have pages in notebooks and a bunch of notes I've made on my phone about just the world, its creatures, its history, and even several versions of maps. It's all really fun stuff, but I learned that there's a point where I have to just write the story or it will just keep sitting in a blank word document.

It was hard to let go of the world building things, but I discovered that a lot of the lore has just come to me as a write. All I have to do is make sure I keep track of it so I don't run into plot holes!

Don't Edit (Until Later)

As a recovering perfectionist, I've had to learn that I shouldn't edit. At least, not until my rough draft is finished. It's not because my work is good, necessarily, but the first draft is where you get down all of the plot holes, grammar mistakes, and messiness onto the pages.

This part is the most difficult for me, because I hate knowing that I probably made a mistake somewhere in my manuscript. In fact, there's probably at least three mistakes on each page. I want to go back and find each and every one of them so I can make the writing as perfect as possible.

However, I also know that if I focus too much on editing before the draft is finished, it'll take me forever to even finish my story. The rough draft is where you put on the training wheels. Editing is where I really learn how to grow my endurance.

After all, in the editing phase of writing, the story is ripped apart and put back together again, sometimes looking completely different from what it looked like in the beginning.

But, I can't find it in myself to be worried about it. In fact, I'm excited to edit because that means I've gotten to a point where I have a strong foundation point!

Conclusion

Writing is a skill that takes years for people to master, and I'm far from being an expert in this craft. Many bestselling authors have taken decades to write bestselling books. So, it's safe to say that I have a long road ahead of me. Yet, as I practice every day, I gain more confidence in my ability to reach my goal, and I learn to enjoy the process along the way.