Let's see ... do I have a long and rambling preamble for this section? No, not really. This is just some general advice I give to aspiring writers before they ever start their story. If you are reading this as a school assignment, aren't I a benevolent millstone tied around your neck?
Write two novels.
When beginning writers are stuck on a project and don't know how to move forward, the best piece of advice I can possibly give is to write two novels. This is challenging, especially for how unfulfilling it is to do all the work involved with writing and redrafting a novel, only to, like Sisyphus, have to start again when you are done. However, nothing improves the quality of your revisions quite like working on something else. Your brain disengages from the work you were obsessing over, you feel more free to experiment with your writing style, you enact and improve upon the things you learned the first time, your subconscious brain loses its focus on blinding you to the mistakes of your first novel. I will talk about this topic in depth later in this guide, but I must reinforce here how drastic your improvements and ability to learn the craft will be when you bounce between two projects. This is especially necessary if you have not yet found someone to test-read your work. When you are finished with completely writing your second novel, you will go back to your first one with amazement at all the problems you hadn't seen before. Rewriting will be tremendously easier and incidentally make you more able to delete things that aren't working.
Keep all your old drafts.
Again, I'll speak more about this in the future, but you should keep all previous drafts from your work. This is for two key reasons. The first, is that keeping a record will make you feel freer to edit and experiment with your work as you redraft. After all, if you end up regretting a change, you can always go back and just use what you had before (I guarentee that you won't actually do it but having the option available to you will be empowering). I can't tell you how many aspiring writers I've met who have been terrified by the delete button and the potential of future regret from losing work. This nips that problem right in the bud.
The second reason to keep old drafts is that it creates a record for others who wish to learn how to write. When you eventually want to teach your methods and how you learned to be a proficient writer, you can directly show someone the steps you took by simply presenting them with all your old work. It will potentially become an invaluable learning tool for other writers. Honestly, it's also sometimes a useful tool to inspire yourself. After all there's nothing that increases a realistic hope in your own potential quite like seeing how far you've already come.
Don't seek out criticism until you have a complete phase you cannot move beyond.
One of the most disheartening things for a critic is to give advice that is not needed. It takes time and energy to give a good critique. This fact is often lost on novice writers who often see the finished critique and then mention something dismissive like, "Yeah, I already knew that was a problem." If you know something is a problem, fix it before you send it to a test-reader. This is for their sake as much as yours. Not only does it frustrate a test-reader and make them less likely to help you out in the future, but it cripples the quality of the feedback you will get.
Criticism functions in layers, both in importance and visibility. A test-reader is not going to give you detailed feedback on your plot if they don't understand what is going on because your descriptions, dialogue, and grammar are so bad. Even if they were willing to do the extra work involved in deciphering your unpolished text, they may not be capable of understanding everything you've failingly worked into your story. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes, such mistakes and critic pitfalls are a necessary and unavoidable problem. You may not yet be capable of writing good sentences, which is totally okay. Everybody starts somewhere. And if a critic has helped you even with your grammar or spelling, then their help has been for something! The problem comes when you could have done better but waste everyone's time because you were too impatient to do the tedious work of making everything in your story the best it can be before you hand it over. So wait to send out your work for test-reading until after you reach a point where you don't know how to improve.
Ask your test-readers for criticism appropriate to your Drafting Phase.
Another way of cutting out test-reader frustration and maximizing the feedback you get is to ask for specific feedback appropriate to your draft. This isn't fool-proof and it does not invalidate the previous point about only sending out a work when it is at your personal best. Test-readers will still be blinded by sloppy text, and they may likely still fixate on problems you don't yet need feedback for. However, asking for specific feedback may maximize your relationship with your test-reader and the quality of their feedback.
For example, if you are only through your first draft, you may still have giant problems with your characters and plot that you don't know how to resolve. So you can tell you test-reader, "Hey, I know I have a lot of work ahead with flow and dialogue, and I'll be happy to get any pointers you can give me for those. However, I really don't know if my character is reacting believably to the zombies eating his family. Could you tell me what you think about that issue as you make your way through?" Asking these sorts of specific questions, combined with a story that is already the best you can make it, will help to direct the feedback you get so that you can best improve the parts of your story you are focused on.
Upload your story to a cloud.
No, I don't want to hear it. No hacker is going to rifle through your computer to find your story and your porn history to send to your mom and priest. Nobody is going to steal it. Nobody is going to go through the trouble of redrafting your crappy first draft, before you're even mature enough of a writer to know that your story ideas don't fucking matter to anyone. What is going to happen is that your story that you uploaded to a website only is going to get banned and removed from existence. You are going to lose that flashdrive. Your computer is going to fry, with none of the data being retrievable. Your house will go up in flames along with all the physical manuscripts within. Upload your story to one or even multiple cloud data services and make sure you can access them via multiple devices. I don't like to victim blame, but failing to do this is almost asking for tragedy and the loss of your story. It's a tragedy I've heard a thousand times—one that more than one aspiring writer has blamed for their lack of motivation to write again—and I will not abide it happening to another if I can help it. UPLOAD. YOUR. STORY. TO. THE. CLOUD. Or email it to yourself. And don't fucking write on a typewrite, you pretentious, coffee shop, hipster twat.
Write-a-Novel Exercise 1.whothefuckcares
Write in the comments, on a piece of paper, or on your forehead with a sharpie, "I will stop being a little bitch and upload my story to a cloud."
YOU ARE READING
Anybody Can Write a Novel
Non-FictionMy journey through writing and the lessons I learned by which anybody who truly wants to can begin learning the craft. Note that this guide has daily exercises. By finishing them all, you will have completed writing an entire novel.
