From the mailbag, T. asks:
When you write a novel it’s like a boat-load of short stories, with the same characters, and they tie together, right? So how would someone with great ideas get them onto paper if they don’t have the time to sit down and write? Me, for instance.
Hi, T.! That’s awesome that you want to write (a novel or short stories), and that you have some great ideas. You have some very good questions.
Let’s take this one at a time.
1) No, a novel is not really like a boatload of short stories, even if the short stories have all the same characters and are interconnected. Short stories are their own discrete items that exist unto themselves.
This is a short story:
This is a bunch of connected short stories:
This is a novel:
A novel is a great big complex thing that all needs to hold together, so it is a lot harder to do than a short story. At least, for me. I have friends who would much rather write a novel than a short story, because then the get to put all those flowers and such together, whereas their short story would topple over under the weight and actually not exist as the bite-sized confection it ought to be. They have different needs, novels and short stories.
But if it’s easier for you to think in terms of writing small things rather than big things, then do so. Because that wedding cake up there? Was decorated one flower at a time. The first time I wrote a novel, I was very scared that I wouldn’t be able to finish it, even though it was going to be a very short (60,000) word novel.
(I say “short” now. At the time when the most I’d ever written was a 25 page college thesis, that seemed enormous. But now I’ve written 120,000 word novels, so 60k seems like nothing by comparison.)
How did I do it? See below:
2) Novels are not written in days or weeks or even, necessarily, in months. Some people take years. There are novels that I have been working on for years.
The first time I wrote a novel, I told myself that all I had to do was write one page every day. That’s it. Just one. If the page had a lot of dialogue, so much the better. And I made myself a deal. I really, really wanted to join a writing organization, but the dues were $100, which was an enormous amount of money for a poor, underemployed college graduate living in New York City. So I told myself if I finished writing a book, a whole book, then I had proved that I was serious enough about this writing thing to deserve to spend the money on that organization.
Maybe your “carrot” is something different. Maybe you just want to prove to yourself that you can do it. All you have to do is write one page a day. At the end of the year, you’ll have a whole book.
Don’t tell me you don’t have time. You have time to write one page a day. When I did this, when I first graduated from college, I had two jobs plus I was trying to get freelance work from newspapers. Set your alarm clock for 20 minutes early. Choose not to watch TV in the evening. Use your lunch period not to talk to friends, but to go sit somewhere quiet and write while you eat your sandwich.You have to make sacrifices.
If you don’t have time for that, then no, you can’t write a novel. There were periods in my life when I didn’t have time for that. When I had a newborn baby, for example. Maybe you’re going through a time like that. Maybe you’re caring for an ailing parent, or currently in combat, or working four jobs to keep a roof over your head, or you’re on a reality TV show that requires twenty-four hour surveillance, or you’re in a coma in the hospital. That’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up.
One page a day is 250 words. If you can do that even five times a week, by the end of the year you’ll have over 65,000 words. That’s a novel. You’re done. If you’re writing a long novel, well, bump it up to 7 days a week, or do it for 18 months.
Using this method (and, I’ll be honest, some cramming) I have written TWELVE novels, SIX short stories, FOUR longform non-fiction essays, half a dozen unfinished novels and proposals, four newspaper features, dozens upon dozens of food reviews, and hundreds of blog posts since 2002. And I’m lazy. I know a lot of people who have done like five times that much.
So if I can do it, so can you.
This year, I’m doing NaNoWriMo, which is a fun project in which I promise to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s not going to happen. But I’ll have fun trying. The last time I did NaNo, I did 10k in a week, and then had to put it aside to work on another project. But that’s 10k I didn’t have before.
But you don’t have to do it like that. Start with asmall goal. One page a day. You can do it!
