Hello friends! This weekend I’m thrilled to share one of my most requested topics. Today I’m sharing books, resources and tips for anyone setting out to write their very first novel. Anyone can start a routine. Completing a novel length document is not hard (I think my eleven-year-old daughter could already do it). What I found to be brutally difficult was the process of learning and practicing enough to write a novel I was proud of.
Craft Books. I learned more from craft books than from any course I ever took. This is great news because craft books are like $10 and courses are typically hundreds (or thousands). But the best basic writing education I found was in the pages of writing books. I’m going to recommend my personal top three as well as a bunch that I enjoyed.
Storytelling Basics. I learned so much from Story Genius by Lisa Cron. If you only want to read a book or two I would recommend this one as well as Save The Cat Writes a Novel.
I read Story Genius when I was preparing for my first rewrite and it helped me see stories in a different way. Prior to this I’d taken the advice “write the book you want to read” way too literally and I had hundreds of pages of a meandering story that never really went where I wanted it to go. I resisted books like this because they felt cheesy to me, but I promise you it’s worth it to understand all the basics of storytelling. I recommend this book to everyone. Her method for planning scenes helped me build a stronger story.
What Separates Beginner and Professional Writing? Writing The Breakout Novel by Donald Maass helped me to understand the difference between beginner and published writing. The author is an agent who explains, through dozens of examples, what beginner writing sounds like and what to do instead. I read this book while doing my rewrite last summer and I’d say it helped me more than any other book.
This book explains both storytelling and the writing industry in a way that clicked for me. I also loved it because it was published more than twenty years ago so all the bestsellers he references throughout the chapters are older and a lot of them I hadn’t heard of. I ended up buying 20+ books from Thrift Books based off these lessons.
Write Your Novel From The Middle by James Scott Bell. This book is super short and teaches you how to structure your novel from the mirror moment in the center of the story. It’s a different way to think of outlining that helped me to create more transformation in my character and story.
More Great Books. I loved Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and On Writing by Stephen King (even though most of his advice wasn’t right for me personally). I also loved The Emotional Craft of Fiction and Wired for Story.
OTHER RESOURCES:
Courses. I’ve taken a lot of courses and although there is always something I learned from each one a lot of them are less informative than the books above. The best course I took (which sadly isn’t evergreen) was CeCe Lyra’s course on Interiority and Emotional Acuity. I recommend courses that focus on one skill instead of general writing advice.
Brandon Sanderson has his BYU course on writing Science Fiction and Fantasy on Youtube (you can watch the entire course for free). It’s so fun and I admire Brandon Sanderson as a business icon. He has a lot of great advice and is very active in podcasting as well.
Coaching. The year I wrote my first draft I did coaching. It was a great experience for me. My coach came with a once a month zoom meeting and they would read and critique 10k words. It was worthwhile for me and I enjoyed it. Any writing program that includes coaching or mentoring is worth doing. Don’t ever pass on an opportunity to get your work critiqued by a professional.
Editors. Hiring an editor for a developmental edit or line edit (at the very end of revisions) was a great choice for me. I learned so much from it. A developmental edit is where they read and evaluate your manuscript and suggest improvements you can work on in editing. A line edit is correcting spelling and grammar. I had some great experiences with both and I am also working on becoming a stronger self-editor as I go.
Beta Readers. Similar to editors, beta readers will give ideas and suggestions for how to improve a story, or let you know where it isn’t working. Some of the time beta readers are too nice, but that can happen with editors and coaches too. Most beta reading is done in trade, so if you are willing to read for them they will read for you. It can be free so don’t skip the chance to get as many beta readers as you can.
CONCEPTS THAT HELPED ME:
Learn your strengths and weaknesses: There’s an idea that writers are either talented or not, but I think it’s an unhelpful way to look at your writing (especially for a beginner!). The truth is, talent isn’t that important and even if you have a ton of born talent it has to be honed through practice and critique. Taking the time to learn your personal strengths and weaknesses can help you improve both the things you naturally shine at and gaps in your skills. Be open to the idea that you can always be growing. Embrace your natural talents and turn yourself into a lab-made diamond on the skills you weren’t born with.
Capacity for Zero. The more you are willing to start over, especially in early drafts, the higher your potential becomes. There are people out there who are able to write a clean first draft of a first novel, but those people are rare. More likely, you’ll have some false starts and some writing that makes your skin crawl in the beginning. That’s normal. In fact, if you make yourself cringe it’s a sign you have good taste and potential!
Start over and over and over. Don’t be afraid of a blank page.
Set Pieces. Set pieces are a screenwriting term for those big scenes in a movie. Think of your favorite movie and the iconic scenes probably jump to mind. Scenes like in ET where his bike flies past the moon or in Little Women (2019) when Jo and Laurie have their big scene where he proposes and she rejects him with a sunset in the backdrop. As soon as I learned what a set piece was I looked for them in every movie.
Set pieces happen in novels too and the advice is that these big, emotional moments can happen about every 50 pages. They often combine an iconic setting with an emotional moment. Knowing exactly where your set pieces are will help you spend those prior 50 pages building toward these moments. I like to think of it as a visual outline where the story is always building toward one of these scenes.
Critique & Revision. Receiving critique and starting a new revision are my current favorite parts of writing. I love the process of making the story better. I believe that falling in love with the revision process is one of the best mindset hacks you can have for writing novels.
Let me know if you have any questions and I can possibly to a part 2 at some point.
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