Where to Begin Writing a Novel
In the spring semester of my junior year, I enrolled in a creative writing class that focused on generating content for long-term projects, particularly novels. Prior to taking this course, I had never worked on a sustained piece of creative writing for an extended period of time. I gravitated toward short stories or flash fiction because I didn’t know how to approach a longer project, but this course broke down the process into digestible pieces.
Creating an Outline
One of the first assignments for the class was to give a rough outline of the story’s structure. This outline did not have to be incredibly detailed, but it did have to illustrate the general “shape” of the story. With short stories, it’s easy to hold the entirety of the plot in one’s head, and I often approached writing these pieces from a bird’s eye point of view (i.e., I can visualize exactly how many scenes there are and what happens in each one). With longer works like novels, though, this kind of visualization felt impossible. Writing the rough outline gave me an opportunity to conceptualize the key scenes and events that I did have in mind and pinpoint where they would occur in the larger context of the plot. Then, I could fill in the blanks between these scenes as I wrote. Even though I couldn’t hold the entire story in my head, I had an idea of where I wanted to end up, and hitting these concrete milestones kept me motivated to continue writing.
Using a Spreadsheet to Stay Consistent
This class also helped me break down a larger project into more manageable segments by presenting a system of goal-setting and record-keeping to each student. I set a writing goal to write for at least 1-2 hours every Tuesday morning, and at the end of every week, I would fill in an Excel spreadsheet with how many hours I actually wrote. This system helped me stay consistent with my writing because I could visually see the work I completed on a weekly basis. I met my writing goal every week of the semester, writing around 500-750 words every Tuesday morning.
By the end of this course, I had three chapters and 35 pages of a novel to show for my efforts. Although the project was nowhere near being fully completed, I learned how to start and sustain a work of that magnitude—and that knowledge was equivalent in worth to a thousand completed manuscripts.
