During the four long years I spent writing my first novel, A Propper Man, I learned the importance of craft and routine in managing both the work and the worry.

If you’re wondering how to start writing a book, these strategies could help you meet your goals with less stress and fewer struggles. The thoughts on craft help form a plan of attack for completing your daily work, while those focused on the routine and ruminations about the writing life help you put that plan into practice and find the will to finish.

Craft tips for writing your first novel

Although the idea of craft can seem like a witch’s brew when applied to fiction, it’s no magical thing.

Sure, there are elements of fiction that are useful weapons for your arsenal, as well as tried and true storytelling methods that are helpful to know about. Mostly, though, the craft of fiction is composed of relentless practice and process: the stumbling, mealy-mouthed verbosity of beginning and ending and revising that you must apply repeatedly, ad-infinitum.

As a writing professor once explained on the first day of class, “I’m going to dump out my toolbox here on the floor. Take everything you need — but know you might not need everything.” Below are a few to consider.

1. Have a roadmap

The word “outline” is a polarizing one for fiction writers. We all know about this structure, but depending on our experience and mindset, we either love or loathe it.

Whatever opinion you have about outlines, it does help to have some sort of map or outline for where you’re going, even if you only know the approximate route and have a few key landmarks scribbled on a bar napkin. As E.L. Doctorow famously said, “Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I experimented with four different outline systems before abandoning them altogether in favor of building my own. I used notecards that each held a simple statement about the action that occurred in each scene, then taped each card in chronological order to a whiteboard in front of my desk. If I needed to replace a scene, add one, or move a few around, it took seconds. And when I lost my way, I only had to look up to my roadmap. From there, I moved to a more detailed scene-level outline that helped me to structure the cause and effect that advanced each scene and the story as a whole.

It took time to find an approach that worked. I prefer analog, but you might feel more comfortable with a digital tool like Scrivener.

Experiment to find what works for you and then modify it to align with your approach to storybuilding. But have a map — even at night, you may need to pull over and refer to it now and again.

2. Consider the importance of conflict and stakes

Among Kurt Vonnegut’s eight tips on how to write a great story is this gem: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

What makes a story truly compelling is how that character goes about getting it. What stands in his way, and how will he overcome those impediments? One of your tasks as a storyteller is to manipulate your character in such a way that the journey feels worthwhile for the reader — even if all that character wants is a glass of water. Fundamental to this reader buy-in are the elements of conflict and stakes.

In literature, conflict is an inherent incompatibility between the objectives of two or more characters or forces. Conflict creates tension and interest in a story by adding doubt as to the outcome.

Be clear about your conflict: how the setting, other characters, or even local and global events slam into your character’s desire to get what he wants. When conflict is clear, you help the reader better understand what drives your character’s motivation.

Stakes show the reader what happens if your character doesn’t get what he wants after the altercation with conflict. Have some fun raising the stakes to force your character to take action that might be abnormally, even fantastically, out of character.

Consider this scenario: A man sits on the highway twenty-five cars back from a slow-moving roadblock on the interstate, thirty minutes from his home. He could be stuck there an hour, maybe longer. With low stakes, he’s annoyed because he might miss the first quarter of Monday Night Football. So he flips on the radio, checks his smartphone and ekes along in line.

Now, what happens if the man receives a message that his young son is mortally wounded, and he’s the only one who can reach him in time to save his life? Suddenly, he’s offroading into the median, blowing past the roadblock and racing toward his house at 100 mph with police cruisers in hot pursuit.

High stakes change motivation and put your characters in interesting situations you didn’t initially imagine, which results in compelling, page-turning fiction.

3. Maintain measured scene beats: Your novel’s heartbeats

Scene beats, or micro-tension, make up the dramatic action that propels a story forward. In his Wonderbook, Jeff Vandermeer calls them “micro-cycles of ebb and flow, progress and setback playing out within a scene.”

I wrote four versions of my novel before I finally pegged its current course. The challenge? I wrote a collection of disparate and at times tangentially-related scenes. In a vacuum, these scenes were fine, but when woven into a tapestry of scenes and chapters, many of them fell flat. The setting, the dialogue and the characters didn’t exhibit enough micro-tension to move the story forward.

While most readers won’t identify that your scene is missing a beat, they’ll likely feel it in the way their minds drift as they consider turning another page or picking up their smartphones to check the latest Buzzfeed list.

Be sure to analyze the beats — the cause and effect — to maintain a measured progression of the scene’s shifts in emotional tone. Make sure they build upon one another. The character enters the room thinking one thing is going to happen, only to find something else. As he realizes this, it’s a beat. Or, the character is investigating a mystery, and discovers something shocking that changes the purpose of her quest. How she feels about that discovery, in that moment, is another beat.

If you’re struggling with a scene and you can’t quite figure out what’s wrong, lay out the beats on the page. After each beat is a decision: open the door or pretend you’re not home; get in the car or call a cab; take the blue pill or grab the red pill. What does your character choose, and how does that choice affect her? Once on the beats are laid out, you’ll be able to see where the scene is lagging — likely, where it lacks stark emotional shifts.

4. Approach the revision process with passes, not drafts

Drafts are hulking, beastly things. They sit in the corner and sulk as you plod through, page by page, trying to do everything at once to reach the Second Draft.

Instead of looking at your revision process in terms of drafts or versions, think of passes. Passes are lighter, more jovial folks. They allow you the freedom to consider elements of revision and to move more quickly through the process, like a painter adding layers of color to a painting that is not fully realized.

One pass might be for research, another few for character development and continuity; perhaps you add one pass each for setting, tone, and consistency of speech. Editing and re-editing the same copy repeatedly can seem Sisyphean — and eventually leads to unproductive tinkering.

Identifying the passes necessary to finish your project, then remaining disciplined as you move through each pass, makes the revision process seem less arduous.

Routine: It’s essential to writing your first novel

Once you have the right tools and you know what you’re going to build, how do you go about doing it? That’s where a sound personal approach to the psychology and routine of fiction becomes crucial.

You first build a novel in your head, so it’s important to ensure it’s a safe and productive place to work.

5. Recognize and overcome resistance

In his fabulous book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield focuses on resistance as a primary culprit in avoiding creation. The forms of resistance are myriad and highly personal.

For me, the usual suspects were errands, cleaning and looking for “legitimate” jobs online. I ate up hours, even entire days, resisting the process of putting words on the page, until I was honest with myself about how I resisted writing. I kept a list and acknowledged my modes of resistance each time they popped up.

What modes of resistance do you fall victim to on those days when writing doesn’t feel fun? Write them down on big piece of paper and hang it over your desk. In time and with practice, when you recognize resistance, you’ll stop what you’re doing and return to work. Your ability to overcome resistance is fundamental to establishing a routine.

Maintaining that routine is often the only thing that will help you through the pits of despair in the middle of your novel, when the fun has drained from your writing and you’re left with the ditch-digging required to finish the project.

6. Write to a word count

Time and writing are strange bedfellows. Who is to say how long it should take to finish a story? But we all face a simple truth: You can’t write a novel if you don’t put words down on the page.

Writing 100,000 words takes time, discipline and some semblance of an organized routine. Each writer approaches this process in their own way, but my routine involves a commitment to a daily word count rather than a time block. Writing to a word count rids me of the pressure of feeling constantly short on time.

Some days, a thousand words takes me forty-five minutes. On others, I might stretch three writing sessions out across several hours: at the coffee shop, at home while making dinner and waiting for the rice to cook, and sitting up in bed for a few minutes after I finish reading. Looking back, I won’t remember the amount of time each session required, only that I hit my word mark.

Set your own word count and make it achievable. Is five hundred words all you can manage? Great! Shoot for that mark and hit it. Then stop. Don’t edit, don’t ponder, just go and when your hand or fingers need a break, tally up the words. My guess is you’ll find you have written more than your daily target.

If you’re inspired to write more words, do so. But give yourself the opportunity to stop. And when you stop, think for a moment about what you’ve accomplished, and how it felt. Learn to finish. Now do it every day, forever… until you need a cheat day.

While we’re on the subject, check out our guide to the ideal word counts for novels and other books.

7. Have a cheat day

Dieting is a dirty word, but I love the concept of a cheat day: the one day each week when you eat anything you want and refuse to feel guilty about it.

Sure, we all want to be perfect adherents to the dogma that writing every day is the only way to improve, but sometimes life just gets in the way. And that’s okay. You may have kids, or kids and a crazy job — or all the above, plus a house with a yard. If you can make time for writing, great, but if you can’t, allow yourself one day where you don’t judge your perceived lack of productivity.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle posits that the mere act of observing something ultimately changes that which is being observed. So stop focusing on the days you don’t write. Look away. In time, you may find removing guilt from the process, focusing your attention elsewhere, makes it easier to commit to a routine. Funny how that happens.

8. Learn to separate fact from fiction when dealing with fear and doubt

Fear and doubt are perhaps the most damaging forms of resistance; they’ve likely prevented more art from reaching humanity than any other form of artistic oppression.

When you’re experiencing fear and doubt, take a moment to separate fact from fiction. Break apart those things you know as fact; “writing is hard,” “finishing a novel requires that I write a lot of words,” “publishing is complicated,” from the fiction: “no one will ever read about what I write,” “writing is a waste of time and effort,” and “I have no talent.”

This is a key practice of mindfulness and it merely requires that we actively recognize and compartmentalize thoughts. We all tell ourselves various fictions about creating art. The key difference between those who persevere and those who quit is the ability to recognize the fallacy of subjective thought, and power on through despite it. To paraphrase Seth Godin: the question is not how to get rid of fear, it’s how to dance with fear.

Putting this all into practice

The truth of the matter is that there isn’t any one recipe for creating great fiction. If it works, it works. The old saying about methods and madness is true: no matter how crazy or esoteric an artist’s routine, there is almost always a method present. Building your own is crucial.

If you’re like me, you find little joy in finishing a novel; you want to finish a great novel. You also want the next novel to be even better. Crucial to this process is understanding yourself: your your innate abilities, and those that require more work and practice.

Listen to and record what you learn from your writing projects. Take from your writing the lessons that teach you as much about yourself as they do about your craft. In time, and with hard work and faith, this discipline will help you finish the personal masterwork you’ve always dreamed of creating. You will build the method behind the perceived madness of your creative process, and the work emanating from it.

Have you written a novel or other fiction project? Do any of these lessons resonate with you?

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via franz12 / Shutterstock 

Among your best friends for harnessing the power of momentum is to cultivate urgency in your fiction: leaving the reader with the feeling they must read what you’ve written.

A lot of writers have great ideas, beautiful prose, or stunning scenes; perhaps smart dialogue comes as natural to them as breathing.

But ultimately, how you bind these pieces of craft together to advance your idea is what separates memorable stories from those that fade into the background.

Cultivating urgency

First off, let’s dispel the common misconception that urgency is always a function of pace, and a force unique only to thrillers. Both are just malarkey. Urgency is about creating a feeling in the reader that they must read your work now. Its presence says to the reader that the story is important enough, enjoyable enough, and immersive enough to give them an excuse to drop whatever they’re doing to read it — and not stop until they’ve turned the final page, loaded up Amazon, and pre-ordered your next book.

And, like any aspect of fiction-writing craft, urgency is something you can learn to use. Dial it up or down depending on the type of story, or genre in which you’re telling it.

As you’re considering your story from the outset, or returning to it in revision, here are a few steps that may help cultivate your story’s urgency.

1. Ensure your character wants something

Simple, right? Humans usually want stuff, whether it is a sandwich, or to stop an impending apocalyptic collision with an asteroid.

Whatever it is, make sure it’s crystal clear to the reader early in the story.

2. Put something in the way of them achieving it

Pursuit of the sandwich or stopping the asteroid can be infinitely interesting depending on what stands in the way of your character getting what they want.

Throw some stuff in front of your character — vindictive butchers, clandestine government agencies — to make their pursuit more complicated, or their journey more interesting.

3. Make it painful for the character to not get what they want, and make it matter

The math of your character’s stakes has to tally up, so work hard to ensure the reasons and potential fallout are compelling enough to keep the reader interested.

4. Make your character’s backstory and exposition work for a living

Again, urgency doesn’t always mean action.

Sometimes, it’s good to slow down and offer some context for the tale you’re telling. Backstory and exposition shouldn’t just be there to hang out on your couch, eat your food and watch your cable.

Exposition and backstory are typically where we receive information dumps from authors. This is detail below the iceberg the author may need to write the story, but that ultimately gets in the way of the reader connecting to it.

Keep your head, and your prose, above the water line.

5. Treat your setting like a character

Think of how your setting is not merely just a collection of artfully described details, but also an active player in your character’s journey.

Each individual detail, along with its location, can affect what happens; and can ease or complicate your character obtaining what they want.

If a setting has its own desire, its own complications of achieving those desires, and its own stakes, it can help you choose the details you share — and ultimately enrich the story world you’re creating.

6. Avoid entropy

Easier said than done, but keeping the reader’s interest alive should be among your primary objectives.

Stories have arcs, we all know that. And we’ve seen it on charts and infographics a bazillion times.

But there are individual arcs, or beats, that make up a scene’s microtension: the molecules of your story’s universe forming blocks of momentum and urgency. Where momentum slows, everything around it, including your beautiful writing, starts to die.

If you’re slowing your story down, be sure you do so for a specific reason, such as changing characters and character POVs, locations, or merely to give the reader pause to catch their breath.

But don’t let entropy seize control of the stick, because as urgency slows and the reader’s eyes get heavy, it will plunge all your work directly into the mountainside.

Cultivating urgency in fiction takes practice. It’s not always something you can recognize — or that you should obsess over when you’re writing.

But when planning new scenes, outlining, or revising those sections not quite delivering the impact you’d hoped with readers, dialing into the elements above can drastically improve your drafts.

How do you keep readers interested in your work throughout their experience?

In this, Kevin Spacey’s quote from The Usual Suspects (originally from Charles Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler and paraphrased in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters) is remarkably apt:

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

So how do all we author-devils go about convincing our readers we don’t exist?

After analyzing all 71 individual scenes in the latest draft of my novel, I discovered one common problem: my authorial presence on the page created barriers between the action and the reader. I needed to get out of the way.

Narrowing in revealed three main areas where my footprints on the page depressed the action. I had created a protagonist I really liked, but who was one–dimensional; I was filtering the action in my descriptions; and I was oversharing irrelevant setting and description details.

Developing solutions to each challenge tightened my scenes and helped build a closer connection to the conflict playing out across the narrative. Here’s how I did it:

1. Issue: A one-dimensional, likable protagonist

When I’m reading a novel and I encounter a one-dimensional protagonist, it’s like I’ve sat down in a poorly made chair. I immediately wonder, “Who made this?” If a reader asks that question of a story, the author may not have done enough work to create a character independent of themselves and let the reader experience the tale without wondering how it was made.

Great stories seem organic, as though the author channeled them, rather than created them. The writing can be brilliant, and the reader will notice the beauty in the construction of sentences and paragraphs, but what they absolutely shouldn’t notice are clunky story mechanics, including poorly realized characters. These reveal a sort of clumsiness — and clumsiness draws the author out into the open.

[bctt tweet=”Great stories seem organic, as though the author channeled them, rather than created them. “]

It’s tough to give your hero faults and flaws: vanity, an ego, even dark, criminal impulses. If you do, how can he or she possibly remain a good protagonist? Aren’t all our heroes free of vice?

The most believable heroes are people not too different from us, with all the complexities and challenges we face each and every day. A great story, in which your protagonist achieves great things, is all the more satisfying when that character reaches her goal despite the challenges of her situation and setbacks that real or perceived imperfections cause. As David Corbett says in his epic The Art of Character:

“Its far more important that we empathize with a character than like her, which is just as true of villains as heroes. And empathy is created by a well-drawn character taking on a convincing dramatic problem, in which compelling wants are at stake in the face of potentially overwhelming opposition. We feel for such a character, even if she is imperfect, for we all understand that necessity compels us to act as we must, not as we should.”

Our characters acting as they must — and not as they should — is a hallmark of separation from the author. It is the antithesis of contrivance because, as protagonists become believable individuals — with warts and all — they tend to make decisions that reflect their many varied facets.

Solution: Give your protagonist flaws

Learn to cultivate flaws in your protagonists. Collect and log them. If you don’t know where to begin, gather inspiration on key character flaws, and learn why your character needs them. We like flaws because they make our characters vulnerable and allow us to empathize with them — precisely because they are not perfect, because they are like us.

My protagonist, Duncan, had many likeable qualities in my first draft. He was well-intentioned, moral and without vice; a victim but rarely a predator. And, over the course of the book, while he dealt with certain troublesome episodes, nothing forced him to change. His flaws were in no way tied to the obstacles blocking him from achieving his goals. He was without reproach; in other words, boring.

In my rewrite, I peppered Duncan with flaws. I wrote about what might shame or embarrass him. I flung at him snobbery, pedantry and annoying idiosyncrasies. I applied these flaws to specific scenes to see how they would change his decisions — and noticed an immediate and remarkable positive effect.

Suddenly, Duncan was making his own choices, rather than me making them for him. He began acting as he must, not as he should — and in doing so gained an important separation from my undue influence.

2. Issue: Filtering the action and description

Certain words filter the action from the point-of-view character to the reader. They disrupt your story’s flow by creating distance between the reader and the action on the page.

These filter words riddled my first pass with such interruptions. In fact, here are just a few from my finished first draft, in order of their egregiousness:

to look: 300

to think:  111

to see: 91

to hear: 66

to feel (or feel like):  51

to seem: 50

to realize:  13

to wonder:  9

to watch: 8

to decide: 8

to touch:  5

Solution: Ruthlessly remove filter words

At first, it’s tough to spot these filter words. Here are a few of my favorite resources on reducing filters and eliminating telling words. Author Jami Gold has an impressive list for creating specific Word Macros that help you find filter words during your revision phase.

Below are three examples of where I found and removed filters:

Filter: “Nonsense,” Duncan said, feeling the letters N and S crash against the numb shores of this front teeth prior to completing the sounds.

No Filter: “Nonsense,” Duncan said — the letters N and S crashed against the numb shores of his front teeth.

Filter: “I advise you to pay thanks to the general for bestowing this honor upon you, rather than question the method of payment. You and I both know what this order will do for . . .” he looked around at the dirt pens, the long grass and the crumbling house, muddied, with hay tipping over onto the roof, “this business.”

No Filter: “I advise you to pay thanks to the general for bestowing this honor upon you, rather than question the method of payment,” the soldier said. The heat was sweltering in the crumbling  pens. Muddied, matted hay hung from the roof. He drew his sleeve to his nose. “You and I both know what word of our order will do for . . . this business.”

Filter: “Sure, sure,” she said. “Does he know he’s meeting you . . . Duncan?” She looked down over her empty pad toward his name, scribbled in eyeliner pencil.

No Filter: “Sure, sure,” Sheila said. “Does he know he’s meeting you . . . Duncan?” She drew her painted fingernail down over the empty pad and toward where his name was scribbled in eyeliner pencil.

As with many writing rules, consider it a suggestion more than a fundamental requirement. You may find mere awareness of filters helps you to write tighter, more vivid descriptions.

3. Issue: Oversharing setting and description details

Writers know more about their story’s setting and their characters’ thoughts than anyone else. The problem is, we often share more than is necessary, leading to large chunks of description and internal monologue that break a scene’s momentum.

We all know the rule: show more and tell less. But it’s become a cliche because it can be interpreted about a million different ways — so what the heck does it mean in practice?

When we write scenes, we present an isolated viewpoint on a moment of conflict to advance the story for the reader. In a moment of conflict, people rarely notice what’s happening around them. They don’t take in exhaustive setting details or spend time trying to analyze their surroundings. They are in the action — where every move, every word, every detail either helps them get what they want, or pushes it further away.

Imagine being in the front row of a play. To access the moment of conflict on stage, you need to be close to the action as it occurs. If a narrator is standing between you and the actors, they depress the intimacy of the action. So, showing is largely about getting out of the way of the action — drawing out into plain view only those items that advance the scene.

Subtext is important here — the ability to tease out items that add meaning to a scene without drawing too much attention to them. For example, consider Big Jim Rennie’s golden baseball in Stephen King’s Under the Dome. To Rennie, the baseball at first represents power and prestige, until it becomes a literal manifestation of those delusions. When the violent drama finally plays out on the page, the baseball’s established subtext enriches the scene without impeding the action.

Solution: Visualize your telling

In a pass during your rewrite, visualize where you tell more than show. In each scene, create two different highlights — yellow for setting and pink for internal monologue. Highlight the blocks, then print out the scene and look at where your interjections slow the action of that scene. What details are unnecessary to the subtext of that isolated moment?

Of course, telling can be useful for summary scenes to help the reader understand the aftermath of several intense scenes of conflict. In many plays, narrators come on stage at the beginning, in between scenes, and maybe at the end to recap the action. Such pacing mechanisms give the reader time to take a breath before plunging back into the action. But in most cases, scenes benefit from cutting down — or eliminating altogether — those interjections that slow action and impede the story.

Have you found it challenging to remove yourself from a story? How do you take yourself out of your fiction writing?