Dear Dr K,
One of the many things I wish to accomplish in my life is to write a bestselling novel. I have some interesting story ideas, but I’m not sure how I should actually go about the process of writing a novel. Would you happen to know how to write one?
Noah Vellist
Dear Noah,
If you have some interesting ideas for a novel, you’re already 90 per cent there! The actual writing part is terribly easy. You’ll find that nearly everyone is willing to expend the patience and energy required to write a novel, but hardly anyone has any ideas, which is why there are so few novels worth reading in the world today.
So the first step is getting your ideas, which you have already done. Step two is talking about those ideas as much as possible, and trying to gauge how impressed your friends and your mother are by your ideas. Then you can revise those ideas in your head and come up with new and more interesting ways to complicate the plot of your novel before you actually begin the process of writing it. Remember to try and visualise what a movie adaptation of your novel will look like, because if you don’t see your novel being turned into a blockbuster film, it’s probably not worth writing.
Once you have completed the arduous task of imagining, dreaming about, and talking about the novel you want to write, it’s time to get down to putting words on the page. But wait — are you sure you are ready to start? Because once you commit words to the page it’s going to be a chore to go back and edit them if you change how you feel about them. A novel typically ranges from 80,000 to 1,50,000 words, so you need to be ready to let it all rip in one go, because if you start to have doubts or change your mind about some vital part of the story halfway, you will have to go back and rewrite a lot of things, and that can be quite a headache.
Once you are sure you are ready to write your novel, think again. Do you have everything you need? What about a cup of tea to keep you going as you write? Are you likely to be hungry sometime soon? You don’t want to interrupt your creative process, so have a light meal before you start. Might as well go ahead and have a heavy meal while you’re at it. Now you are fully charged and ready to bang out those chapters. Except the heavy meal you just had is probably making you feel a little drowsy, so maybe a quick nap will do you some good. You don’t want to write your novel while you’re half asleep.
Eventually you may come to the realisation that you don’t really have the time or the inclination to sit at a desk for several hours staring at a screen or page to carry out the drudgery of writing words. You are more of an idea person, you think about the big picture and let other people do the menial labour. You can perhaps hire a writer to translate your mindblowing ideas into words that can be understood by the common folk. That is not your field of expertise anyway.
Until you find someone to do that, you can consider yourself the greatest novelist the world has ever seen who just hasn’t written a novel yet.
Yours questionably,
Dr K