Though writing is often arduous and sometimes seems a fool’s errand, for those of us who are writers, we also know that it chooses us. To create something from nothing is difficult and the imposition of a blank page can be insulting, but as my friend Eric, a prolific novelist says, “I truly hate writing. But I love having written.”
How you approach writing your novel can not only make a big difference in the quality of your final draft, but also in the state of your sanity.
In this article, I’ll give you some tips for writing a novel. I have plenty of articles that discuss how to make your prose, your structure, and your ideas stronger. That’s not my goal here. I’ll focus instead on making the long process of writing a book more of a joyous pursuit than a Sisyphean struggle. I’ll also give you a Story Weapon with some writing exercises at the end to help release your inhibitions in writing.
To keep your creative momentum high, these tips for writing a novel focus on using low-stakes warmups to bridge the gap between daily life and your story’s world. By giving yourself permission to write poorly and silencing your inner critic, you can prioritize the flow of the narrative over perfection. This approach transforms the drafting process from a struggle into a joyous discovery where you can safely explore “forbidden” themes and deep character truths.
Find a fun warmup
The heavy lifts in your writing days will go better if you’ve done the right warmups. To go straight into a big effort might seem brave, like a cold plunge. In the long run, it’s just not sustainable. You make “injuries” more likely — here I mean fatigue and time-intensive mistakes more than carpal tunnel.
Frankly, there are spiritual aspects to a warmup exercise. Think of this as the passageway between the mundane world and the world of your story. It’s a magic spell to relax you and get you ready for the act of creation.
One warmup activity recommended by some stellar writers is penning a letter to someone. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a fan of this method. When he encountered writer’s block, he’d write a long letter to a friend.
You don’t need to send these letters (especially if you do this every day), but writing to someone you love does a number of things. It recenters you. It brings you out of the mind and into the heart. It lets you drop the anxieties of the day onto the page so you can turn to your creative work with excitement.
John Steinbeck was also a fan of this warmup. In fact, when he was writing East of Eden, he started each writing day by penning a short note to his close friend and editor Pascal Covici. These are collected in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. Here’s a short excerpt from a writing day in March as a reminder that great works have come from the same circumstances that you find yourself in:
Here we go again. No sleep last night but I feel fine. And I don’t even know why I didn’t sleep. I was perfectly comfortable. Just couldn’t let go of consciousness. Funny thing. But an early start today because sometimes fatigue slows me down. And I want to get a good stretch in today — maybe even finish the chapter — but I put little faith in that. Everything in this book turns out to be larger than I had anticipated. I think I put down the next happenings in a previous note. I’ll have to look back and see whether a night of consideration… Now, once to the toilet and I will go to work.
Your writing warmup can be whatever you like. Try to separate it from the world of your story if you can, just to take the pressure off.
Try writing a short haiku or longer poem about something that irritated you this morning. Maybe you want to get your thoughts down or just warm up the old keyboard. However you approach this, a good writing warmup is a great way to keep the process of writing exciting.
“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
– Brenda Ueland
Permission to write poorly
This might seem counterintuitive, but when you give yourself permission to write poorly, it often produces the opposite result: flashes of brilliance and meaningful insights. This happens because you’re allowing yourself to relax and get curious, rather than trying to be impressive with your prose.
Let go of your fear of being wrong. We all have an idea of what good writing looks like or what makes someone a good writer. Odds are, those qualities just happen to be the ones we lack. Self-doubt and overthinking are big parts of everyone’s writing experience.
Give yourself permission to write poorly. Let yourself choose the wrong words or misspell words or even make them up. Don’t concern yourself with grammar, spelling, or syntax at this point. Learning to be less precious with your work goes a long way to spinning out page after page of material.
Allow yourself to be a channel for the story that wants to be told through you. When you change your job from deciding what fits in the story to inquiring into your characters’ experiences, you begin to write from a different part of your brain. You begin to discover that writing is less about figuring things out and more about listening for where the story wants to go.
Remember this: your conscious mind is responsible for making sure you have enough coffee and your phone is stashed in the other room. Your subconscious mind is where the real work happens. Your job is to plant your butt in the chair, and to stay curious and take dictation.
Writing poorly also helps you unlearn the habit of editing as you write. This is a difficult thing to shake, since most of our day involves doing just that. Whether it is an important email or text, a memo for work or a social media post, we’re accustomed to getting the words just right before moving on to the next task.
But in writing a novel, the first draft is about simply focusing on getting the story down. Eventually, after the edits, the right word will find its way into the right place.
Here’s Toni Morrison’s advice on the subject:
When you first start writing – and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers – you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter – another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it – and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better.
Your story weapon: Write the forbidden
We don’t read literature to see perfect characters do perfect things. The ugly, raw, meaty aspects of great literature shed light on the parts of life we sweep under the rug. This is one of the ways that we evolve as our story evolves.
In other words, there is often gold in the places you’re avoiding.
If you feel that some topics are too risky to approach, odds are that’s exactly where you need to head. Open up the can of worms. Let your characters surprise you with their humanity. Try to avoid judging them for their actions and see where that leads you.
✒️ Writing Exercises
To help explore the forbidden, here are some stream-of-consciousness writing prompts. Set a timer. No editing or second-guessing. Just write as fast as you can.
As your protagonist, write for five minutes on each of the following prompts, beginning with:
- My first love was…
- The lie I continually tell is…
- I can never be forgiven for…
- One day I am going to…
- You would never know this by looking at me but…
Good work! Remember, the desire to write is really the desire to evolve by resolving something you’re seeking to understand. Surprise yourself. Get dangerous on the page. Because the writer’s dirty secret is that this is actually fun!
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