I hear lots of different responses when I mention that I’ve
written a novel, even more when I say that I’ve written a total of twelve.
“How did you do that?” “Wow! That must have been really
hard.” “I wish I could write a novel.”
My favorite is when someone responds by saying, “Yeah, I’m
going to write a story myself one day.”
So then the question is: how have I done it, how has it not
entirely devoured my life, and why am I not the person who is just sitting back
claiming that someday I will make the attempt? There is one simple answer in
response to all of this: I write. But I think that it can be broken down a bit
further as well, and so my goal now is to delineate it into to three key
elements that can be applied by any person who wants to take that next step and
enter the ranks of the novelists.
#1 Be Responsible to Yourself
This is a key element to any personal project that you might
have. It is impossible to get anywhere if you are not willing to be held
responsible to one person, and one person only, yourself.
Admittedly, for many aspects of my life, I am horrible at
holding myself accountable to this single person. There are times when my room
will go months without being cleaned because I just can’t find the motivation
to hold myself responsible for it, I let the excuses of being tired and busy
pass. For the greater portion of my schooling career I would let myself get by
with the excuses that I was a genius, I could not study and not do homework and
still pass with B’s, so why do the extra work, it would just hurt my brain.
Strangely enough it was during such a time of being
unwilling to hold myself responsible for anything that I came across the
beautiful art of novel writing in the form of a challenge, NaNoWriMo, something
that I know many writers in the world are already familiar with. I guess I must
have been subconsciously fed-up with myself for not being faithful to anything,
and so I saw this as an opportunity to do something and do it all the way.
I can see that now in retrospect the entire endeavor was
particularly strange for me to take on. I had not written much since I had
tried writing a story that I never completed back in fifth grade. I had made
the resolution that English was my least favorite subject (and here I am
majoring in English, I can only imagine the kind of reaction that would have
been evinced from that thirteen year old if I could go back in time and tell
him just what he would be doing with his life). And, as aforementioned, I was
unwilling to put any true effort into anything.
Now that unmotivated, uncultured, writing-hating,
thirteen-year-old boy managed to write 50,000 words in the month of November,
and also to keep a B average in all of his honors, high school classes. Not
only that, but by the end of December he had added the last ten thousand words
or so to his manuscript so that he had his first finished novel. How did that
boy do that? He learned that he could be responsible to one person, himself,
and that if he was, he could do anything… or at least write a novel.
#2 Read
This is something every writer who has ever picked up a book
on writing, who has been to a writing club and/or conference, or who even just
perused writing forums has heard repetitively, and there’s probably a reason
why. For some reason though, my young-writer self didn’t understand why he
should read when he could write stories. I was a voracious reader up until the
point I entered high school, which queerly enough corresponded with the time
that I started writing.
During the time period in which I wrote my first three
novels I fell victim to the rather perverse reasoning that there was no point
in reading if you could write stories yourself. It was after I wrote my third
novel (which just so happens to be the recently published, and severely edited,
Let Them Come) that I began to think there was something to the suggestion to
read all the time after all.
Nowadays I go a bit further than the usual recommendation to
read: I say read the best literature that you can get your hands on, go back to
the early writing, understand where the art of writing came from. I have
probably taken this a bit too far myself recently. In the past two years or so I
have only read three or four books written after the 1930’s—that is compared to
a total over fifty. One thing about this experiment is that it has improved my
writing by leaps and bounds. My characters are several layers deeper; I have
forgone a lot of my own prejudice as I’ve seen how it affects the older
literature that was written in a time when such things were accepted.
So I recommend reading, and even if you are not a fan of the
classics I at least encourage every writer to read at a rate of five to one,
five modern works to one classic (the best ones to read are written before the
turn of the century). Trust me; it will elevate your writing beyond your
greatest expectations. (Charles Dickens reference anyone?)
#3 Write
Yes, we are back to that one essential that I mentioned at
the very beginning, but it deserves repetition. If anyone is to ever call
him/herself a writer he/she must write, and not just once a year, but
consistently. A novelist has to take it a step further—a novelist should be
writing novels consistently. I’m a sprinter when it comes to novelling: I have
to give myself a short span of time to complete a project or else I’ll never
get it done. But even then I don’t limit my novel writing just to NaNoWriMo,
which would be an easy thing to do, but I throw in a seventy-two hour novel in
the middle of the year. Even with all of that writing I still feel like I need
to do more, so I write short stories all the time throughout the rest of the
year.
The brain is not just a single muscle, it is a group of
them, and just like when you try to use a muscle group in your body that you
never use you end up only being able to do half of what you were expecting and
lying in bed sore for the next two days, so if you become lazy with writing you
will try and sit down to a big project, such as a novel, and will only be able
to get half way through it, and you’ll want to avoid it for the next several
months.
There you go, three simple keys: Be Responsible to Yourself,
Read, and Write. If any person applies these three keys then he/she can write a
novel. Take it from a guy who has written twelve, and already has a thirteenth
brewing in the back of his mind.
Good luck, and happy writing.