How to NEVER Finish Writing Your Novel | Novel Writing Advice

Don't forget the GRRM, who plans, drafts, and revises all at the same time, and is just rewriting the same book in eighty different variations for over a decade.

And then there's the reviser who's a perfectionist and always thinks the next draft will be better. Luckily that's not me. I'm a procrastinator and I have it on good authority that tomorrow DOES come, it just disguises itself as today...wait, does that mean I have to go write now?

what about The Talker - they who talk about their novel but never put a word on paper

Procrastinating on my writing by watching this video. This counts as productive work, right?

I’m old school. I wrote a novel which was labor of love which took me 20 years to finish. Only 178 pages long. The longer I worked on it, the thinner it got. For me, I went through all the stages you mention. Ultimately, writing a novel—a good one—is a form of lunacy. There is no system, no formula, no shortcut, no rules. You just kind of… jump off of a cliff which has no bottom. You decide where the bottom is.

The first one sounds like people who tell me, I'd like to write a book, I have one in mind, but I don't have the time to write it.

The only thing that stands in my way is work and personal obligations. Unavoidable interruptions that have real world personal and financial consequences if they are shrugged off. All routines are subject to interruption and every sentence is written in stolen time. And by the end of the day, when you do have a few hours, your mind is burnt out and the words aren't going to come. Plus there's sleep which is yet another obligation. Leaves a fella feeling like Jack Torrence tearing up pages and smiling a little too hard at coworkers and loved ones. I really feel bad for the guy. Even in isolation with all the time in the world his wife kept bugging him about the weather. No wonder he couldn't get past that first sentence.

i skipped the planing stage. total "pantser" which tends to require more revision, and also, i keep going. i write later parts before resolving earlier issues, but that has an upside of being able to weave narrative threads outside of time. plus there's things that require more research. of course, i didn't make the task i set for myself there easy at all. when i finally wrote something else tho', a short story with which i'm thoroughly satisfied and distributing free, i've really experienced a boost in confidence and have been working on other projects

I’m definitely the reviser 😂

You know. It feels so obvious, when you say it like that. "Oh, you procrastinate because you didn't get it done and as such you never start, but the further you go the more inclined you are to actually do it." Like. It's not rocket science but boy did it get past me. --Let's go see if I can actually put it to use lol.

I definitely land in the last one. I’m petrified in sharing my writing. I have however shared my outlines to people and gotten feedback on them and what little writing I’ve shared has gotten good results. My younger brother sends me his writing for my own feedback and I emotionally need to get over the small hurdle. I know logically I will grow as a writer. It’s just getting there. It’s been my dream to publish a book since I was 15, I’m now 33.

Thanks for this bracing talk. I am #3 . BTW YOur presentation is very succinct. Appreciated.

I am a hardcore pantser/gardener type writer, who only does the most rudementury forms of outlining for my works, and just goes wherever the plot and characters takes me. I am currently 1/3 way through writing a 30,000 word novella, which is going well so far.

I'm between a procrastinator and a reviser. Actually, I tend not to revise beyond the first draft, unless you count the revising and editing I do while writing a draft. I bring a project to 75% or 90% completion, then I stop or slow down significantly. Right now, I have a draft of a novelistic political satire (it's not truly a novel, but it has fictional characters) that is three or four tweaks away from completion--and it came to that stage months ago. I also have a series of essays that I started back in 2015, whose full manuscript is "nearly done". I have already received encouraging feedback on both manuscripts. Yet I'm dragging my feet, afraid of the querying and publishing processes, afraid of how the outside world will react.

Pantsers seem to be internally organized. They know how to just follow their own trail and discover where a story heads without getting ADHD tangled up. Good advice btw.

Planning, to the planner, is what "writing: the first draft" is to the pantser. Planning IS writing (however, it is a different form of writing than what the pantser uses (i.e. the crappy first draft). Pantsing can lead to becoming a 'reviser' (since their novel is such a mess, because they failed to plan). Revisers failed to plan enough.

I'm definitely a procrastinator. It's taken me YEARS to write my novel, which, when it's finished will likely only be about 200 or 250 pages. I'm in my third major rewrite, which I expect to be the final rewrite, though maybe not the final draft. Every time I start making progress and get into a pattern of getting stuff done, something big disrupts me and it takes days, weeks, months, and at one point about a year, to get back into the thick of it. At this point, I often find myself not even liking the thing anymore, but I want to have it finished. I feel guilty when I work on other projects, but I often don't feel the passion for the novel I did...like 7 or 8 years ago, when the ideas originally came together.

These cover the main steps in how a book is written but as other commenters have pointed out, there are a number of nuances and hybrid roadblocks left out. Chief among them is the person who pushes past the rumination block and the early drafting block, they've pushed through procrastination but then they're hit with shiny object syndrome and either abandon the WiP for a new idea or go back to square one to make revisions that incorporate their new ideas.

Solid advice. Just subscribed. Looking forward to more.

Dude, I love your cat portrait