How hard is to write novels? Ask the wise old Owl. Tootsie pop =3 licks. Novel=5 licks. 1. get an idea 2. write said idea 3. get published and printed 4. go on book tours 5, go to the bank It all seams so easy...on paper. OK. I'm the dummy and you guys get to watch, should be fun.
2.1 Revise revise revise 2.2 Write several more stories 2.3 Realize you have things to learn about writing 2.4 Join online writing forum, binge on writing videos on Youtube, buy writing books, spend a few years immersed in deep study
1.1 come up with a plot. 1.2 develop characters. 2.5 polish the turd, and hope it will sparkle. 2.6 repeat step 2.5 2.7 submit to publisher. 2.8 repeat steps 2.5 thru 2.7 ad infinitum until success or you give up.
I want to be clear—this wasn't an estimation of your skill or anything, I have no idea how well you write. But generally when one of us figures we're getting pretty close to pro level, we start submitting to publishers, and then we start posting on the Rejection thread. You know the general advice—try to rack up as many rejections as you can, because there will be a lot before you get your first acceptance. Stephen King said he put a nail in the wall and started impaling his rejection slips on it, and then I think he had to start adding more nails (if I remember right). Even the best get rejected for a long time before they get published, it's just how this thing usually works. I think people on the thread are aiming at a hundred rejections in a year, and some are well beyond that, with the occasional acceptance peppered in between.
I would suggest posting some critiques in the workshop, to meet the requirements to post some of your own work.
I am more interested in writing plays and screenplays than novels, from my point of view, it probably gets easier after many years of experience and published/staged etc work. I am in a phase where I would rather be a co-writer/assistant writer, not sure if there is such a thing when it comes to novels, but I think it might eventually bring me closer to the path of an author.
This is very true. I've developed skills (to varying degrees) in several artforms throughout my life—besides writing there's drawing, painting, a little bit of sculpting, and stopmotion animation (which actually consists of many skills—essentially you're the entire cast and crew, and must learn photograghy, set-building, and many other skills). With many of them I started when I was young, and I can tell you how it generally goes. It works the same way for each. A very good analogy that most people today are familiar with is leveling up in a video game. You start out on the first level, which by design is the easiest one, where you have to learn the basic skills that will serve you in many if not all of the successive levels. In the beginning you're stumbling around, not knowing what to do and getting killed a lot. But gradually, if you put in enough time and effort, you learn your way around the terrain, and what kinds of threats you're facing and how to deal with them. So you go around using those skills and sharpening them through practice until you've defeated everything necessary, then you fight the level boss which demands a better use of those skills than anything previous (this is your final exam), and when you defeat that you get rewarded with a cinematic and move on to the next level, where the layout and terrain are different, and you need to start learning them. Generally each level brings in somewhat more difficult challenges and you need to develop a few new skills for each one. But as you move forward (upward?) you usually continue to need those skills you developed on the first level, and you get really good at them, until you can do them in your sleep if necessary (and you probably do, in dreams). And to some extent the same is true for the skills and techniques you learned on each level. Really video games are very cleverly designed skill-building exercises designed to be fun to play. The major difference being that you can learn the skills to beat a level in hours or days, whereas it takes more like months for an art-form. Sometimes a friend will show you how to deal with certain things, or you'll watch some play-throughs or read an article about it. That's analogous to watching those Youtube videos (or reading articles and books) about writing, and important principles like Show and Tell, POV, character arcs, and things like story structure etc. Another good analogy is joining a forum like this one, where you're surrounded by other writers at all levels of skill and understanding, and can take part in conversations, get your work critiqued, critique the work of others, and discover principles you had never even heard of before in some cases. All of it is extremely helpful. And until the internet came along, the only way to do any of that was through books (and there weren't nearly as many as there are now), or by taking classes or workshops etc. Or writing with a friend, though trust me that comes with a very particular set of problems, or it can. We've all already learned some of the basics. That's what grade school was about (formerly known as grammar school). We were taught how to read and write, and about the basics of spelling, punctutaion, and grammar (SPAG as we refer to it 'round these parts). And then we learn how to structure paragraphs, and start writing papers (essays) and short stories. But most of us have forgotten many of the basics we haven't used since school. When I started getting serious about writing (when I joined this message board three years ago) I bought myself a book called The Gregg Reference Manual—aimed at business correspondence and filled to the brim with all the rules of writing. Some of it I remembered from grade school (some incorrectly), and much of it I didn't remember or had never learned. The SPAG is the most basic level, the building blocks of any written work. You need to develop a good-enough facility with it. Most of us have some holes in our basic knowledge that need to be filled in. But it's also important to just play around and have a lot of fun in the beginning—the first few years, or if you start in childhood like I did, a couple of decades. We've had discussions here on the board about the importance of just writing for fun without worrying about the rules etc. A lot of it is just experience. By writing a lot you develop a sense for what works and what doesn't. And then there are also things you won't figure out on your own, or that would take way too long, that require book learnin' (or internet learnin').
A little followup— Here's my experience in developing as an artist so far. Generalized. After spending some time studing a handful of principles or techniques, it messes you up for a while. You're trying to incorporate these new ideas into your work, and at first of course you're awkward and terrible at it, like with learning any new skill. The riding a bike analogy is a good one—you need training wheels until you get your balance. And even with training wheels you'll be clumsy and all over the place, crashing into things etc. But you need to log the experience, because that's what works it all down into the unconscious (or subconscious as some call it). The conscious mind is slow and clumsy, the unconscious is greased lightning and incredibly graceful. This is why people drill so hard in martial arts or dance moves—your body has to get so used to making the moves that it becomes a matter of unconscious thought, quick as lightning and no conscious effort required. When you do reach that level, suddenly the thing you've been laboring and struggling at, with your tongue sticking out the corner of your mouth, becomes easy and graceful. The training wheels need to come off, and now you find you glide effortlessly and it's like flying or ice skating, just beautiful. Such a huge contrast to how it was when you were trying to do it consciously. The conscious mind works linearly, one thought after another, while the unconscious works 'in parallel', many thought-streams running simultaneously. It's a lot like instinct, just instant with no thought required. This process happens each time you learn some new things. It disorders you for a while, until the new ideas get firmly ingrained and you can access them instantly with no effort. In fact apparently (according to brain science) the things we practice enough get "Written on the spinal cord"—not even in the brain itself. That means your access to it is much quicker than thought. We needed these kinds of super-fast reactions in caveman days to deal with sabertooth tigers and the like. And today we can use that same mechanism to develop our art or whatever. I don't know that anything we do as writers would get written on the spinal cord, it's all more thought-based as opposed to instant physical reactions. But to me it's fascinating to know about the spinal cord thing, and it tells us a lot about the levels of thought. Slow/plodding/clumsy (conscious thought), lightning-quick and utterly graceful (unconscious), and faster-than-thought itself (spinal cord reactions). Think about how it was when you learned to talk or read or write. Difficult going at first, and then gradually smoother and better, until it became effortless. Learning is always like this as far as I can tell.
I don't want to make it sound daunting, like you need to study for years before you even write a book. It doesn't work like that. You just write and have fun, and every now and then you decide you want to learn some more.
This. You want to try your hand at writing a book and see where that takes you. That'll give you lots of valuable experiences which will enable you to understand all the theory later on. This is what I did too. I tried to read theory before I got started but none of it made sense, so I got straight into writing a book... which became three. Afterwards, I started more books, and because I started to see a flaw within my writing, I came here to ask advice on it... which caused me to stay and discover a whole bunch of them. And now I'm finally starting to feel like I'm onto something. The point is, I was unlikely to get anywhere writing-wise if it wasn't for my first book. In terms of quality, it looks silly to me now, but I owe a lot to it and I will definitely re-write it to do it justice someday. But I want to get to a good level first. So, just write for now. Get experience. That is the most integral thing. Theory is nothing without retrospect to apply it to.
If I may offer an alternative view: https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/beginner-dont-write-that-novel-9975
Maybe sacrifice a vegetable too, in case the god of writing is vegan. (certainly hasn't put much meat on my writing bones recently... mutter... mutter... mumble....)
I glanced at this post early this morning and read "...sacrifice children..." My first thought was that this was maybe a little extreme. My second thought was what the hell is wrong with me!
Perhaps you could plant the idea in the fertile soil of it's mind, and let it grow there little by little.
That's not a terrible alternative. It's what I'm doing now essentially. I write a story based on the monthly contest prompt of this site and then I submit it. If I lose, I submit to the workshop for review, and many people there are happy to chase me with axes to cut down on all the crap that weighs down my writing. On the other hand, the only reason I got into these short stories was because my earlier books gave me the experience & confidence to do so. But my own experience isn't all-encompassing. If OP can get behind short stories, it might work better.
I agree with this many times over. A composer doesn't start with a symphony. A writer doesn't start with a novel.
Just be sure to keep in mind that shorts and novels are very different animals. To some extent what you learn will carry over, but you need to make some big adjustments too.
Now that I think about it a bit more, it actually makes a lot of sense to start with short stories, and it makes much more sense than writing a novel simply because its a smaller unit in the lines of fiction. You really do learn a lot by writing short stories. Description, exposition, dialogue, vocabulary, punctuation, grammar and other kinds of deeper-level skills like knowing when to show and when to tell. These things alone won't write you a novel, but they're absolutely essential when it comes to having a command of the language. No matter how good of a story-teller you are, it's impossible to write a thrilling novel without language skill. It reflects my experience too. I did say that I started out with novels. I wrote two trilogies. And while they have an interesting story underneath them, well, the writing sucks! And I didn't really fully understand this until I started trying to tackle short stories. That's where the real self-improvement started. Though I still have long ways to go. Makes sense. The language is the medium which carries the stories in our writing. If the medium is poor, it won't deliver the story to the reader in a way that has impact.
Yes. One of the problems is that when you write a novel you're stuck in one story for months if not years. Shorts allow you to keep changing the various elements of the story each time you finish one and start another. When I started I wasn't thinking in terms of novels and shorts, I didn't finish most of what I wrote. I was a kid and it was all just for fun. But I learned a lot just from doing a lot of beginnings. I could tell when things were going off—I'd lose interest or come up with an idea I liked better. Later I did finish a bunch of shorts, and that's definitely important. I don't think I got much beyond the planning stages of the first few novels I tried to lay out. It felt entirely daunting. My first actual novel (and only one) started as 'probably a short story' (I really wasn't thinking about length, just playing around). But I saw it was becoming fairly long and decided to aim at novel length, which gave me the room to slow down and develop things much more.
