Practical advice for getting started on your novel (NEW and open for comment)

Let's assume you already have an idea in mind for your novel, and lots of scenes you already intend to write. Let's further assume that you've written your outline, done your research, are sure of your facts, and feel ready to actually start writing your novel.

Now you're face with the dreaded… (Cue Scary Music)…blank page.  Hundreds of them, in fact, and that can be pretty intimidating.

Although lots of new novelists crank out the first chapter or two without a problem, almost every writer hits the wall at some point.  But I learned a secret that keeps that from happening to me, and it works for everyone with whom I've shared it, too.  I got much of it from"> Ernest Hemingway, and using this method allows me to avoid ever sitting down and wondering what to write next.

First off, I already have my outline (I'll say it again: the time invested in an outline will more than pay off when you're writing your book), and my outline tells me, more or less, what I'm going to write today. My personal goal is five pages a day because, hey, at that rate in just two months I'll have a first draft, right?

But I don't usually want to jump right into writing five pages of a novel when I first sit down at my laptop. Like many of you, I need to warm up a bit.

Some writers, especially when they're starting out, do writing exercises to get the juices flowing. At some point, though, you realize you're a professional writer and want to make all your efforts count, so the idea of exercising, while sounding nice, pretty much goes out the door with the tread mill and stationary bike

So instead of doing writing exercises, the first thing I do when I sit down is edit the five pages I wrote yesterday. Sometimes I go back ten pages.  I read and edit them, sometimes a couple of times, sharpening the dialogue, augmenting details, making sure I use the exact right words, because what sounded wonderful yesterday might not even make sense today (if you've written for a while, you know how true that can be).  So I polish it. And while I'm cleaning up the words I wrote yesterday, an amazing thing happens.  I get drawn back into the story, and become anxious to write what happens next.

Now here's the coolest part: When I finish editing yesterday's work, I know exactly what happens next because Ernest told me: "Stop writing when you know what happens next." So, when I finished writing yesterday, I wrote a sentence or two about what happens next, something like:

Taz goes to town and gets thrown in jail while Pete guards Wasafiri but gets boarded by the mysterious guy they saw in the opening scene.

 It's not much, certainly, but you can imagine how easy those few lines make it to segue from editing your work from yesterday to writing your work today, especially when an outline fleshes it out even further.

This advice will really simplify your efforts to write you novel.  And after you've written it, I have another important tip for you.

Walk away from it for several months!

That's right.  Put it in your grandma's panty drawer and don't even think about it for a long time. I kid you not, when you re-read it after a long break you will go: "God, am I glad I did not let anyone else read this."

I swear by that.  My friend Brooke Cooley mentioned the value of that advice to her on her blog, and everyone who tries it, values it.  So should you, even though I know you're proud of your accomplishment and probably know of an agent who's willing to read it.  I'm also sure your friends have read a few pages and were wonderfully encouraging.  Your dog and perhaps even your boyfriend salivate over it (I'm not judging) and you just know it's destined for bestseller status.

But if you will just once take this advice, and see the difference in the quality after you wait a few months, you will never again finish your manuscript and then send it off.  I've been a professional writer for a long time and am still amazed at how dramatically I improve my novels after letting them sit and season a bit.

And on a personal note, I would have been much farther along in my career if someone had given this advice to me.  But like many of you, I was sure my novel was perfect and amazing, I had an agent waiting to read it, and they already had a publisher in mind.  That was back in the day when we printed out our manuscripts and sent them to agents in a manuscript box, complete with return postage.

Want to know what it costs to print and send a four-hundred page manuscript to and from NYC? I can tell you.

Lastly, writing is re-writing.  Creating your story is hard, but editing your own work is probably the most fun of the whole process because you're cleaning, amplifying, and adding beautiful, light touches. So don't cheat yourself out of the experience of self-editing, or the benefits.

One other tip: don't feel like you have to write your novel from beginning to end. If there's a scene or chapter you're anxious to write, then by all means get it on paper and save it with a description – but not a chapter number. I have just such a scene right now titled "Something for Isabelle," and even though I know what its chapter number is according to the outline, an outline is merely a guide and not a jailor.  I'll often break an outline chapter into two chapters, or decide that a little something else needs to come first.  If I number the chapters I write out of sequence, it gets a bit trickier to keep track of them when I change their location in the story.