16 ms·

How to Write a Novel

238 points by samclemens 10y ago

cgriswald 10y ago
What works for me* : 1. Make a plan. 2. Mostly ignore the plan. 3. Feel. Feel what your characters are feeling. Feel what you want the reader to feel. 4. Write, even if you aren't feeling. 5. Iterate. Be fearless in throwing things out that don't work. Rewrite an entire work if you have to. Some of these "greats" act like they completely wing it. Stephen King, for instance, has some really great writing. He's a man really in touch with his emotions and can, through his writing, cause those feelings to resonate in you. But, his lack of planning leads, in my opinion, to weak endings that are emotionally unsatisfying and sometimes nonsensical. *By works for me, I mean my best fiction writing comes out of this, not that it's any good or published. Edit: Formatting
- deleted 10y ago
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- jacobheric 10y ago
  I always thought King's writing could stand to be edited down (a lot). But I feel that about most genre fiction. I find it stifling as a reader especially when characters thoughts and emotions are over described. Usually a simple detail about their appearance, their manner, or similar is sufficient to clue me into what's going on inside. And the uncovering of those clues makes for a much more enjoyable reading experience.
  - bovermyer 10y ago
    Have you read anything by Robert E. Howard? I imagine you might rather enjoy his works.
    - jacobheric 10y ago
      I'll check it out. Thanks! Some of my favorite reading is genre fiction that trims the fat and floats above the rest of the genre. This seems to fit that bill.
      - rpgmaker 10y ago
        Any recommendations?
        jacobheric 10y ago
        Yes, I recently stumbled upon Black Wings Has My Angel by Eliot Chaze. Great, obscure and underrated crime/noir/pulp novel. It transcends the genre. It's somehow both more gritty and more literary than the more famous Hammett and Chandler and similar stuff.
      - bovermyer 10y ago
        REH, most famous for the Conan the Barbarian short stories, has a visceral writing style. I'd start with one of the Conan omnibuses, like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Conan-Cimmerian-Original-Adventures/dp/0345461517/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1470229829&sr=8-10&keywords=conan+the+barbarian https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Conan-Cimmerian-Original-Adven...
  - rpgmaker 10y ago
    I agree. Ironically (since he is associated with the 'gardeners' type in the piece), his writing feels too methodical and lineal to me. Also very repetitive. Of his books I haven't liked the first one. The same happens to me with Neil Gaiman, who seems very heavily influenced by King. To me their style of writing is almost interchangeable.
    - douche 10y ago
      A lot of Stephen King's best writing, he was pretty much out of his mind the whole time on PBR and cocaine. For instance, not really having any recollection of penning Cujo[1]. His later stuff feels much more planned, in that it kind of all ties into his big meta-project of the Dark Tower, even the early stand-alone stuff, that he more or less retcons into that universe. [1] http://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/king-forgets-cujo.2225/ http://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/king-forgets-cuj...
      - jacobheric 10y ago
        I actually think that's not a bad way to write! Whatever gets you into the zone or flow. Of course, you have to have the discipline to go back and edit with clear eyes later. There is a famous (mostly misattributed) quote to that effect: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84190-sometimes-i-write-drunk-and-revise-sober-and-sometimes-i http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84190-sometimes-i-write-drun... Though Hemingway didn't say that, he was definitely a merciless editor of his own work. I dropped in on this (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway) exhibit recently that had early drafts of some of his most famous stories and books and it was remarkable how many whole pages and chapters he chopped out just prior to publication.
      - rpgmaker 10y ago
        I have read about that. And while it would explain the repetitiveness it's independent of how his writing appears to me. Needless to say, a lot of people disagree with my view of his writing.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Me too! I find myself skimming when I read his books.
- Kuiper 10y ago
  As referenced in the submission article, George R.R. describes two approaches two writing: >"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect." These two approaches are often referred to as "outlining" vs "discovery writing." My view is that these approaches don't describe two categories of writers so much as they describe two points along a spectrum, and most writers lie somewhere between the two extremes. For example, Brandon Sanderson says that he extensively plans/outlines his plots and fantasy settings, but he tends to "discovery write" his characters: he will frequently write multiple versions of the opening chapters of a book to see which character fits best for the story he is writing, sort of like auditioning different actors for the role. Brandon didn't plan the Mistborn trilogy with a female protagonist; rather, he tried several different versions of the opening chapters, each featuring a different character in the role of protagonist, and he found that the story worked best with a girl in the lead role. He went on to make several significant adjustments to the events of the story to fit with his character choice (he has sometimes jokingly described Mistborn book 1 as "Lord of the Rings meets My Fair Lady"), but the world and the overarching plot structure still matched his original plan for the series.
armenarmen 10y ago
Wrapping up with my first novel now. Very much fell into the gardener/pants faction. I had a concept "start up guys can't raise money so they sell cocaine" and just let it unfold from there. Any other fiction folks here subscribe to the planning method?
- petewailes 10y ago
  Very much so. I'm currently in the process of writing a trilogy of trilogies, for which there's a loose outline of each book and the major plot points. However, the detail of exactly what happens is left up to me as I find it in the moment. It's something several acquaintances of mine who are published, successful writers subscribe to. One recently summed it up nicely as "plan the mountains, write the valleys". The major advantages are that it gives you the ability to write the ending first, so you don't get to the end and discover that you need to dig yourself out of a hole, and that you can keep things internally consistent, ensuring people don't magically teleport around the world (unless of course that's actually a thing your characters can do). There's something to be said for not over-planning, but also for giving yourself enough time and room to be able to spot problems ahead of time so you don't write yourself into a corner.
  - armenarmen 10y ago
    This "plan the mountains, write the valleys" seems like a pretty decent approach. I suppose that I did something of a hybrid. I had plot points that came to me at different stages that I wanted to get to. But again it was mostly by the seat of my pants. Is the first part of your trilogy out yet? I'd love to checkout a fellow HNers work!
    - petewailes 10y ago
      Not yet. I'm planning to write until book six before I start publishing (I expect my life to get busy during the writing of the last three, so I want a buffer in place). That said, I'll add you to my list of people to contact when they start being published (probably end of next year).
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dogprez 10y ago
There are techniques for writing for role-playing games that are a hybrid of planning/winging. You want to plan a hook, how the story get's started, who are the main agents and their motivations, then you just let the story unfold. It seems there is room for something in the middle.
- aethertap 10y ago
  > There are techniques for writing for role-playing games that are a hybrid of planning/winging. That sounds very interesting. Do you have any links you could share with more details? I've been trying to come up with a way to get some friends involved to play out some of the scenes in a book I'm working on and those techniques might really help. The only thing I've seen that sounds related is a game called "Downfall" [1]. I think it's a little too structured to use for this purpose, but I liked the concept. 1. https://lessthanthreegames.com/downfall/ https://lessthanthreegames.com/downfall/
  - dogprez 10y ago
    Sure, there is this book "The Lazy Dungeon Master" ( http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/ http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/ ). Dungeon World also has advice on how to do something similar with its "Fronts" ( http://www.dungeon-world.com/ http://www.dungeon-world.com/ ). The writers of The Expanse based their books off of role-playing sessions they did. George R.R. Martin also was an avid role-player. I believe his Wildcards novels were based on his games in the RPG Superworld.
    - aethertap 10y ago
      Dungeon World looks awesome, I'm definitely going to give that a shot. Thanks!
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Regarding playing scenes with friends: What's the genre of your book? I have a couple lighter-weight RPGs to offer as suggestions. FATE - you have skills ranked as things like mediocre, expert, poor, etc. (don't recall exact terms). You roll dice to determine how well you do as modifiers (+/-/0) to your skill or attribute when appropriate. Fairly freeform character creation and play. Genreless. You can make it fit almost any genre. Dread - This is horror focused. The mechanic is a Jenga tower. If a player wants to do a non-mundane task, they pull a block, if the tower falls, that character is out of the game (dead, went mad, whatever, you choose). Tension develops as the tower gets harder to pull from. Ebook is $10-20, can't recall, got it for free for buying the print book at a convention. Very lightweight, while horror focused it is otherwise independent from your setting. Create character sheets describing their history, their skills then are "what does it make sense for them to know". Does it make sense for the programmer to be a sharpshooter? Maybe not, maybe a difficult shot requires two pulls for them. OTOH, a soldier character may only need to pull if the shot effects the story more significantly. You can wing it, but be consistent with your players.
programminggeek 10y ago
There was only one thing that worked for me to finish my first book. I showed up every day and wrote something. Then I edited the hell out of it (like 8 passes). The rough draft was 100+ pages. The final version is 64. There is no shortcut to writing and editing a book. You have to put a lot of time in and just write the damn book. My book if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163BAUWC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163BAUWC
swsieber 10y ago
I'm in the middle of the "Wheel of Time" books. That must have been the most planned out series ever. Or reworked like a million times. At least, that's what I gather from people who have reread the series and praise the amazing foreshadowing in the first half of the series (even books 1 and 2). For those who don't know, "The Wheel of Time" is 14 books plus a prequel.
- gentleteblor 10y ago
  Those middle books are indicative of something...i'm just not sure if it's planning or rework :) I'd be interested to hear what you think of the approach (planned or reworked) when you hit the Sanderson books. Enjoy!
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  When I wrote my book, I intentionally left a few bricks lying around in it, so that I could make them look like foreshadowing later on. Really, I have no idea what they will connect to, just that they're not connected to anything right now. Several of the loose ends are already planned to connect to books 2, 3, and the (presumptively) conclusive book 4, but there are others that I just threw in as an investment that might pay off later. But no reader would know for sure whether any given loose end is a forward link or just a brick, until the series is pinched off and it's still left hanging.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  I think the writer had a vague plan at the start, but nothing beyond that. This is pretty much proven out in books 5-10 where he rambled on and on about basically nothing. When called on it, he said he'd do better and he did on the next couple, but then fell ill. He managed to write up his ending notes and hand his notes to Brandon Sanderson before he died. But I don't think those notes were written before that.
qznc 10y ago
I like the snowflake method [0]. It gives you a very strict plan. Disclaimer: I have not written a novel yet. [0] http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/ http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-met...
- ggambetta 10y ago
  I have! Followed the Snowflake Method relatively closely to write my first (and so far, only) novel, The Golden Legacy (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI).
- joeax 10y ago
  I also used the snowflake method (with exceptions). Being a software developer forces you to think that way. My approach was: paragraph, outline, story story, full novel. I also refined my research in between stages. The novel is called The Final Six Days, about an asteroid about to destroy civilization and the strange man who is endlessly time looping in the those final days. http://amzn.to/2atUtOC http://amzn.to/2atUtOC (P.S. I'm a introverted engineer not a shameless self-promoter. I don't want to feel like I'm spamming so if you want me to check out a novel you wrote let me know.)
- mklim 10y ago
  It's really interesting how much the writing process differs among people. I could never see this working for me. 95% of my writing is getting to know my characters and accurately recording what they do, 5% is actually having a plan on what I want to happen to drive the plot. Getting to know a character is like getting to know a person, except instead of interacting with them and hearing their words IRL I'm "watching" them go through experiences in their life and "hearing" their thoughts instead of just their spoken words. Me writing the story feels more like me just channeling these imaginary people and recording what's happening to them, sometimes recording it in their own words. It's almost like running a tabletop campaign, where I'm setting up the environment and the major problem but then leaving it up to my players to drive the action and give me hooks to use. This leads to a lot of pacing problems that I have to solve when editing, and a really inconsistent rate of progress on the initial draft (lots of days spent just trying to "hear" what happens next) so I've tried a lot of plans like this to make myself a better writer. But every time I've tried I've come up with nothing. I don't know the characters, so how can I possibly plan out what they're going to do? I can't fill out a spreadsheet about them either, because I don't know anything about them yet, how do I know what the right answers are to put down? The only exception I've found is when I write a bunch of short stories and/or scenes outside of the longer novel from their POV and get to know them that way, then I can fill in the character worksheets and figure out what they would do and write down the scenes in one sentence or less summaries a long time ahead of time. I get that writing scenes involving them is logically making stuff up just as much as picking personality traits to fill in the blank in a worksheet is, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I'm an observer. Disclaimer: never had anything past a short story published by anyone other than myself, so I'm not exactly an authority. It's definitely not an efficient style, but it's how it works for me.
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akeck 10y ago
Those here who write, do you use plain text with source control? If so, what's your work flow?
- jacobheric 10y ago
  I start out in google docs because it's convenient and the change history is nice to have. I do this instead of plain text because I like adding some formatting as I write. If the book gets over 200 pages (or thereabouts) google docs starts to have problems and then I switch over to Pages on OSX. There, I save edits to google drive as I go. When it comes to (self) publishing time, I actually end up typesetting in word (for print) because it's the easiest, least horrible tool for that (though still horrible). HTML for kindle.
- calebm 10y ago
  Evernote -> git/plain text
- ggambetta 10y ago
  Markdown, vim and git, plus spreadsheets for notes and The Plan (list of scenes, etc). Wrote some scripts that use pandoc to take the markdown files and generate both epub files for the Kindle version and OpenOffice files that I later save as PDF for the print version. I should write an article about my workflow. From Markdown to Amazon using 100% open source :)
  - awesomebob 10y ago
    I would like to read that article. :)
    - ggambetta 10y ago
      Here it is! https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov...
- david-given 10y ago
innocentoldguy 10y ago
I've studied various methods (e.g. "pants-ing," Snowflake, outlining, etc.) and for me, a combination of outlining and pants-ing works best for structuring my novels. Having said that, I don't think the method you use for structuring your novel is nearly as important as how you write. I studied writing in college, and it always amazed me how many people would use passive sentences; had no grasp of tenses, spelling, punctuation, or grammar; didn't understand plotting, or even the three-act structure; mixed up their points of view; couldn't write dialogue; broke the "show don't tell" mantra; never bothered researching their topics; etc. If you cannot write to begin with, no amount of structure is going to make your novel worth reading, so solve that problem first. I would recommend Million Dollar Outlines, by David Farland, Write That Novel, by David Farland, and On Writing, by Stephen King, as good places to start. I would also recommend joining a writing group, and encouraging your peers to critique the hell out of your work.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  I find it interesting that many people who want to write a novel don't actually read very much, and so their writing isn't very well developed.
- chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  I'd second, third and fourth the notion of joining a writing group. Attending a (good) intensive writing workshop like Clarion or the CSSF workshops -- those are speculative fiction, since that's what I know, but there are others out there -- can also be invaluable.
stewbrew 10y ago
I think the more interesting questions would be: - How to write a novel that is actually a worthwhile read? - Why should you invest your time into an endeavour that will most likely fail and have no significant outcome?
- jacobheric 10y ago
  If you consider a novel a work of art, then creating it is an act of artistic creation that has some intrinsic value. There is a benefit to expressing yourself carefully, to telling a story that says something about the world that you think needs to be said. Those outcomes are "significant" even if the novel has a small audience.
  - stewbrew 10y ago
    Once you discuss rulesets and guidelines, it's probably rather a craft. Just because it looks like art from the past century doesn't make it art.
    - e12e 10y ago
      Most art takes craft.
- Artoemius 10y ago
  > How to write a novel that is actually a worthwhile read? There's no silver bullet for that, but one promising approach is to honestly try to write something you'd really like to read yourself. > Why should you invest your time into an endeavour that will most likely fail and have no significant outcome? The answer to this fully depends on your personal definition of a significant outcome. Some people consider working on open-source projects a waste of time. Other people think the same about working for a corporation. For some, the only outcome worth working for is noticeably and unambiguously making the world a better place. Others (the happy ones) just do things "for the hell of it".
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html
Artlav 10y ago
In all my worlds, there are no people. They have shape, structure, geometry, the physics and the backgrounds. Places, regions, cities and borders, architecture and machinery. But there is no one. No characters or villains, no random strangers, no gods or myths. Not even faceless masses. At most there can be vehicles in the distance, or a general, indistinct feeling of inhabitation. This might be the reason i never really wrote any stories, despite always wanting to. For all the verse, there is no one to write about. Not sure how to fix that, other than considering a different media. VR, perhaps...
- derefr 10y ago
  You sound like you'd do well as an art director. You have a vision, but it's an aesthetic one, not a narrative one. You could work with a writer to fit narratives in there.
- elorant 10y ago
  Well you could try writing poetry.
- labster 10y ago
  And here I am imagining what it would be like to first astronauts landing on one of your worlds. What would an explorer feel upon seeing vast cities and machinery, but seeing no trace of the people who built it. Was the city built by a species who all died in a plague 1000 years ago? Is it an abandoned City of the Gods, who were destroyed by another pantheon? Did the inhabitants all leave to a higher plane of existence? Was it built by nanotechnology in anticipation of another alien species' arrival? Add a character who is driven to find out the truth and let them explore. Or you could always go with the "the world really is empty" existential horror, like in Yume Nikki. As a world with only one character and very few monsters, it still manages to be terrifying.
  - bollockitis 10y ago
    > And here I am imagining what it would be like to first astronauts landing on one of your worlds. What would an explorer feel upon seeing vast cities and machinery, but seeing no trace of the people who built it. This reminds me of Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama
raamdev 10y ago
If you're writing fiction (or doing any sort of storytelling for that matter), The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read. The podcast is amazing—it's the first podcast I've found worth listening to from the very beginning—and it has opened my eyes so much, helping me understand the fundamentals of story structure and how great novels "work". I've read Stephen King's On Writing and several other books on novel writing and as a programmer what I really liked about The Story Grid was its analytical approach to storytelling, as opposed to a more emotional, intuitive, "just keep writing and eventually the good stuff will come" approach.
- rayalez 10y ago
  There's a new awesome podcast called Rationally Writing made by Alexander Wales and Daystar Eld(http://alexanderwales.com/rationally-writing/ http://alexanderwales.com/rationally-writing/). I highly recommend it, I'm sure HN crowd will love it. Also I recommend a fantastic course "Writing about Dragons" by by Brandon Sanderson - https://youtube.com/channel/UCyUHzyUE31r16wUL4vEVRJA https://youtube.com/channel/UCyUHzyUE31r16wUL4vEVRJA
  - Kuiper 10y ago
    "Write about Dragons" is a video recording of one of the writing classes titled "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy" that Brandon Sanderson teaches at BYU. He teaches the class every year, and frequently updates it with new material, and most of the lectures are online (spread across myriad Youtube channels). Here are several of the others: * 2014 class lectures (via BYU English dept): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRO9W1Nmh6clZP-IAhMeMpMru7vJaW7KJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRO9W1Nmh6clZP-IAhMeM... * 2016 class lectures (via Camera Panda): http://brandonsanderson.com/2016-sanderson-lectures/ http://brandonsanderson.com/2016-sanderson-lectures/ He also delivered lectures at JordanCon in 2010 and 2011. I frequently recommend his "description and viewpoint" lecture as the best tool for competent non-fiction writers to understand what separates the skill of fiction writing from non-fiction writing. * JordanCon 2010: description and viewpoint https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A1F631BCD668EDF https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A1F631BCD668EDF * JordanCon 2010: plotting https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2AB4CCF96ECB552 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2AB4CCF96ECB552 * JordanCon 2011: sanderson's second law of magic systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9F2E7291F6FBFEB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9F2E7291F6FBFEB Brandon Sanderson is also one of the hosts on the weekly Writing Excuses podcast: http://writingexcuses.com/ http://writingexcuses.com/
erdevs 10y ago
I've always wanted to write a novel, and I hope to some time before I die (or afterward, I guess.. but who knows what's possible then). I like the way this article describes architect vs gardener writers. I've always felt this internal conflict of modes when trying to write. I actually think there is a similar spectrum for coders. As a programmer, I definitely architect-first (within whatever scope I'm in) as opposed to feel-it-out-as-I-go. Yet great programmers I know just get started and sort of see where they land. (Iterative refinement is key in both styles, in my experience, and I'm sure the same is true of writing.) In writing, I always think I should architect the story and setting, so as to validate whether it will be interesting or not at a high-level. But when I try to do this, I seem to end up with uninteresting, low quality results and the process itself feels contrived and burdensome. When I free flow, I seem to do a lot better. But I'm not sure if that's because I just don't have practice in trying to hold all the bits of a story in my head and craft it into a good outline which I can then flow from, and/or if it's because I only write short bits of material (ie the free flow might become unwieldy at length). Curious what others think about the architect vs gardener coder bit, and also how those who write relate their writing approach to their coding approach.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  Do you want to write a novel or do you want to write a good novel? I mean either way it's pretty easy. Just start writing and don't stop. That's kind of the whole NaNoWriMo thing. To write a good novel you just need to write like a dozen shit ones first. Ray Bradbury says ~a million words of bad fiction.
  - erdevs 10y ago
    Heh. :-) I'd love to just accomplish writing one, even if it's shitty. But of course would prefer a good one, at some point. The issue for me at the moment is just carving out the time / paying the opportunity cost to go for it. Not quite ready to dive in yet, but I think about the methods once in a while. Thanks for the reply and advice! I think it'd be sage to bear in mind if/when I start.
egypturnash 10y ago
This worked for my graphic novel: 1. Start with an interesting situation and image. Explore it for a while, ask questions about the situation and weave the answers into the story. 2. Figure out where you want it to end. 3. By now the characters will have established themselves and their desires. Figure out ways to drop situations on the characters that motivate them to go where you want them to. If they refuse then keep trying. 4. Continue until the story's finished. 5. Publish it, for whatever values of "publish" you're comfortable working for - online, self-pub, submissions to publishers/agents, whatever. 6. Take a break. If you enjoyed it then start again. Or, in the language of the OP, switch between pants-ing and planning. Neither one will cover everything you need IMHO. Also: 0. Read a lot. In whatever genre you want to work in, and outside of it. Read great stuff, good stuff, bad stuff. Be able to tell the difference; apply that critical eye to your own work.
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  In case anyone needs some prodding, read Margaret's bio and check out her work. I just started Decrypting Rita -- it's a captivating story, innovatively told: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/ http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
  - egypturnash 10y ago
    Thanks! <3
joeax 10y ago
I wrote a book called The Final Six Days. It is a full length novel about 438 pages. Note that I am a software engineer by trade and not a writer, but I took a stab at it since I've always wanted to write a book. Here are my takeaways: 1. If took me 8 months from idea to published novel (self-published on Amazon). 2. I used a variation of the snowflake method, as my analytical and natural tendency to architect solutions was a good fit for me. The process was: paragraph, outline (by chapter), short story. 3. Writing the book itself is fun and mind stimulating, it only took me 2 months (about an average of 2 hours per day). It was my favorite part of the process. 4. Editing took me 4 months, and it was the most painful, dreadful, unstimulating, and daunting task I ever had to do. Imagine writing code for months, then self-QA'ing your code. Yes, it's that bad. Hire someone (even a spouse or loved-one) to help you. 5. You will find when you go from short story to full story, your story will mutate into something far more beautiful and deeper than you can imagine. It's because when you write continuously without stopping, ideas just flow out from your subconscious. 6. No matter how many times you read your own novel, you will never, ever, ever find every possible mistake, syntax (i.e. misspelling, misused word, etc), or otherwise. Get a pro to help you. 7. Every reader you invite to read your draft will inevitably come back with a ton of feedback, much of it negative (and unnecessarily nitpicky). Ignore most of it. Write the novel you want to write. 8. No matter what, don't give up. If you get writer's block just have a beer, and come back to it tomorrow. 9. Have your cover professionally designed. Yes, a cover does matter. Bonus: I read a book called Writing the Breakout Novel that was a huge help, perfect for an engineering mind. It's very technical in nature and deals with ensuring each chapter has enough intrigue. It also takes about character development, POV, etc. I rewrote many areas after that. Everyone I know who read my book has done so from beginning to end so I did something right. I planned on writing an article on Medium at some point getting into more details about the process, specifically from an engineering point of view. https://www.amazon.com/Final-Days-Time-Crossers-Book-ebook/dp/B01HYJ6D32 https://www.amazon.com/Final-Days-Time-Crossers-Book-ebook/d...
madhadron 10y ago
I have found that most folks who have not written a novel but feel that they would like to have a useless preoccupation with process. A novelist's process is how their habits of mind were adapted to the problems of writing an account of a social simulation that is too large to hold in your head at once (i.e., a novel). For example, I'm not comfortable starting a work without knowing how it will end. It's a psychological crutch after I found myself without the skill to wind up a couple of works that had gone astray. I got lucky in that my first novel (http://madhadron.com/monologue-sample.html http://madhadron.com/monologue-sample.html), and the only one I've actually put out, had a clear ending from the beginning of its conception. I know that I sit down and usually start writing in the middle of a chapter, work to the end as its structure takes form, go back and write the beginning and rewrite from middle to the end to make it hold together. That didn't emerge by plan, just from day after day of writing. My chapters tend to involve lots of flashback and switching of time. It's how I solved a set of problems about keeping the intensity of the prose constant even though events in the story might be spread around in time. It drew on techniques I had learned to handle for music composition many years before. But that's me. There's no reason to think that you'll be anything like me. Or like Mark Twain, or Henry James, or Jane Austen. Don't worry about the work habits of those authors. Instead, study their works. When you have a technical problem, pause and think about places in well written novels where a similar problem arose, and then go analyze how they handle it. For the basic technique of novels, pretty much everything you need is in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' and 'Pride and Prejudice.' 'Emma' is her most technically perfect novel, but you can't learn from it. Go to Twain for handling dialect. Take your pick of some modern novelists for flashback and the like. I mostly use Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End'. I don't really go to Henry James's novels much, but his collected prefaces, also published as the Art of the Novel, or available online at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/home.htm http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/home.htm, are essentially a textbook on writing novels. Dig through the purple prose. There are utter gems that explicate what the craft is about. Reading the opening chapters of Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading' may also be a useful reference on how to approach learning technique from novels. Writer's block is usually your subconscious telling you that something you're doing isn't going to work. It's a useful message. I haven't found much else worth the bother. King's 'On Writing', for example, seemed mere exhortation to me. For nonfiction, Williams's, 'Style: Toward Clarity and Grace' is worth your time, but for fiction I really haven't found anything.
david-given 10y ago
The absolute first thing to do is to get lots of words down and see what happens. Then you'll know what kind of author you are, and where you need to plan and where you can make it up as you go along, what sort of things you like writing about, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, etc. It'll also give you a corpus to look at and learn from. (The first rule of writing is: hold your fingers slightly above the keyboard and wiggle your fingers. Everything else is secondary. Unless words are coming out of your hands, you're not writing.) I can strongly recommend signing up for Nanowrimo: http://nanowrimo.org/ http://nanowrimo.org/ Spend the month of November writing a 50,000 word novel. It doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be 50,000 words (more is acceptable). It gives you a structure to write within, with motivating deadlines and a support group (I usually end up in a coffee shop with other Nanowrimoers from my area), and most of all, a defined win condition: once the month is over you get to stop. The goal is quantity over quality, but if you have any talent whatsoever, you'll end up at the end of it with at least some prose you'll look at later and think, wow. This is good. (And yes, you are allowed to write 'I am a fish' 12,500 times and call yourself a winner. But that's really boring. Wouldn't it be easier just to write prose at random and see what happens?) I've done it several times; I started my first one with a vague idea and an image of a few set pieces and ended up with something semi-coherent at about 55,000 words with some nice characters and, well, it was good enough to put on my website. Subsequent attempts have been lots better. Some authors end up with saleable novels...
- gooseus 10y ago
  I also recommend 750words.com and signing up for their monthly challenge (750 words a day for an entire month). I've been a member for 5 years (grandfathered in from when it was free, currently $5/mo I think) and just finally completed the challenge and made my way to the Wall of Awesomeness in June. In addition to having great motivation to write words and a cool platform to do it on, they also do some NLP analysis of your writing everyday. I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year on 750words, pretty sure they have a badge specifically for it.
- kriro 10y ago
  I'm currently reading "On Writing" by King and he recommends 1k/day and allows you to take a day off each week. He also recommends the obvious (room with a shut door and no distractions) and lots of reading (he averages about 80 books/year). I recommend the book, the first half is an autobiography of sorts which is also interesting.
jacobheric 10y ago
Here's what I do. I usually start with a dream. When I wake up, if I've dreamt something interesting I write down a brief sketch or scene or even just an image in a google doc. Then I mull it over for a few weeks, adding new ideas and details to the doc. I love to use the time that I'd otherwise be using for insomnia. If I find myself awake in bed, I spend time tuning the idea or the scene until I fall back asleep. Then I write it down in the morning. Pretty soon I have a plot or a basic outline or just an idea for a beginning or an end. Then I continue to chew on it until a specific first sentence strikes me. Then I drop everything and start writing like a maniac. When I'm going on the writing, I try to let the characters live and let the story go where the characters take it, knowing that they'll eventually end up at the signposts I've set up in the initial sketch. I always use a trick that Hemingway used: stop writing for the day when you know what's going to happen next. That way you'll start right off again tomorrow and not get stuck. I've written three books this way and I'm writing two more now. I've started a publishing company and published one so far. I'm working on ushering two more through that process (editing, editing, editing, typesetting, etc). That's a whole other story, and just as important. EDIT: I have a day job (most of the time) as a developer, I do this in my spare time and between gigs.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  That is awesome, I really appreciate you sharing how you approach capturing your fog of creativity. I've had to do similar disciplined efforts, especially during revision, following my subconscious apparently working some things out for me. Great advice in your post, thanks.
gkya 10y ago
I recommend the Art of Dramatic Writing of Lajos Egri to anyone who wants to write fiction in any genre and of any type.
christinehany 10y ago
Love Writing? We can help you build a career that lets you: Have flexible hours Choose topics you're passionate about Earn a great income doing what you love Write for blogs, ebooks, magazines, and more http://turboviraltraffic.com/links/3804 http://turboviraltraffic.com/links/3804
christinehany 10y ago
Love Writing? We can help you build a career that lets you: Have flexible hours Choose topics you're passionate about Earn a great income doing what you love Write for blogs, ebooks, magazines, and more http://turboviraltraffic.com/links/3804 http://turboviraltraffic.com/links/3804
beccabb 10y ago
HN people trying to write a novel is somehow funny to me!
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Is writing a novel all that different from writing a compiler from scratch or hacking on obsolete consoles like so many posts here. We are all drawn to long involved, possibly solitary, intellectual exercises. Sort of a hacker personality trait.
  - rpgmaker 10y ago
    > Is writing a novel all that different from writing a compiler from scratch or hacking on obsolete consoles like so many posts here. Yes it is. But you're mostly right about your other affirmations.
lkrubner 10y ago
This surprised me: "Mark Twain too, insisted that a book “write itself” and that “the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations…I put it away…The reason was very simple — my tank had run dry; it was empty" I'm surprised that the phrase "tank had run dry" was already established during Mark Twain's life. The metaphor refers to automobiles. He died in 1910. Automobiles began to become popular during the early 1890s, but they were still the toys of the rich. The first Model T was built in 1908, and this was the first car built "for the masses". It's interesting that Twain did not use a steam engine metaphor. "The boiler needs to be stoked." His life overlaps entirely with the peak of the railroad/steam engine. But he uses a metaphor from automobiles?
- jccc 10y ago
  The word "tank" as a container for fuel dates at least back to 1902: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank And "tanks" had been used for things other than fuel for centuries, such as water, that would have "run dry."
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  How do you think steam engines generate steam if not from a tank of water?
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6stringmerc 10y ago
Collecting a bunch of anecdotes about writing from a litany of disparate writers seems rather odd to me. A little bit of a disingenuous title maybe? This is how "successful" writers wrote novels. Personally I think the novel is on its way out to pasture the way Sonnets are. How many people read Sonnets? Back in the day, plenty. Look at the names on that list and a significant number either work in relatively well defined genres (King, Gaiman, Martin) or were working in a pre-TV time when reading was an essential pastime (Twain, Proust) and audiences were engaged at a much higher level. That may not seem like a direct connection to "how to write a novel" but it certainly applies to "why write a novel." I always preferred short fiction. This is why I've pursued screenwriting with much more discipline of late (just entered Shore Scripts, will wait for Nicholls & others next year) trying my hand at TV series (stoner golfer comedy, toy company workplace comedy) and various film ideas. Honestly I think writing Novels is like writing every part for a Symphony. Even if some of the parts are absolute genius, they're easily drowned out by slop or chaos. Very challenging discipline, and if you feel it's a good fit for you, I do say "You've got nothing to lose but your time and your mind by trying!" Seriously though, happy writing to all.
losteverything 10y ago
I love to create words and found using my fingers to create words is so inferior to simply talking them. I would never have thought that the greatest feature of my phone is not the camera but the microphone. I wish I had voice recorder when I wrote my diaries 40 years ago. I still write with pen and sometimes fingers to help me uncover how I feel about deep subjects. Often I am surprised my initial thought becomes the opposite to my final conclusion. I recall reading Justice Roberts said something similar. So for me actually writing something ( out) is more formation of thought. My biggest surprise was the hundred 180 degree turn I made on the Karen Ann Quinlan episode.
chatmasta 10y ago
Story submitted to HN by samclemens, nice. :) Samuel Clemens was the actual name of Mark Twain, for those who don't know.

238 points by samclemens 10y ago

What works for me* : 1. Make a plan. 2. Mostly ignore the plan. 3. Feel. Feel what your characters are feeling. Feel what you want the reader to feel. 4. Write, even if you aren't feeling. 5. Iterate. Be fearless in throwing things out that don't work. Rewrite an entire work if you have to. Some of these "greats" act like they completely wing it. Stephen King, for instance, has some really great writing. He's a man really in touch with his emotions and can, through his writing, cause those feelings to resonate in you. But, his lack of planning leads, in my opinion, to weak endings that are emotionally unsatisfying and sometimes nonsensical. *By works for me, I mean my best fiction writing comes out of this, not that it's any good or published. Edit: Formatting

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jacobheric 10y ago
I always thought King's writing could stand to be edited down (a lot). But I feel that about most genre fiction. I find it stifling as a reader especially when characters thoughts and emotions are over described. Usually a simple detail about their appearance, their manner, or similar is sufficient to clue me into what's going on inside. And the uncovering of those clues makes for a much more enjoyable reading experience.
- bovermyer 10y ago
  Have you read anything by Robert E. Howard? I imagine you might rather enjoy his works.
  - jacobheric 10y ago
    I'll check it out. Thanks! Some of my favorite reading is genre fiction that trims the fat and floats above the rest of the genre. This seems to fit that bill.
    - rpgmaker 10y ago
      Any recommendations?
      - jacobheric 10y ago
        Yes, I recently stumbled upon Black Wings Has My Angel by Eliot Chaze. Great, obscure and underrated crime/noir/pulp novel. It transcends the genre. It's somehow both more gritty and more literary than the more famous Hammett and Chandler and similar stuff.
    - bovermyer 10y ago
      REH, most famous for the Conan the Barbarian short stories, has a visceral writing style. I'd start with one of the Conan omnibuses, like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Conan-Cimmerian-Original-Adventures/dp/0345461517/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1470229829&sr=8-10&keywords=conan+the+barbarian https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Conan-Cimmerian-Original-Adven...
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  I agree. Ironically (since he is associated with the 'gardeners' type in the piece), his writing feels too methodical and lineal to me. Also very repetitive. Of his books I haven't liked the first one. The same happens to me with Neil Gaiman, who seems very heavily influenced by King. To me their style of writing is almost interchangeable.
  - douche 10y ago
    A lot of Stephen King's best writing, he was pretty much out of his mind the whole time on PBR and cocaine. For instance, not really having any recollection of penning Cujo[1]. His later stuff feels much more planned, in that it kind of all ties into his big meta-project of the Dark Tower, even the early stand-alone stuff, that he more or less retcons into that universe. [1] http://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/king-forgets-cujo.2225/ http://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/king-forgets-cuj...
    - jacobheric 10y ago
      I actually think that's not a bad way to write! Whatever gets you into the zone or flow. Of course, you have to have the discipline to go back and edit with clear eyes later. There is a famous (mostly misattributed) quote to that effect: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84190-sometimes-i-write-drunk-and-revise-sober-and-sometimes-i http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84190-sometimes-i-write-drun... Though Hemingway didn't say that, he was definitely a merciless editor of his own work. I dropped in on this (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway) exhibit recently that had early drafts of some of his most famous stories and books and it was remarkable how many whole pages and chapters he chopped out just prior to publication.
    - rpgmaker 10y ago
      I have read about that. And while it would explain the repetitiveness it's independent of how his writing appears to me. Needless to say, a lot of people disagree with my view of his writing.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Me too! I find myself skimming when I read his books.
Kuiper 10y ago
As referenced in the submission article, George R.R. describes two approaches two writing: >"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect." These two approaches are often referred to as "outlining" vs "discovery writing." My view is that these approaches don't describe two categories of writers so much as they describe two points along a spectrum, and most writers lie somewhere between the two extremes. For example, Brandon Sanderson says that he extensively plans/outlines his plots and fantasy settings, but he tends to "discovery write" his characters: he will frequently write multiple versions of the opening chapters of a book to see which character fits best for the story he is writing, sort of like auditioning different actors for the role. Brandon didn't plan the Mistborn trilogy with a female protagonist; rather, he tried several different versions of the opening chapters, each featuring a different character in the role of protagonist, and he found that the story worked best with a girl in the lead role. He went on to make several significant adjustments to the events of the story to fit with his character choice (he has sometimes jokingly described Mistborn book 1 as "Lord of the Rings meets My Fair Lady"), but the world and the overarching plot structure still matched his original plan for the series.

armenarmen 10y ago

Wrapping up with my first novel now. Very much fell into the gardener/pants faction. I had a concept "start up guys can't raise money so they sell cocaine" and just let it unfold from there. Any other fiction folks here subscribe to the planning method?

petewailes 10y ago
Very much so. I'm currently in the process of writing a trilogy of trilogies, for which there's a loose outline of each book and the major plot points. However, the detail of exactly what happens is left up to me as I find it in the moment. It's something several acquaintances of mine who are published, successful writers subscribe to. One recently summed it up nicely as "plan the mountains, write the valleys". The major advantages are that it gives you the ability to write the ending first, so you don't get to the end and discover that you need to dig yourself out of a hole, and that you can keep things internally consistent, ensuring people don't magically teleport around the world (unless of course that's actually a thing your characters can do). There's something to be said for not over-planning, but also for giving yourself enough time and room to be able to spot problems ahead of time so you don't write yourself into a corner.
- armenarmen 10y ago
  This "plan the mountains, write the valleys" seems like a pretty decent approach. I suppose that I did something of a hybrid. I had plot points that came to me at different stages that I wanted to get to. But again it was mostly by the seat of my pants. Is the first part of your trilogy out yet? I'd love to checkout a fellow HNers work!
  - petewailes 10y ago
    Not yet. I'm planning to write until book six before I start publishing (I expect my life to get busy during the writing of the last three, so I want a buffer in place). That said, I'll add you to my list of people to contact when they start being published (probably end of next year).
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dogprez 10y ago

There are techniques for writing for role-playing games that are a hybrid of planning/winging. You want to plan a hook, how the story get's started, who are the main agents and their motivations, then you just let the story unfold. It seems there is room for something in the middle.

aethertap 10y ago
> There are techniques for writing for role-playing games that are a hybrid of planning/winging. That sounds very interesting. Do you have any links you could share with more details? I've been trying to come up with a way to get some friends involved to play out some of the scenes in a book I'm working on and those techniques might really help. The only thing I've seen that sounds related is a game called "Downfall" [1]. I think it's a little too structured to use for this purpose, but I liked the concept. 1. https://lessthanthreegames.com/downfall/ https://lessthanthreegames.com/downfall/
- dogprez 10y ago
  Sure, there is this book "The Lazy Dungeon Master" ( http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/ http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/ ). Dungeon World also has advice on how to do something similar with its "Fronts" ( http://www.dungeon-world.com/ http://www.dungeon-world.com/ ). The writers of The Expanse based their books off of role-playing sessions they did. George R.R. Martin also was an avid role-player. I believe his Wildcards novels were based on his games in the RPG Superworld.
  - aethertap 10y ago
    Dungeon World looks awesome, I'm definitely going to give that a shot. Thanks!
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Regarding playing scenes with friends: What's the genre of your book? I have a couple lighter-weight RPGs to offer as suggestions. FATE - you have skills ranked as things like mediocre, expert, poor, etc. (don't recall exact terms). You roll dice to determine how well you do as modifiers (+/-/0) to your skill or attribute when appropriate. Fairly freeform character creation and play. Genreless. You can make it fit almost any genre. Dread - This is horror focused. The mechanic is a Jenga tower. If a player wants to do a non-mundane task, they pull a block, if the tower falls, that character is out of the game (dead, went mad, whatever, you choose). Tension develops as the tower gets harder to pull from. Ebook is $10-20, can't recall, got it for free for buying the print book at a convention. Very lightweight, while horror focused it is otherwise independent from your setting. Create character sheets describing their history, their skills then are "what does it make sense for them to know". Does it make sense for the programmer to be a sharpshooter? Maybe not, maybe a difficult shot requires two pulls for them. OTOH, a soldier character may only need to pull if the shot effects the story more significantly. You can wing it, but be consistent with your players.

programminggeek 10y ago

There was only one thing that worked for me to finish my first book. I showed up every day and wrote something. Then I edited the hell out of it (like 8 passes). The rough draft was 100+ pages. The final version is 64. There is no shortcut to writing and editing a book. You have to put a lot of time in and just write the damn book. My book if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163BAUWC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0163BAUWC

swsieber 10y ago

I'm in the middle of the "Wheel of Time" books. That must have been the most planned out series ever. Or reworked like a million times. At least, that's what I gather from people who have reread the series and praise the amazing foreshadowing in the first half of the series (even books 1 and 2). For those who don't know, "The Wheel of Time" is 14 books plus a prequel.

gentleteblor 10y ago
Those middle books are indicative of something...i'm just not sure if it's planning or rework :) I'd be interested to hear what you think of the approach (planned or reworked) when you hit the Sanderson books. Enjoy!
logfromblammo 10y ago
When I wrote my book, I intentionally left a few bricks lying around in it, so that I could make them look like foreshadowing later on. Really, I have no idea what they will connect to, just that they're not connected to anything right now. Several of the loose ends are already planned to connect to books 2, 3, and the (presumptively) conclusive book 4, but there are others that I just threw in as an investment that might pay off later. But no reader would know for sure whether any given loose end is a forward link or just a brick, until the series is pinched off and it's still left hanging.
wccrawford 10y ago
I think the writer had a vague plan at the start, but nothing beyond that. This is pretty much proven out in books 5-10 where he rambled on and on about basically nothing. When called on it, he said he'd do better and he did on the next couple, but then fell ill. He managed to write up his ending notes and hand his notes to Brandon Sanderson before he died. But I don't think those notes were written before that.

qznc 10y ago

I like the snowflake method [0]. It gives you a very strict plan. Disclaimer: I have not written a novel yet. [0] http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/ http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-met...

ggambetta 10y ago
I have! Followed the Snowflake Method relatively closely to write my first (and so far, only) novel, The Golden Legacy (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI).
joeax 10y ago
I also used the snowflake method (with exceptions). Being a software developer forces you to think that way. My approach was: paragraph, outline, story story, full novel. I also refined my research in between stages. The novel is called The Final Six Days, about an asteroid about to destroy civilization and the strange man who is endlessly time looping in the those final days. http://amzn.to/2atUtOC http://amzn.to/2atUtOC (P.S. I'm a introverted engineer not a shameless self-promoter. I don't want to feel like I'm spamming so if you want me to check out a novel you wrote let me know.)
mklim 10y ago
It's really interesting how much the writing process differs among people. I could never see this working for me. 95% of my writing is getting to know my characters and accurately recording what they do, 5% is actually having a plan on what I want to happen to drive the plot. Getting to know a character is like getting to know a person, except instead of interacting with them and hearing their words IRL I'm "watching" them go through experiences in their life and "hearing" their thoughts instead of just their spoken words. Me writing the story feels more like me just channeling these imaginary people and recording what's happening to them, sometimes recording it in their own words. It's almost like running a tabletop campaign, where I'm setting up the environment and the major problem but then leaving it up to my players to drive the action and give me hooks to use. This leads to a lot of pacing problems that I have to solve when editing, and a really inconsistent rate of progress on the initial draft (lots of days spent just trying to "hear" what happens next) so I've tried a lot of plans like this to make myself a better writer. But every time I've tried I've come up with nothing. I don't know the characters, so how can I possibly plan out what they're going to do? I can't fill out a spreadsheet about them either, because I don't know anything about them yet, how do I know what the right answers are to put down? The only exception I've found is when I write a bunch of short stories and/or scenes outside of the longer novel from their POV and get to know them that way, then I can fill in the character worksheets and figure out what they would do and write down the scenes in one sentence or less summaries a long time ahead of time. I get that writing scenes involving them is logically making stuff up just as much as picking personality traits to fill in the blank in a worksheet is, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I'm an observer. Disclaimer: never had anything past a short story published by anyone other than myself, so I'm not exactly an authority. It's definitely not an efficient style, but it's how it works for me.

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akeck 10y ago

Those here who write, do you use plain text with source control? If so, what's your work flow?

jacobheric 10y ago
I start out in google docs because it's convenient and the change history is nice to have. I do this instead of plain text because I like adding some formatting as I write. If the book gets over 200 pages (or thereabouts) google docs starts to have problems and then I switch over to Pages on OSX. There, I save edits to google drive as I go. When it comes to (self) publishing time, I actually end up typesetting in word (for print) because it's the easiest, least horrible tool for that (though still horrible). HTML for kindle.
calebm 10y ago
Evernote -> git/plain text
ggambetta 10y ago
Markdown, vim and git, plus spreadsheets for notes and The Plan (list of scenes, etc). Wrote some scripts that use pandoc to take the markdown files and generate both epub files for the Kindle version and OpenOffice files that I later save as PDF for the print version. I should write an article about my workflow. From Markdown to Amazon using 100% open source :)
- awesomebob 10y ago
  I would like to read that article. :)
  - ggambetta 10y ago
    Here it is! https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov...
david-given 10y ago

innocentoldguy 10y ago

I've studied various methods (e.g. "pants-ing," Snowflake, outlining, etc.) and for me, a combination of outlining and pants-ing works best for structuring my novels. Having said that, I don't think the method you use for structuring your novel is nearly as important as how you write. I studied writing in college, and it always amazed me how many people would use passive sentences; had no grasp of tenses, spelling, punctuation, or grammar; didn't understand plotting, or even the three-act structure; mixed up their points of view; couldn't write dialogue; broke the "show don't tell" mantra; never bothered researching their topics; etc. If you cannot write to begin with, no amount of structure is going to make your novel worth reading, so solve that problem first. I would recommend Million Dollar Outlines, by David Farland, Write That Novel, by David Farland, and On Writing, by Stephen King, as good places to start. I would also recommend joining a writing group, and encouraging your peers to critique the hell out of your work.

magic_beans 10y ago
I find it interesting that many people who want to write a novel don't actually read very much, and so their writing isn't very well developed.
chipotle_coyote 10y ago
I'd second, third and fourth the notion of joining a writing group. Attending a (good) intensive writing workshop like Clarion or the CSSF workshops -- those are speculative fiction, since that's what I know, but there are others out there -- can also be invaluable.

stewbrew 10y ago

I think the more interesting questions would be: - How to write a novel that is actually a worthwhile read? - Why should you invest your time into an endeavour that will most likely fail and have no significant outcome?

jacobheric 10y ago
If you consider a novel a work of art, then creating it is an act of artistic creation that has some intrinsic value. There is a benefit to expressing yourself carefully, to telling a story that says something about the world that you think needs to be said. Those outcomes are "significant" even if the novel has a small audience.
- stewbrew 10y ago
  Once you discuss rulesets and guidelines, it's probably rather a craft. Just because it looks like art from the past century doesn't make it art.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Most art takes craft.
Artoemius 10y ago
> How to write a novel that is actually a worthwhile read? There's no silver bullet for that, but one promising approach is to honestly try to write something you'd really like to read yourself. > Why should you invest your time into an endeavour that will most likely fail and have no significant outcome? The answer to this fully depends on your personal definition of a significant outcome. Some people consider working on open-source projects a waste of time. Other people think the same about working for a corporation. For some, the only outcome worth working for is noticeably and unambiguously making the world a better place. Others (the happy ones) just do things "for the hell of it".
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

Artlav 10y ago

In all my worlds, there are no people. They have shape, structure, geometry, the physics and the backgrounds. Places, regions, cities and borders, architecture and machinery. But there is no one. No characters or villains, no random strangers, no gods or myths. Not even faceless masses. At most there can be vehicles in the distance, or a general, indistinct feeling of inhabitation. This might be the reason i never really wrote any stories, despite always wanting to. For all the verse, there is no one to write about. Not sure how to fix that, other than considering a different media. VR, perhaps...

derefr 10y ago
You sound like you'd do well as an art director. You have a vision, but it's an aesthetic one, not a narrative one. You could work with a writer to fit narratives in there.
elorant 10y ago
Well you could try writing poetry.
labster 10y ago
And here I am imagining what it would be like to first astronauts landing on one of your worlds. What would an explorer feel upon seeing vast cities and machinery, but seeing no trace of the people who built it. Was the city built by a species who all died in a plague 1000 years ago? Is it an abandoned City of the Gods, who were destroyed by another pantheon? Did the inhabitants all leave to a higher plane of existence? Was it built by nanotechnology in anticipation of another alien species' arrival? Add a character who is driven to find out the truth and let them explore. Or you could always go with the "the world really is empty" existential horror, like in Yume Nikki. As a world with only one character and very few monsters, it still manages to be terrifying.
- bollockitis 10y ago
  > And here I am imagining what it would be like to first astronauts landing on one of your worlds. What would an explorer feel upon seeing vast cities and machinery, but seeing no trace of the people who built it. This reminds me of Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama

raamdev 10y ago

If you're writing fiction (or doing any sort of storytelling for that matter), The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read. The podcast is amazing—it's the first podcast I've found worth listening to from the very beginning—and it has opened my eyes so much, helping me understand the fundamentals of story structure and how great novels "work". I've read Stephen King's On Writing and several other books on novel writing and as a programmer what I really liked about The Story Grid was its analytical approach to storytelling, as opposed to a more emotional, intuitive, "just keep writing and eventually the good stuff will come" approach.

rayalez 10y ago
There's a new awesome podcast called Rationally Writing made by Alexander Wales and Daystar Eld(http://alexanderwales.com/rationally-writing/ http://alexanderwales.com/rationally-writing/). I highly recommend it, I'm sure HN crowd will love it. Also I recommend a fantastic course "Writing about Dragons" by by Brandon Sanderson - https://youtube.com/channel/UCyUHzyUE31r16wUL4vEVRJA https://youtube.com/channel/UCyUHzyUE31r16wUL4vEVRJA
- Kuiper 10y ago
  "Write about Dragons" is a video recording of one of the writing classes titled "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy" that Brandon Sanderson teaches at BYU. He teaches the class every year, and frequently updates it with new material, and most of the lectures are online (spread across myriad Youtube channels). Here are several of the others: * 2014 class lectures (via BYU English dept): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRO9W1Nmh6clZP-IAhMeMpMru7vJaW7KJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRO9W1Nmh6clZP-IAhMeM... * 2016 class lectures (via Camera Panda): http://brandonsanderson.com/2016-sanderson-lectures/ http://brandonsanderson.com/2016-sanderson-lectures/ He also delivered lectures at JordanCon in 2010 and 2011. I frequently recommend his "description and viewpoint" lecture as the best tool for competent non-fiction writers to understand what separates the skill of fiction writing from non-fiction writing. * JordanCon 2010: description and viewpoint https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A1F631BCD668EDF https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A1F631BCD668EDF * JordanCon 2010: plotting https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2AB4CCF96ECB552 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2AB4CCF96ECB552 * JordanCon 2011: sanderson's second law of magic systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9F2E7291F6FBFEB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9F2E7291F6FBFEB Brandon Sanderson is also one of the hosts on the weekly Writing Excuses podcast: http://writingexcuses.com/ http://writingexcuses.com/

erdevs 10y ago

I've always wanted to write a novel, and I hope to some time before I die (or afterward, I guess.. but who knows what's possible then). I like the way this article describes architect vs gardener writers. I've always felt this internal conflict of modes when trying to write. I actually think there is a similar spectrum for coders. As a programmer, I definitely architect-first (within whatever scope I'm in) as opposed to feel-it-out-as-I-go. Yet great programmers I know just get started and sort of see where they land. (Iterative refinement is key in both styles, in my experience, and I'm sure the same is true of writing.) In writing, I always think I should architect the story and setting, so as to validate whether it will be interesting or not at a high-level. But when I try to do this, I seem to end up with uninteresting, low quality results and the process itself feels contrived and burdensome. When I free flow, I seem to do a lot better. But I'm not sure if that's because I just don't have practice in trying to hold all the bits of a story in my head and craft it into a good outline which I can then flow from, and/or if it's because I only write short bits of material (ie the free flow might become unwieldy at length). Curious what others think about the architect vs gardener coder bit, and also how those who write relate their writing approach to their coding approach.

Avshalom 10y ago
Do you want to write a novel or do you want to write a good novel? I mean either way it's pretty easy. Just start writing and don't stop. That's kind of the whole NaNoWriMo thing. To write a good novel you just need to write like a dozen shit ones first. Ray Bradbury says ~a million words of bad fiction.
- erdevs 10y ago
  Heh. :-) I'd love to just accomplish writing one, even if it's shitty. But of course would prefer a good one, at some point. The issue for me at the moment is just carving out the time / paying the opportunity cost to go for it. Not quite ready to dive in yet, but I think about the methods once in a while. Thanks for the reply and advice! I think it'd be sage to bear in mind if/when I start.

egypturnash 10y ago

This worked for my graphic novel: 1. Start with an interesting situation and image. Explore it for a while, ask questions about the situation and weave the answers into the story. 2. Figure out where you want it to end. 3. By now the characters will have established themselves and their desires. Figure out ways to drop situations on the characters that motivate them to go where you want them to. If they refuse then keep trying. 4. Continue until the story's finished. 5. Publish it, for whatever values of "publish" you're comfortable working for - online, self-pub, submissions to publishers/agents, whatever. 6. Take a break. If you enjoyed it then start again. Or, in the language of the OP, switch between pants-ing and planning. Neither one will cover everything you need IMHO. Also: 0. Read a lot. In whatever genre you want to work in, and outside of it. Read great stuff, good stuff, bad stuff. Be able to tell the difference; apply that critical eye to your own work.

jessedhillon 10y ago
In case anyone needs some prodding, read Margaret's bio and check out her work. I just started Decrypting Rita -- it's a captivating story, innovatively told: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/ http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
- egypturnash 10y ago
  Thanks! <3

joeax 10y ago

I wrote a book called The Final Six Days. It is a full length novel about 438 pages. Note that I am a software engineer by trade and not a writer, but I took a stab at it since I've always wanted to write a book. Here are my takeaways: 1. If took me 8 months from idea to published novel (self-published on Amazon). 2. I used a variation of the snowflake method, as my analytical and natural tendency to architect solutions was a good fit for me. The process was: paragraph, outline (by chapter), short story. 3. Writing the book itself is fun and mind stimulating, it only took me 2 months (about an average of 2 hours per day). It was my favorite part of the process. 4. Editing took me 4 months, and it was the most painful, dreadful, unstimulating, and daunting task I ever had to do. Imagine writing code for months, then self-QA'ing your code. Yes, it's that bad. Hire someone (even a spouse or loved-one) to help you. 5. You will find when you go from short story to full story, your story will mutate into something far more beautiful and deeper than you can imagine. It's because when you write continuously without stopping, ideas just flow out from your subconscious. 6. No matter how many times you read your own novel, you will never, ever, ever find every possible mistake, syntax (i.e. misspelling, misused word, etc), or otherwise. Get a pro to help you. 7. Every reader you invite to read your draft will inevitably come back with a ton of feedback, much of it negative (and unnecessarily nitpicky). Ignore most of it. Write the novel you want to write. 8. No matter what, don't give up. If you get writer's block just have a beer, and come back to it tomorrow. 9. Have your cover professionally designed. Yes, a cover does matter. Bonus: I read a book called Writing the Breakout Novel that was a huge help, perfect for an engineering mind. It's very technical in nature and deals with ensuring each chapter has enough intrigue. It also takes about character development, POV, etc. I rewrote many areas after that. Everyone I know who read my book has done so from beginning to end so I did something right. I planned on writing an article on Medium at some point getting into more details about the process, specifically from an engineering point of view. https://www.amazon.com/Final-Days-Time-Crossers-Book-ebook/dp/B01HYJ6D32 https://www.amazon.com/Final-Days-Time-Crossers-Book-ebook/d...

madhadron 10y ago

I have found that most folks who have not written a novel but feel that they would like to have a useless preoccupation with process. A novelist's process is how their habits of mind were adapted to the problems of writing an account of a social simulation that is too large to hold in your head at once (i.e., a novel). For example, I'm not comfortable starting a work without knowing how it will end. It's a psychological crutch after I found myself without the skill to wind up a couple of works that had gone astray. I got lucky in that my first novel (http://madhadron.com/monologue-sample.html http://madhadron.com/monologue-sample.html), and the only one I've actually put out, had a clear ending from the beginning of its conception. I know that I sit down and usually start writing in the middle of a chapter, work to the end as its structure takes form, go back and write the beginning and rewrite from middle to the end to make it hold together. That didn't emerge by plan, just from day after day of writing. My chapters tend to involve lots of flashback and switching of time. It's how I solved a set of problems about keeping the intensity of the prose constant even though events in the story might be spread around in time. It drew on techniques I had learned to handle for music composition many years before. But that's me. There's no reason to think that you'll be anything like me. Or like Mark Twain, or Henry James, or Jane Austen. Don't worry about the work habits of those authors. Instead, study their works. When you have a technical problem, pause and think about places in well written novels where a similar problem arose, and then go analyze how they handle it. For the basic technique of novels, pretty much everything you need is in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' and 'Pride and Prejudice.' 'Emma' is her most technically perfect novel, but you can't learn from it. Go to Twain for handling dialect. Take your pick of some modern novelists for flashback and the like. I mostly use Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End'. I don't really go to Henry James's novels much, but his collected prefaces, also published as the Art of the Novel, or available online at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/home.htm http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/home.htm, are essentially a textbook on writing novels. Dig through the purple prose. There are utter gems that explicate what the craft is about. Reading the opening chapters of Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading' may also be a useful reference on how to approach learning technique from novels. Writer's block is usually your subconscious telling you that something you're doing isn't going to work. It's a useful message. I haven't found much else worth the bother. King's 'On Writing', for example, seemed mere exhortation to me. For nonfiction, Williams's, 'Style: Toward Clarity and Grace' is worth your time, but for fiction I really haven't found anything.

david-given 10y ago

The absolute first thing to do is to get lots of words down and see what happens. Then you'll know what kind of author you are, and where you need to plan and where you can make it up as you go along, what sort of things you like writing about, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, etc. It'll also give you a corpus to look at and learn from. (The first rule of writing is: hold your fingers slightly above the keyboard and wiggle your fingers. Everything else is secondary. Unless words are coming out of your hands, you're not writing.) I can strongly recommend signing up for Nanowrimo: http://nanowrimo.org/ http://nanowrimo.org/ Spend the month of November writing a 50,000 word novel. It doesn't need to be good, it just needs to be 50,000 words (more is acceptable). It gives you a structure to write within, with motivating deadlines and a support group (I usually end up in a coffee shop with other Nanowrimoers from my area), and most of all, a defined win condition: once the month is over you get to stop. The goal is quantity over quality, but if you have any talent whatsoever, you'll end up at the end of it with at least some prose you'll look at later and think, wow. This is good. (And yes, you are allowed to write 'I am a fish' 12,500 times and call yourself a winner. But that's really boring. Wouldn't it be easier just to write prose at random and see what happens?) I've done it several times; I started my first one with a vague idea and an image of a few set pieces and ended up with something semi-coherent at about 55,000 words with some nice characters and, well, it was good enough to put on my website. Subsequent attempts have been lots better. Some authors end up with saleable novels...

gooseus 10y ago
I also recommend 750words.com and signing up for their monthly challenge (750 words a day for an entire month). I've been a member for 5 years (grandfathered in from when it was free, currently $5/mo I think) and just finally completed the challenge and made my way to the Wall of Awesomeness in June. In addition to having great motivation to write words and a cool platform to do it on, they also do some NLP analysis of your writing everyday. I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year on 750words, pretty sure they have a badge specifically for it.
kriro 10y ago
I'm currently reading "On Writing" by King and he recommends 1k/day and allows you to take a day off each week. He also recommends the obvious (room with a shut door and no distractions) and lots of reading (he averages about 80 books/year). I recommend the book, the first half is an autobiography of sorts which is also interesting.

jacobheric 10y ago

Here's what I do. I usually start with a dream. When I wake up, if I've dreamt something interesting I write down a brief sketch or scene or even just an image in a google doc. Then I mull it over for a few weeks, adding new ideas and details to the doc. I love to use the time that I'd otherwise be using for insomnia. If I find myself awake in bed, I spend time tuning the idea or the scene until I fall back asleep. Then I write it down in the morning. Pretty soon I have a plot or a basic outline or just an idea for a beginning or an end. Then I continue to chew on it until a specific first sentence strikes me. Then I drop everything and start writing like a maniac. When I'm going on the writing, I try to let the characters live and let the story go where the characters take it, knowing that they'll eventually end up at the signposts I've set up in the initial sketch. I always use a trick that Hemingway used: stop writing for the day when you know what's going to happen next. That way you'll start right off again tomorrow and not get stuck. I've written three books this way and I'm writing two more now. I've started a publishing company and published one so far. I'm working on ushering two more through that process (editing, editing, editing, typesetting, etc). That's a whole other story, and just as important. EDIT: I have a day job (most of the time) as a developer, I do this in my spare time and between gigs.

6stringmerc 10y ago
That is awesome, I really appreciate you sharing how you approach capturing your fog of creativity. I've had to do similar disciplined efforts, especially during revision, following my subconscious apparently working some things out for me. Great advice in your post, thanks.

gkya 10y ago

I recommend the Art of Dramatic Writing of Lajos Egri to anyone who wants to write fiction in any genre and of any type.

christinehany 10y ago

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christinehany 10y ago

beccabb 10y ago

HN people trying to write a novel is somehow funny to me!

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Is writing a novel all that different from writing a compiler from scratch or hacking on obsolete consoles like so many posts here. We are all drawn to long involved, possibly solitary, intellectual exercises. Sort of a hacker personality trait.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  > Is writing a novel all that different from writing a compiler from scratch or hacking on obsolete consoles like so many posts here. Yes it is. But you're mostly right about your other affirmations.

lkrubner 10y ago

This surprised me: "Mark Twain too, insisted that a book “write itself” and that “the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations…I put it away…The reason was very simple — my tank had run dry; it was empty" I'm surprised that the phrase "tank had run dry" was already established during Mark Twain's life. The metaphor refers to automobiles. He died in 1910. Automobiles began to become popular during the early 1890s, but they were still the toys of the rich. The first Model T was built in 1908, and this was the first car built "for the masses". It's interesting that Twain did not use a steam engine metaphor. "The boiler needs to be stoked." His life overlaps entirely with the peak of the railroad/steam engine. But he uses a metaphor from automobiles?

jccc 10y ago
The word "tank" as a container for fuel dates at least back to 1902: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tank And "tanks" had been used for things other than fuel for centuries, such as water, that would have "run dry."
chrisseaton 10y ago
How do you think steam engines generate steam if not from a tank of water?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

6stringmerc 10y ago

Collecting a bunch of anecdotes about writing from a litany of disparate writers seems rather odd to me. A little bit of a disingenuous title maybe? This is how "successful" writers wrote novels. Personally I think the novel is on its way out to pasture the way Sonnets are. How many people read Sonnets? Back in the day, plenty. Look at the names on that list and a significant number either work in relatively well defined genres (King, Gaiman, Martin) or were working in a pre-TV time when reading was an essential pastime (Twain, Proust) and audiences were engaged at a much higher level. That may not seem like a direct connection to "how to write a novel" but it certainly applies to "why write a novel." I always preferred short fiction. This is why I've pursued screenwriting with much more discipline of late (just entered Shore Scripts, will wait for Nicholls & others next year) trying my hand at TV series (stoner golfer comedy, toy company workplace comedy) and various film ideas. Honestly I think writing Novels is like writing every part for a Symphony. Even if some of the parts are absolute genius, they're easily drowned out by slop or chaos. Very challenging discipline, and if you feel it's a good fit for you, I do say "You've got nothing to lose but your time and your mind by trying!" Seriously though, happy writing to all.

losteverything 10y ago

I love to create words and found using my fingers to create words is so inferior to simply talking them. I would never have thought that the greatest feature of my phone is not the camera but the microphone. I wish I had voice recorder when I wrote my diaries 40 years ago. I still write with pen and sometimes fingers to help me uncover how I feel about deep subjects. Often I am surprised my initial thought becomes the opposite to my final conclusion. I recall reading Justice Roberts said something similar. So for me actually writing something ( out) is more formation of thought. My biggest surprise was the hundred 180 degree turn I made on the Karen Ann Quinlan episode.

chatmasta 10y ago

Story submitted to HN by samclemens, nice. :) Samuel Clemens was the actual name of Mark Twain, for those who don't know.