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 ho

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.