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 w

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...