9 Things You Need to Write a Novel

Hello, here are the 9 Things You Need to Write a Novel.

The first thing you need to write a novel is… Time.

The second thing you need to write a novel is… More Time.

And the third thing you need to write a novel is… Even More Time.

This perhaps seems a bit obvious. But let me explain.

Time, More Time and Even More Time are all required.

I’ve divided Time up into three because you need Time for different reasons.

The first lot of Time is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Time to write. Time to sit at the desk with words coming out of you. Time to work on not being distracted.

The second lot of time, More Time, is… Time not to write.

More Time to do stuff which doesn’t seem to be writing but which, in the end, turns out to have been writing all along. To the non-writer, this may appear to be sitting in a cafe people-watching or going for a walk around a park or a gallery, having a nice long catnap, or listening very closely to a piece of music — but, actually, it is when the writing bit of the brain does its hardest work. Believe me.

The third lot of time, Even More Time, is Time to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. But we’re not going to worry about that now. That’s for later drafts. For the moment, we’re thinking about the first draft.

As I’m sure you know, Time is never a neutral, abstract thing. Nor merely a clock-ticking-on-the-mantlepiece thing.

Time for writing your novel is time not for other occupations, not for other people. It’s time stolen from your loved ones; time they will probably resent you not devoting to them. Time is closing the door behind you and not answering when people knock – not unless they knock very hard, and shout words like ‘Fire’ and ‘Selfish’ and ‘I’m leaving – I really am’.

In a way, writing is saying to your loved ones, ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you’. Meaning, I want to talk to you in a more articulate and truthful way than I ever can when you are here in front of me. ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you.’

All of which explains why you’ll need the fourth thing, which is…

Some Selfishness

I could try to make this sound nicer — I could call it determination or self-belief or following your dream — but that’s not how it’s likely to appear to your loved ones, the ones outside the door, knocking, pleading.

Self-belief without justification is always going to appear selfish, and until you write your novel there won’t be any justification. In lots of people’s eyes, until your novel is published by a publisher they have heard of, and appears in shops they visit, and is reviewed in a newspaper they read, then it will continue to be unjustified. And in the eyes of a large minority, a book still isn’t really justified until it has been made into a film starring an actor or actress they have heard of — thus saving them the trouble of having to read it.

However, writing rarely has a proper justification. Not in the strictest sense. Writing with justification is the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The only real justification for a piece of writing is that it is worth other people reading — or feeling guilty about not having read.

But Some Selfishness is, of course, not enough. You will also need…

Some Generosity

Because, without making it sound like running a coffee morning for Macmillan, writing is an act of generosity. A novel that isn’t essentially for other people to read isn’t worth writing.

This is the ..I want to talk to you part, the part that comes after Go away.

Many writers claim they write only to please themselves. And I believe them — but only so far as to say this is what they need to tell themselves in order to write.

A well-formed sentence has a direction: towards the reader. It arrows.

So far we have: Time, More Time, Even More Time, Some Selfishness and Some Generosity.

We’re over halfway through. What can be left? Why not have a guess — make a list. You have four more choices.

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The next thing I believe you need is a little more prosaic. It’s…

The Means

By The Means I mean the physical necessities of writing — a pen or pencil and some paper, or a computer, or a phone.

What you use is entirely your choice. If what works for you is to write in betting shop biro on old cornflake packets or in chalk on the corner shop wall, it doesn’t really matter.

There are some drawbacks to the corner shop wall (though with instagram poetry, and taking a photo of your writing and posting it, who knows?). And I have a few cautionary things to say about word-processing.

The first is that it can make writing seem too easy. Although I am telling you the nine things you need to write a novel, the most important is probably contained in these five words: There are no short cuts.

The sheer physical labour of rewriting a novel, start to end, by hand, will certainly make you consider the necessity of every single word; copy/paste does not do this.

Of the Evils of Word-Processing, copy/paste is Number 2. (Number 1 comes a little later. Read on.)

Alongside There are no short cuts there is the equally true There are no lost hours.

Every minute you spend on drafting and redrafting a novel will benefit your writing — sometimes not in the place you’re working, but elsewhere, later.

By Means I also mean a workplace. Ideally this would be, as Virginia Woolf put it, A Room of One’s Own. But if this isn’t available, a café, library, church, or park bench in spring or summer will do almost as well. Quiet, too, is probably recommended.

I realise for many people even this is hard to secure. In which case, I’d suggest you concentrate on writing short stories, flash fiction or poems — for the moment. Until you can sneak away for longer. It is very hard to write a novel without somewhere to spread out at least a little. Not impossible. Many have done it. But a small desk in the corner of the bedroom or front room will help you, because it is the place for your writing, and will make writing more constant. Places like these are where I wrote the first four novels I completed.

The next thing you need — there are only three more — is something much more abstract. It is…

A Discipline.

A Discipline. Not I repeat not a routine, though it might on the surface resemble one.

A routine is unhelpful because, when you miss it or mess it up, you are going to feel bad, and get disheartened, and stop writing.

I think the idea of a discipline is better than that of a routine, because it is more flexible.

A routine is, I need to be at my desk by nine o’clock and produce 400 words by lunchtime. A discipline is, It would be best if I could do about a page or so every day.

I might be able to give you a few hints about finding a good, productive discipline:

To start with, don’t count the hours (a person can easily achieve nothing in eight hours), but do have a set amount you must do before you finish: one page, two, more, of hand- or typewritten words.

I said that I’d come back to the Number 1 evil of Word-Processing. It is wordcount. Especially Live Wordcount always in view.

Wordcount is an instrument of the Devil.

Don’t use it more than once a week.

Count pages, not words. A page of dialogue — full of white space — shouldn’t count for less than a dense page of description.

A few other suggestions:

If it’s a choice between writing badly and not writing at all, write badly. Your only responsibility is for the final draft.

Don’t try to make it perfect on the first draft. Roughness is a virtue at this stage, because roughness is easier to cut, to rewrite.

The penultimate thing you need is the one you’ll probably have thought of first…

A Yearning

I’ve chosen this, rather than Idea. There’s nothing more likely to close you down than someone saying, You have to have an idea. A great idea. Now.

But you need to have a strong sense that of something not there that should be.

A nagging sensation. A question. Okay, I give up — an Idea.

What does an Idea look/feel/smell/taste/sound like?

Well, you tell me.

But if it’s a really good one, it’s quite possible that, even if you told it me, I wouldn’t recognise it as an Idea — and certainly not as a really good one.

I would, incidentally, recommend that you don’t ever tell people your ideas. Because unless they say, That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Let me sell my house to finance you as you complete this great work, you are likely to be disappointed with their reaction. And this may put you off seeing the idea through to its end.

The problem of The Idea is the biggest one for writers just starting out. They return again and again to the question: What do I write? And this is, of course, the question I am least able to answer for you.

But the one thing I won’t repeat is the Great Wisdom of creative writing classes, i.e., Write What You Know.

This is likely to make you think not of what you Know but what you’re Completely Bloody Sick to Death of.

Henry James, my favourite writer, had something neat to say about the relationship between writing and knowing, expression and experience, in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’:

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consist of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’

This is a much more difficult, and useful, thing to aim for. If you aspire to being one of those on whom nothing is lost, then ideas will come to you, I promise.

An idea can be an area of mess or confusion in your head, or a line of remembered real-life dialogue, or an enticing title, or an exquisite memory, or a feeling of dreadful foreboding. It’s something, in other words, that haunts you.

A Yearning

The final thing you need is…

A Tone

For the first-time novelist, consistency of voice is one the hardest things to achieve. You probably won’t, to begin with, have anything approaching a style, but you will have to settle upon a tone. This can range from ‘Once upon a time…’ to ‘For a long time, my mother used to…’

Here, though, is the ultimate and very simple secret of writing a novel:

If you write 1,000 words a day for 75 days, at the end of those 75 days you will have a novel-length-thing. This novel-length-thing may not be a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a novel, but it’s a lot closer to being all three than the nothing you had before.

Or as Gertrude Stein said, The way to do it is to do it.

So, to conclude, let us go through the 9 things you need to write a novel:

1. Time

2. More Time

3. Even More Time

4. Some Selfishness

5. Some Generosity

6. The Means

7. A Discipline

8. A Yearning

9. A Tone

You have no more excuses. If it’s in you, it can now come out.

Let it.

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