Deciding to write a novel

Over New Years, I decided to write a novel. It wasn’t a resolution thing, just something that occurred to me between the holidays and I started doing. On multiple occasions over the years I’ve thought I’d like to write a book but never followed through. That’s mostly because I didn’t have an idea that felt worthy of writing about.

But this time was different. I just wanted to write, and just wanting to write made me realize that novels don’t just fall out of you, they are worked on. Effort is expended to get it right and, over time, a novel develops. If novels grew on trees, everyone would have one clad in a bright cover and ready for public consumption. The only detail I knew was that if the novel weren’t at least moderately amusing, I would deem it a failure. I’ve always wanted to be funny and twenty years of practice has made me at least not-boring.

Step one for aspiring novelists: decide what software to use as a writing platform. This was really a choice between two options for me. The first was my trusty Microsoft Word subscription. I’ve been using Word for as long as I can remember and am pretty good at it. That said, Word isn’t structured specifically for novel writing and I was concerned that I’d flail around a fair amount trying to fit a specific task to a general tool. Option two was the very popular Scrivener writing software. It has excellent reviews from scribes using it daily and it comes with a 30 day free trial. Sold! I downloaded and installed it and immediately began writing.

Approximately two days and 8,000 words later, I realized the story I’d started developing had a fatal flaw and was gonna be boring.  It started to dawn on me that, even if novels didn’t grow on trees, if they simply emerged fully formed from one’s fingers in a half-dozen frantic writing sessions, that would also be far too easy. And so the editing began, but even that was premature.

Something tells me this is going to become a series. I expect to make a lot of mistakes as I delve into this new skill, so I will capture them here. Please don’t think less of me.