10 Tips to Help You Finish Writing Your Novel

Trying to write a novel is ambitious, but finishing it is what gets people’s attention. Many people have wonderful ideas for stories and have even begun to write books, only to procrastinate or become distracted or worse, become discouraged. These ten tips helped me keep going until I finished my first novel.

  1. Set aside a time to write and keep it sacred. Make this a time when you know you are at your best and feel most creative — Saturday mornings, late at night, whatever works for you. Make writing a priority and arrange other parts of your schedule around your sacred time.
  2. Remove all distractions while you write. Turn off the television and radio. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t make shopping lists or do the laundry. In fact, you may need to set your writing time at a time when no one else is around to help you avoid being distracted.
  3. Outline your plot. Know generally where you want your story to go. Sometimes stories and characters develop in unexpected ways, and you need to allow for that. But keep your guiding plan in mind.
  4. Avoid the intimidation of a blank computer screen. Just start writing. Try freewriting about the plot of the story or a character to get “the flow” started. Perhaps writing a couple of short e-mails before you begin will get your mind-finger connection up and running. Begin a dialogue between two characters and see where your flow takes you. Sometimes that ends up in an embarrassingly bad scene, but that bad scene may just have the seeds of something a lot better in it. Once you’ve got something written, you can always improve it, but you have to get something, anything, written first.
  5. Keep a draft mentality. Nothing you write has to be permanent. Everything can change. This alleviates a lot of the perfectionistic pressure writers put on themselves. If you get into a good flow and there’s a word on the tip of your fingertips that you just can’t think of, don’t interrupt the flow by pondering over the word or going to the thesaurus. Leave a blank space and keep going with your writing. There will always be time to go back and look up that special word. At this stage, spelling and grammar don’t matter; just write and create.
  6. Don’t feel compelled to begin at the beginning. You don’t even have to write your story in chronological order during the drafting phase, especially if you know the main events you want your novel to cover. Work on the chapter you feel like working on. During the next writing session, work on a different scene or chapter. The first sentence and the first chapter will probably require the most work, so don’t get frustrated by trying to get that perfect before you write anything else. Work on that opening passage over time.
  7. Organize your files, especially if you are not going to write in order. Create a different file for each chapter you write. That way you can dip in and fool around with a few words or draft a scene and then save it, close it up, and move on to a different section of the story. This requires spending time combining, separating, and renumbering files as you rearrange the material(number and name your chapters, if only for your own convenience), but the organization enables you to work on the part you feel like working on, which also helps prevent writer’s block.
  8. Revise, revise, revise. Someone once said, “Writing is revising,” and I believe that wholeheartedly. If you can write a perfect sentence or create a perfect scene the very first time you try it, congratulations. I can’t. I change and polish and delete and rearrange and change some more until I like the sound of the words. Often the best way to revise a sentence is to delete it. Maxine Hairston advised, “Take an especially hard look at sentences that particularly delighted you when you wrote them. Too often they are precisely the ones that should go because they were written to satisfy the writer rather than instruct the reader.”
  9. Don’t be afraid of putting yourself out there. Make a list or keep a scrapbook of mediocre writers who have written mediocre books (the incentive: “If HE can do it, so can I.”) Rather than letting their success discourage you, be emboldened by writers who are just so-so or whose works don’t impress you much. The only thing those writers have over you is that they have finished their books. There will always be critics, but there are critics of everything: your clothes, your driving, your business decisions, your children. Separate the wheat from the chaff: some people’s criticism means something; most people’s criticism is just so much noise. People keep writing novels despite the criticism. You might as well be one of them.
  10. Only you can determine when you are finished. Show your writing to a trusted friend, preferably one who knows about writing. Friends are likely to tell you how wonderful your novel is, as friends will do, and this of course is not helpful at all. Read between the lines of their compliments. Ultimately, you have to be the judge of your own writing, and you have to have the confidence that you can be the judge of your own writing.  

Make up your mind to finish your novel, and you can do it. The only thing standing in the way is you.

About the Author

A. R. Allen is a college writing instructor and the author of the historical legal thriller A Serpent Cherished, based on the true story of an 1891 Memphis murder. Visit her website - www.arallen.com or e-mail her at ann@arallen.com