Even if you don’t have a day job, a family, a social life, or other hobbies, there’s only so much time in the day for writing. If you want to finish your book, you must maximize that time. For me, the act of wringing maximum productivity out of myself is to gauge my mindset and do the thing most conducive to that mood. This isn’t to champion the idea of avoiding discipline – sometimes you must simply make yourself stick to priorities even if you don’t want to – but when I work intuitively like this, I usually feel like no matter what, I’m drawing nearer to my goal. It’s a way of continually “working” even when I’m too tired or distracted to do any “real” writing.
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Stages of Writing a Novel
Notes
For me, the first stage of writing a novel is the notes. This is where I accumulate every possible idea for what could be in the book. It’s important not to limit yourself, to tell yourself you can only write down “good” ideas. First, you must get through quite a lot of “bad” ideas before you get to the “good” ones.
And second – the reason I keep using quotation marks – is that ideas are only good or bad in context. If you’re writing a grimdark war novel filled with violence and nihilism, a romantic subplot filled with all the loving and tender dialogue you spent hours drafting might be a “bad” idea. But that doesn’t mean your work is wasted. When you get to the point of carving out ideas that don’t fit in the book, you don’t need to delete them – you can put them in a separate file to maybe use later. More on that in a minute.
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Chronicler's Note: 