Q: “So how do you write a novel?”
A: “One word at a time.”
I’ve always hated that quote, but it does ring true in a certain sense. When you sit down to write, you’ve got two options:
- Write.
- Don’t write.
If you want to write a novel, you have to lock yourself down and force yourself to get the words out. You can outline all day long, or do character charts until your blue in the face, but if you don’t just sit down and get to work, in the end you’ll nothing but an outline and a stack of unused characters.
There are other games you can play too. Some of my favorite authors still endorse that ridiculous “note card plotting” strategy that my college English professors use to preach. Others come up with plot outlines so strict and static that they run the risk of allowing the outline to dictate the creativity, which in turn, makes their prose flow more like a term paper than a novel.
Stephen King’s advice is to plop down on your chair and stay put until you reach your daily word count goal, and basically write on the fly as you do it. I’m not totally in agreement with the daily word count goal (it’s got its pros and cons), but I do agree that writing on the fly is the way that works best for me. Still I need to have some idea of where the plot is going, otherwise it will go on far too long and when it does end, the ending leaves a lot to be desired. And yes, we’ve all seen a few real world examples of when an author stretches out a story far too long and then delivers a terrible finale.
Anyhow, we’ve all got things that work well for us and things that don’t. Figure out what works best for you. Don’t put too much thought into it, just sit down and do it.
One word at a time.
I quite like the Dark Tower ending 🙂 Although author insertion is not a favourite technique of mine it has to be said.
I tend to call myself a “plantser”. I like to know where the story is going, but if I try and plot in too much detail it all goes wrong when I get to the writing.
But I agree that too much procrastination is bad, when really you just need to get some words down on paper and see what happens.
You know, it wasn’t so much the actual ending I hated, even though I would have ended it in a completely different way. I just pretty much hated the final book in its entirety. He killed off the most interesting characters to me way right away in the novel, and then the majority of the book was just Roland and the character I hated the most walking through the dessert to the tower.
Potential spoiler…
As for how I would have ended it? I thought it was building toward Roland becoming the next Crimson King. That would have made so much more sense as to why he’d been so obsessed with the tower his whole life, and it would have just been a better ending, imo.
Thanks for reading 🙂