The case for writing your novel FAST.

Ideas fizzle eventually. Write it while it's burning.

I decided to write a book for the first time back in 2007. Because I had no idea what I was doing, I followed a ton of blogs by authors and editors and agents all doling out amazing advice on writing novels and getting published. The more I learned, the more questions I had, the more I researched, and before I knew it, it was 2009, and guess what? I still hadn’t written a book.

I had an idea. I had a VISION for this book. The characters lived in my mind those two years and became more vivid and real to me by the day. I drew maps and filled documents with world-building notes. I made spreadsheets to plot out not just the book, but the WHOLE SERIES—oh yes, it was going to be a fantasy series. I could see it all: the cast, the world, the plot twists, the big epic emotional reveals. It was a movie in my mind. It kept me awake at night and distracted me to no end.

And yeah, I did write some of it...maybe five thousand words? But whenever I would write, the sentences came out clunky and awkward. The dialogue was cheesy. Elements of my fantasy world suddenly sounded so derivative. This beautiful story was coming out all wrong, and I started to doubt myself. 

I started to think my idea wasn’t worth writing.

And why? Because the story wasn’t coming out of my head and onto the page flawlessly on my first try. Looking back on it, I know it was ridiculous for me to expect that of myself. But the truth is, the combination of obsessively researching things like “why agents and editors reject books” and “biggest mistakes first time authors make” resulted in me picking over every line I wrote to make it ‘perfect’ from the start, and THAT resulted in me never finishing that book. 

When you get an idea for a novel, it’s like lighting a match. And what are your options, when you’re holding a lit match? You can blow it out and move on. You can hold it and hold it and hold it and think about maybe doing something with it until it dies out (and burns you a little).

Or you can use it to start a fire. 

With my very first novel idea, I went the second route. I let the flame burn out. There’s a reason seventeen years have gone by and I still haven’t written it. I can’t relight a used match. Maybe one day I’ll take bits and pieces from that idea and another spark will fly. But that story, the way it existed in my mind back then? It’s never going to happen. 

If you have an idea for a novel and you’ve never written one before, here’s my number one piece of advice for you: write it fast. 

This isn’t about the market or competition. I’m not saying “write it now before someone else has your idea” (nobody has YOUR idea). This is about creating something amazing before that match burns out.

“Well, I just really have to craft each sentence, so it takes me awhile to finish a draft. But then, my books are literary, soo…”

I’ve heard that one a lot. But the difference between literary fiction and commercial fiction has nothing to do with the speed at which the writer wrote the story. 

That kind of comment REALLY got in my head early on in my career, because I didn’t recognize it for what it was: insecurity and self-defensiveness. So I want to emphasize this point now: “fast” is relative.

Six months to a finished draft might be very fast for this author, and very slow for that author. But the number six isn’t what matters; what matters is that this author got the idea out while the match was still lit, and that author is letting it slowly burn out.

In 2014, I had an idea that consumed me. I researched, I took notes, I played around with outlines and put off drafting and made all the mistakes I’d made with that first idea. This time, years later, I did finish a draft. I sent it to my agent, and she read it, and she called it my “masterwork” and said a lot of genuinely lovely things about it. She also said it was so big and unwieldy that it almost certainly wouldn’t sell unless I did a ton of rewriting and reshaping. I’m talking a ground-up, start over situation. Because all that time I dallied over it allowed doubt seep into choices I made with the characters, the plot, my prose, everything. 

In contrast, in 2016 I had an idea and I wrote that book in five weeks. It was published and received the best reviews and most recognition of any book of my career to date. Obviously, five weeks was just the first draft, but that’s why I’m telling you to write it fast—because you will ALWAYS revise! Revision is a non-negotiable part of being an author! Who cares if your first draft is full of plot holes or typos or whatever? That’s fixable! The point of a first draft is to capture your passion for that story and get it on the page. The one thing you can’t edit for is a lack of passion. 

Every writer works best at a different pace, which is why there’s no number in the title of this video. I’m not telling you to write your book in a week or a month or sixty-four days or whatever. I’m not defining fast because my fast is different than your fast, and her fast, and his fast, and their fast. I’m not telling you there’s a deadline. I’m telling you that if you have that little flame of an idea inside you right now, you have to do whatever you can to help it grow into a wildfire as fast as YOU can.

“Okay, fine. I need to write my book fast. But how?”

Here are a few tips.

• Go easy on the writing/publishing advice. I’m not telling you to avoid it; I know reading writing tips or watching videos about the craft usually just motivates me to write more, so definitely do that if it motivates you. But when you’ve never written a book before, and you start hearing the endless laundry list of things first-time authors do wrong—cliches, things readers are over, things editors hate, reasons agents reject manuscripts—that stuff can really get inside your head. Criticism is great and necessary, but not before you’ve even written the thing! Also, the best way to improve as a writer isn’t reading about all the mistakes ever then trying to avoid them. It’s writing and making some mistakes and learning from them. 

• Design a flexible writing routine. Please don’t take “write fast” to mean “write as many words as humanly possible every single day until it’s done.” I know the sort of conventional wisdom for aspiring authors is to carve out a specific time of day just for writing. That might work for you. Certainly, it’s better than waiting until you’re in the mood to draft, because then you’ll just keep procrastinating, waiting for that mood to strike. Routines are great, but your routine will be a hundred times easier to stick to if you give yourself choices. Try giving yourself 3-4 options every day, then in the morning, choose which one or two you’re going to do that day. One option will obviously be writing more of your draft, but the others could be working on character sheets, world-building, research, and daydreaming. (YES. Daydreaming is vital. Daydreaming counts as work when you’re an author! Isn’t that cool?) There will likely be days when you wake up and daydreaming is the only option you want to choose, and that’s okay. Letting the story turn over and develop and grow in your mind is a key part of keeping that match burning. And the point is, giving yourself a choice rewires your brain a little bit when you sit down to work. You don’t HAVE to do this. You are CHOOSING to do this. That makes a huge difference in your motivation. 

• Forbid yourself from writing (some days). Obviously, you need to actually write the words if you’re going to get a finished draft. When you don’t feel like drafting, do not sit down in front of your laptop and force the words out. Instead, tell yourself you are forbidden from writing not only today, but tomorrow, too. No matter what, you cannot open that document for the next forty-eight hours, because you are risking getting sick of this idea and letting the match burn out. And stick to it. By the time your self-imposed moratorium is passed, you’ll be itching to get back to writing.

• Make peace with your doubt. All writers have it. With every book. It never stops. The more you write your draft and your book starts to actually exist, the louder that doubting voice tends to get. But that voice is wrong. And I’m not just saying this to be motivational; it’s true. Think about the weirdest book, movie or show you’ve ever read or watched. And I mean weird in a bad way. Weird in a “who signed off on this” way. That idea got published or produced. What’s more, if you go looking around online, you will find fans. Might be a small fanbase, but they’re out there. That thing you think is so weird and bad it should have never been made, there are people who love it. Your readers, the ones who will LOVE your idea, they are out there too. They’re your fans. They just don’t know it yet. 

When I think back to what I would tell 2007 Michelle if I could give her one single piece of advice, this would be it: write that book fast. Because man, I would love to know how it would’ve turned out.

You have an idea. Now take that match and go set a fire.

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The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a series called Ask the Editor, which will publish every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle