I studied creative writing at university and like so many students of the subject, when my final year began to enter its less than exhilarating climax I began to ponder my career prospects. When I questioned various members of the illustrious faculty about what I should do upon completion of my course, I was given the same answer:

“Erm…write a book”

Thanks.

Despite my utter disbelief at their less than inspirational advice, it wasn’t a bad idea.

In theory, writing a novel shouldn’t be a particularly difficult proposition I thought. After all, I’m a relatively creative person and always have lots of ideas floating around in my head. If nothing else, my time at University had equipped me with the skills necessary to knock together a decent story. How difficult could it be?

A close friend of mine recommended reading a book by Steven King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft) where the man himself offers pearls of wisdom on writing a novel. It is certainly a worthwhile read to anyone starting out on the long and lonesome path. However, the one snippet of advice that particularly resonated with me was how he spoke about writing everyday and how he always makes himself complete 1000 words or so. I started to do the math:

A novel is somewhere between 60,000 to 100,000 words (well, the kind of novel I was going to write certainly wasn’t any longer).

1000 words a day so that’s 60 to 100 days to write a novel.

…well, that doesn’t sound too hard.

For some reason, I have this mechanism in my brain that always switches on when I’m faced with long tasks which allows me to break them down until I’m happy with what lies ahead. For this reason, once I’d done the math, I felt able to sit down and outline a rough plan of my novel…thanks Steve!

I started out like an express train churning out words everyday and before too long I’d reached the 30,000 mark and it hadn’t even taken me the month I’d forecast.

I’ve always sworn by the same writing theory, whether I’m writing an essay, a speech or a short story and that theory is simple:

Get it down on the page.

However boring your writing is, at least when it’s down on the page it is there and it’s tangible and you can work with it. Unfortunately though, with novel writing this leaves you with a mountain to climb even after you’ve finished your hundred thousand words. This is where I began to realise just how difficult writing a novel actually is.

So to rejoin my story, I’m at 30,000 words and I make the mistake of looking back over my writing and unfortunately, I didn’t like what I was reading. So I started editing and reworking and added words and taking out commas and thinking of new ideas and ways of doing things. Before too long I’d come up with so many ideas that none of it seemed to make sense within the context of the novel I was writing. Here I lost my motivation.

That 30,000 words is still sitting on hard-drive to date with no progress on the horizon.

My novel writing journey has stalled since the early days of post-graduate hope, optimism and logical mathematics. There are many reasons such as becoming employed, starting a new relationship and other time-consuming activities. However, the one overriding problem is that I have hundreds of ideas for a novel but just don’t seem to be able to decide what I want to write and what the best method is for turning a good concept into a great novel.

Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that I must merge my early novel writing theories with a more patient and caring approach.

I believe the best way of writing a novel is to commit to adding to it daily, but at a slower rate so I can take far greater care over what I’m putting down on the page. This allows more time for thought over advancing the narrative and building up the characters without sacrificing on quality or momentum.

Perhaps when I’ve written as many books as Steven King, I’ll be able to muster 1000 quality words a day.

…we’ll see.