When I wrote Word Count Is Like Paint, I realised that however sound the advice was, it would leave my younger self stranded. After all, how do you approach something as ambitious and amorphous as writing a novel, except with the one thing you can measure: word count?
So this is my letter to that younger self, exactly half my age: she was having a kitchen-painting party for her birthday, in the photos below, and it's my birthday on Sunday! So even our painting theme continues. And it's an open letter, because I thought you might find it useful, too.
Hey darling,
I know you’re longing to write a novel, you dream of being a
novelist, and it seems as far off and unobtainable as being an astronaut. It’s
not. You can totally do it and you don’t have to wait until some magic point of
Readiness: you can start now.
First off, don’t worry about the words. I know it feels like that’s the main, most difficult thing, but really: you can do the words just fine. You’ve been inhaling novels since you learnt how to read. You know how the words go, in novels. The same way you learnt to speak, by being around people speaking? You’ve already learnt how to write.
You’ll get better and better at it, as time and writing go by, and you’ll discover exciting new things to do with style and words, but those are things you can only discover through writing – and what you’ve learnt from all that reading is more than enough to get started. Just go for it.
Writing a novel will take time and commitment, but you’ve already shown you’ve got that. Think of all your studying, the effort you put in – it’s like that, but this time with something that’s much more yours, that enthrals and delights you. It’s half commitment and half like falling in love, wanting to steal that time for it.
So you’ve got the commitment and you’ve got the words. You just need to know how to do it.
Here’s something that might surprise you and seem very obvious at the same time: the story is the main thing. Not how beautiful the words are. Not how important the Central Theme is. The story. None of your English teachers at school, none of your Eng Lit lecturers at uni, talked about novels as stories, ever, but that’s what they are. That’s why you read them. Even your favourite literary authors put the story first. The words have a job to do: to tell a story.
A novel is a substantial story, but not as long as you think. (Remember that 1500-word essay you were set? And you turned in 4500 words? Yeah. You don’t have a problem with writing too little.) But it’s substantial enough that you need to chunk it, both in story terms and your own progress.
Novels are measured in word count (I know that seems batshit, when words are such different lengths, but yes it works – they average out) and for your first novel, you should aim for 80k. I know you’ll overshoot. We want max 90k. (Trust me on this. This is very important. Do not spend ten years writing an absolute masterpiece that’s 330 000 words long. No-one will publish it, because they can’t; it’s too bloody long. Now matter how good it is. Just, y’know, a tip from the future.)
So aim for 80k. To make that manageable, chunk it into five parts; let’s call them acts. (I know your uni film course said three acts, but films are much shorter than novels, in story terms.) Make the first and last one about 10k words each, and the middle three about 20k words each. (Beginnings need to work fast and endings are often quicker than we expect, so those two get less.)
Don’t worry if that word count seems huge compared to the academic essays you’ve written. Fiction is much easier and chews up word count, because you don’t have to research or prove everything; you can just make it up. A good meaty scene with two characters actually doing stuff, somewhere interesting, and having an argument, can easily chew up 1500 words.
We’re using word count to measure the total size of the
novel, and the approximate size of each act, but we’re not going to use it to measure progress. (That’s important. I’ll
come back to that.) We’ll use the story
to measure progress.
To do that, we need to map out the story across acts. Think of any story you know well. Lord of the Rings, if you want. (Btw, you’re going to meet someone who loves it as much as you do and you’ll get to introduce him to Terry Pratchett. Good things are coming.) What’s the main story line in that? Write that down in your notebook, in a sentence or two.
Now, what are the main points where things change, in that story line? For instance, the first one is when Gandalf tells Frodo he has to take the ring out the shire. Those change points are what mark the end of one act and the beginning of the next. You want four of those big change points (turning points) for the switch from one act to the next.
Your story also needs a thing that sets it going at the start (eg Bilbo giving Frodo the ring) – we call that the inciting incident, but it can also be the ongoing situation at the start. It doesn’t have to be massive, but it gets the story-ball rolling. And at the other end, an ending, which you might know before you start writing, or you might figure out much later.
You can map that out on one page of your notebook or a scrap of A6, to get going. Treat yourself to a coffee out, even a month of Saturday morning coffees if you want to keep brainstorming and coming up with ideas, but then dive in and start writing. You just need enough plan to give you a direction to write in. You’ll learn so much more about the story, and get to know the characters, through writing. And your plan will change, as you get to know it all better, and that’s fine – great, even. The initial plan is just your springboard.
Don’t get caught up in word count. I know I said 10k, then 3 x 20k, then 10k, but that’s a rough guide. I know you love spreadsheets, but try not to make a pie chart. Some acts are longer, or shorter. You might discover new change points, so your story has six acts, or seven, or ten. But you need some clarity, certainty, and structure to start with, so start with 5, and then be flexible.
I know what you want to know now, because you’re me: I stood
shivering at those London bus stops with you, on the way to a temp job, leaden
as the sky, notebook in our handbag, staring into the cosy coffee shop we
couldn’t afford. How do I find The Idea?
A good enough Idea, Worthy Of A Novel?
That’s the second thing your teachers and Eng Lit lecturers got completely wrong. And most of the world still gets wrong. The idea doesn’t matter. It does to you; it needs to, to you; but it doesn’t need to be Worthy, novel-length, or prize-winning. Ideas aren’t those things. It’s writing that grows ideas into novels, and the original idea can be lost as a seed-husk in the full-fleshed fruit. You don’t need to wait for The Idea. You just need an idea that will help you start writing. Everything grows from there.
It doesn’t need to be The Best Idea, either, because this won’t be your best novel. It’ll be your first, your best so far, but you’ll keep writing. Of course you will. So you’ll keep getting better.
All the idea needs to be is something that excites you to write. The way you keep thinking about sunsets. Or the creepy atmosphere of that field when the mist creeps over at night, which puts you in mind of witchery. Or the dreadful fog-horn sound of that misused amp and the description you’re writing of the building next to you. Small, such small, seed ideas that you’ll grow into novels by writing them.
I have so much more I could tell you. So much more I could advise. But most of it won’t make sense until you start writing. In fact, telling you all of it now would hold you back. Remember when you were 14 and you read every book the Wynberg municipal library had on writing? The car park’s hot tar and eucalyptus-tree smell wrapped through them? And how you couldn’t write for almost a year, because you knew too much about it but not how to do it? That’s why I can’t tell you the rest, now.
But I can tell you this: you can write a novel, and you can start now. The idea only needs to entice you; the rest will grow. The story matters more than the words, and you can do the words. Chunk the story into five acts, around change points, and use word count as a loose yardstick of story, not your metric. You can learn so much more when you’re writing, but you need to be writing.
And you can; you just needed to know how to get started. Now you do.
All my love,
Megan
P.S. If you do want to learn the other stuff, and write alongside it, I’ve learnt an awful lot in the last 24 years, including why you’re still sitting on a short story you wrote when you were 21 and why you’ll only publish it when you’re 30. That’s in the new Time To Write course. And a bunch of the other practical stuff about writing a whole novel is in Story Elements.
