It is said that physicians have to train for 10,000 hours to become competent practitioners. The same for lawyers. The same for hockey goalies, and baseball pitchers. The same for military masterminds and chess masters. The same for physicists and philosophers, for dancers and discovers of the universe.
Writing is no different. There are many rules that we have discussed in addition to published guidelines that help your development. Flush out your characters fully before you write about them. Have good, snappy dialog that is laced with narrative. Be sure your scenes are brimming with emotion and excitement. Don’t just tell, show. And many more. Your task for your novel is to come up with the write combination of these moves and tools as you write. To make them work on the page. Yet to put all of this together for your first novel can be awkward and clumsy and make you feel off-balance. But to be a good writer, you must master this combination of tools.
The way to master is to practice. Write, rewrite, and write again. Write a scene until you’re sick of it, then put it down, returning to it after you have rested to write it again. This is one of the reasons why writing successive drafts is so important. They give you the opportunity to embed the product of good dialogue and exciting chapter endings into your book. Ask yourself “is this too much narrative? Or “where is the emotion in this scene?” But you must devote yourself to it. The current draft is not getting better just lying there on the bedroom table or the backseat of your car, regardless of the novel writing tools that you have learned. I find the first draft of a novel easy to write, because all I’m trying to do is place the characters in the scenes and produce their actions to get an emotional response from the reader. When I have the first draft done, the real work begins. Now, I try to incorporate all that I have learned into my scene rewrites. This is when I bring in emotion to the dialog, to release the personalities of the characters I have created, and to let them emotionally interact in the scene. This is where your practice produces real fruit. As I work at this there will come a time where I can incorporate much of the tools of good writing in the first draft, but I am not yet there.
A metric of your progress comes when you look at a scene that you wrote a year ago and grimace, thinking “I can’t believe I let this character say it this way.” You have improved, seeing the writing that you were so proud of as now being deficient. But don’t be too upset with yourself. Six months from now, you will come back to what you’re writing with great pride now, and be equally critical. This is the sign that you are walking the path toward becoming the best writer you can be. With every new novel, I have the opportunity to practice yet again. I never asked my myself the question. “Why is this not better? Instead I ask, whether I am doing my best. Have I incorporated all of the instruments of novel writing that I have learned, so that when combined, they produced the powerful reaction in the reader that I want? If not, I go back to work. Let’s be clear. This is not an easy process. Sometimes I still struggle with complex scenes as I did fifteen years ago. And make no mistake, this takes time I write between two and three hours a day. Sometimes it’s an easy process. Other times its exhausting. But it is a process worth enduring to improve. If you can’t spend all the time that you’d like on a particular day to write, then don’t get discouraged. Use what time you have, but use it effectively. Concentrate on a particularly troublesome paragraph. Read, write, read, write until it says exactly what you wanted to say the way you want to say it. There is no shortcut to doing this. Re-devote yourself to this craft. The more work you spend on developing your writing skill, the more time you take on your book, the better the writer that you are becoming. And that is the goal, to be the very best novel writer you can possibly be. So practice.
