Category: Writing Craft, Revising
When I decided to become a novelist, I thought I could whip out a novel in a year. After all, I knew how to write – I was a professional screenwriter. I could structure stories and develop characters and string together words in a compelling fashion. Why wouldn’t I complete a book in a year?
Six years and zero novels later, that question is no longer confidently rhetorical. What went wrong? I was prioritizing writing time (I even took a year off to write), I never gave up because writing is hard (I’m stubborn like that), and I rarely procrastinated (I beat that bad habit). So I did some painful soul searching and identified my three main problems and (fingers crossed) came up with some solutions…