Lessons I learned after writing 20,000 words of my first novel
plot twists, writing habits, and the outlining process
In the middle of January earlier this year, I was hanging out with my little sister on the living room couch when I had an idea for a sci-fi novel.
I told my sister about it, she agreed it sounded cool, and I immediately grabbed my laptop and some coffee. I didn’t want to get bogged down by second-thoughts–– I didn’t want to get distracted and lose my inspiration. (inspiration is perishable!) After a week or two of outlining, I hit pen to paper and sped off.
Even when my university classes started, I kept writing and now I’ve written 26.4k words of my first book. A normal novel is about 80k words, so I’m only currently a little more than a quarter way through. I hit the “messy middle”–– I had an idea of what the general ending would be like and what other plot points needed to unfold––BUT to execute the “science-fiction” part of the novel to the standard I wanted, I needed to deepen a few aspects of the worldbuilding and sort out tons of character arc logistics. The rough outline I had come up with during the beginning of the year wasn’t cutting it; I needed to do more homework and figure things out.
So I decided it was best to go back and get my hands dirty and flesh out my outline a little bit further. I’ve already finished this and now have double the material I had before–– I’ve untangled most of the snags I was having trouble with in my plot and am back on the novel-writing journey for the summer :)
Throughout this experience, I learned a BUNCH of lessons about my own writing habits and how to build a story so I figured I’d share them here! If you’re interested in hearing about them, then sit back & enjoy. xx
1. Figure out what makes you consistent
If you’re curious about how a full-time engineering student with a part time job managed to try and keep a consistent writing habit, then we have something in common––I was curious about how I’d find the time too. Around midway through the semester, I decided to keep track of my word count starting march 3 (excluding anything I wrote beforehand). Here’s a screenshot of my progress so far if you’re the type who wants to be a little nosy xD.
Brandon Sanderson writes 2.5k words a day on average. Hemingway wrote about 500. Some successful writers write every day religiously, while other successful writers write every three days or so. I personally found it most useful to track my wordcount per week.
According to the data and my observations, I wrote best and was most productive when I did writing streams (I livestreamed my writing sessions on Twitch for fun). Because of that, I’ll be experimenting more with multistreaming on X, YouTube, and Twitch over the coming months. I actually found it enjoyable, and it made me a lot more productive having the extra push of feeling like people were literally watching and making sure I didn’t slack off or end the writing session early lol. I’ll adjust strategies as the time comes & when things break. For now, it works.
Now that it’s summer and I am not juggling writing in between classes, I hope that average wordcount/week number becomes the wordcount/day.
We’ll see! I’ll give updates on this every so often. :)
2. I’m an architect & not a gardener
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”
―George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
George RR. Martin (author of Game of Thrones) once famously said that writers fell into two camps: gardeners (aka. pantsers) and architects (outliners).
Gardeners have a rough and very minimal outline (if any) and usually decide to just grab their ideas as-is and jump into the void.
I made a graphic to help you understand this further using my own little analogy (hehe):
Outliners usually need things to be a bit more prim and proper and like to have some guardrails when writing. Think of the flags as checkpoints of where the author wants the story to go. Architects figure out the map of the journey beforehand and give themselves little markers to keep them on track as they go along.
It’s the difference between Stephen King who can’t write if things are too heavily outlined, feeling like it “sucks all the life out of a story”, and J.K. Rowling who thinks that “your teachers are right; you’re no good without a good plan beforehand.” Usually, writers choose whatever strategy resonates best with them and fall into a spot on the spectrum between the two.
Personally, I adore the feeling of having a good outline. Maybe it’s my STEM background, but for me, writing a story sort of feels like solving a really tough math equation. You’re given the formula you have to solve or prove and you just have to learn to use all the tools in your tool kit to pull it off. I think I use a similar part of my brain to make sure that the structure, plot points, and character arcs make sense.
The best feeling is when different aspects of your story link together thematically surprisingly well. (It sort of feels like when you’re solving a math, chemistry, or physics equation, and multiple things cancel out 😍). Incredibly satisfying and delectable.
Front-loading the thinking and doing it ahead of time frees me up so that when it comes down to putting pen to paper, I can allow myself to just feel and focus on the emotion of things. The writing is then gravy and describing a scene or creating dialogue feels a lot easier for me than when I’m trying to do that AND plot at the same time. I generally don’t want to throw my characters into the void; I need to see the castles I planted and work my way towards them while navigating through the labyrinth.
3. Early conflicts and subplots are important
Around the 10,000 word mark, I noticed something interesting…
Most of my characters got along marvelously and that there was nothing truly working against them. Now I understand why in many books, mean or nasty characters are usually introduced before the main conflict unfolds, typically during the late-beginning part of the story. (ex. draco malfoy!!). It makes it a lot more fun for the writer to write and the reader to read because something happens.
There’s only so much funny conversation and delightful exposition that can occur before it all starts getting a little ridiculous.
This was the bulk of what I had to figure out during the reworking of my outline.
4. Trying to tell a story is incredibly fun
I realized that I actually enjoyed writing a lot….
It’s one of the purest if not the purest motivation I’ve ever felt in my life, so much so that I’m even slightly protective of sharing this out into the world–– just cause it’s like.. a ball of fuzzy light that I don’t want to speak about too much and muddy, lest this feeling towards it go away. I feel like I’m kindling a love and I’m afraid that it’s fragile; I just want it to stay. I don’t want it to be tainted by ambition or anything like that–– more than anything, I just want to keep going. Which feels so refreshing.
There are already so many lessons I’ve learned throughout this process and I can’t wait to learn even more. While I know that this novel will be far from perfect, I’m excited to finish my first one and then keep writing and improving to the point where I look back at it and see how much I’ve grown. Anyway.. that moment is far, far into the future. For now, we enjoy the ride and keep going :)
See you on the other side! x
- Mia
P.S. Here are the best writing resources I’ve encountered during this time:
Write books write books write books 🙌🏻
I haven't written a novel yet, but I do like it when things "cancel out" because they work together well to make a statement. 😊