How to write your first novel – 1) getting started

I’m sure there’s are plenty of experts who will give you an official answer to this question, probably involving creative writing courses and vast amounts of sensible planning and forethought, but I’m afraid I did none of those things. So perhaps the title ought to be ‘How I wrote MY first novel, purists and those of a delicate disposition please look away.’

Any guide will tell you that making time is critical, which is often the hardest bit when you’re working full time, raising a family, focussing on a million other projects that seem more important in the moment. This was me for 25 years, entertaining an occasional thought that I should try writing a novel, then never actually doing it.

But that’s not the only problem - if you read a lot like I do, you’ll regularly pick up a book SO funny or gripping or evocative that all ideas of trying to do this yourself feel embarrassing. I swear there are hundreds of thousands of brilliant stories not being told because of crippling imposter syndrome. You think you’re not good enough, so you file the idea away again for another year, leaving it to the experts who’ve done the courses and read the textbooks.  

What finally enabled me to Get Started was the first Coronavirus lockdown in 2020, when I was immediately furloughed from my marketing job in London. Suddenly I had enough money coming in to pay the bills if I took a mortgage holiday and didn’t take up any expensive hobbies (no Peloton bike for me), and I wasn’t allowed to work. I can’t imagine another time in my life when I’ll get paid the equivalent of £30k a year for staying at home and not working, and for the mental and physical health of the nation I hope it’s never repeated. But it also meant that I had absolutely no excuse for not having a go at writing a book.

At the start it was about ‘CAN I write a novel?’, tentatively moving into ‘Can I keep ENJOYING writing this novel?’, to a final burst of ‘Can I FINISH this novel before I have to go back to work?’ I thought my furlough would end in June, twelve weeks after it started. As it happened it finished at the end of July with redundancy. I finished Book 1 by mid-June, so I started writing Book 2 while I tried to find a literary agent. We’ll talk about that another day.

I guess the point is that you don’t need to do courses or read textbooks or have the smallest idea what you’re doing. You just need to find the time to sit down, open a Word document (other software is available, we’ll talk about that another day too) and start typing. It might have to be at 5am before the kids wake up, or 9pm after they’ve gone to bed. You might be the kind of person who can evolve plots while walking the dog, then write them down when you get home. Some of my best ideas have come at 3am during a peri-menopausal hot flush.

I have a new job now, but I’ve kept on finding the time. I write ‘1000 words’ on my to-do list every morning, and make sure I write them before I go to bed, even if I really can’t be arsed. Sometimes they’re just notes, sometimes they’re polished paragraphs. It depends on my mood, but that’s something for another day too.

Write the first sentence, then the first paragraph. Evolve that into the first chapter. Keep plugging away and try to do a bit every day. At some point you’ll be looking at 90000 words and thinking that maybe it isn’t the biggest pile of shit ever written. That seems to me like as good a way to get started as any.