Writing a Novel, Part One: The Nature of the Beast

I’ll be upfront: the impetus for this blog was the idea I could convince you guys to buy my ebooks (3 Days of Demons and Hero, Prepackaged, available at Smashwords.com, Amazon, and BN.com).  But I know that expecting sales as some sort of birthright is silly.  So here’s the deal.  I’ll do my best to provide weekly informative and entertaining blog posts on topics related to novel writing and urban fantasy.

Today, we’re going to start a series on how you write a novel.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first—pacing, plot, and style are all crucial, but the first step is to NOT BE AFRAID TO PUMP OUT THE WORDS.  There’s a reason I wrote that in all caps.  Creating relatively long blocks of text is a skill in just about everybody’s toolkit—I remember 1,000 words essays from high school, 3,000 word essays from college, etc.  Even for those of you who never did any of that, or thought what you produced was crap, I’m guessing you speak.  The average rate of English speech is 150 words a minute (http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/quality.html). But even though people can put lots of words together, there’s a sort of mystique surrounding novels, because putting a lot of words together over and over again gets a little intimidating.

But it’s possible.  Lots of people do it.  It’s amazing to see how frequently authors upload books.  3 Days of Demons managed to stay on the home page of Smashwords.com for less than a day before being pushed down to make room for new releases.

So maybe you can write a novel.  But how long is this creature we’re talking about?

According to a well trafficked post of Colleen Lindsay over at The Swivet, a publishable adult novel by a first-time author is traditionally between 80,000 and 120,000 words (http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-word-counts-and-novel-length.html).  Since I’m indie, you might be wondering why I think traditional counts matters.  The answer: those counts are what readers expect.  I’m looking at a bookshelf right now, and just about everything that sits there is about the same thickness—not hugely far away from 400 pages in one direction or another.  Now, even on my shelf, there are exceptions—Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is well on the low side, and Robert Jordan’s The Great Hunt is fairly gargantuan—but an average is still an average even with outliers.

Let’s go over some equivalencies.  That 80,000 to 120,000 word novel with its roughly 400 typeset pages translates into approximately 170 pages of single-spaced Times New Roman 12 pt font.  That’s the target.  There’s a saying in the novel-writing biz that if you can write a page a day for a year, you have book, but in point of fact, the epigram overstates it a bit.  If you write in single-space, like I do, you can produce at that speed while taking off two seasons.  Even if double-spaced type is more your fancy, you still can slack for about a month.

Let’s talk about what it means to write one single-spaced page a day.  Conveniently enough, my blog post up to this point is about the equivalent of a single-spaced page, and I’ve been writing for maybe an hour, including research, planning, and some insta-editing.  An hour is a television program.  Two lunch breaks.  Both sides of a reasonable-length commute.  If you decide to write on the bus, or to skip Late Night, or to take a break from just some of your daily wanderings around the internet, you can find that hour.

If, on some primal level, you view writing a novel as work, I can’t help.  For you, there really are better things to do with your hour.  But if you think writing a book might be something you want to do, just remember that you can stride at a quite reasonable daily pace by skipping one episode of Firefly or Jay Leno.  And writing one book a year puts you in the same league as the big boys (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3649184/A-novel-in-a-year.html).  Jokes about George R. R. Martin aside.