How do I write a novel?

Jeffrey's answer

By doing it. Every day. For as long as it takes.

I have written more than thirty novels and a great many short stories, and the method has not changed in fifty years. I have a routine that has not changed in fifty years — four two-hour shifts a day, six days a week. The full routine is in What time of day should I write?

I write by hand. Lined A4 pads, black ink. The physical act of pushing a pen across paper — slower than typing, infinitely more deliberate — is, for me, the difference between writing and typing. I do not believe a great novel has ever been thumb-typed onto a phone. Perhaps one day I will be proved wrong.

I keep an hourglass on the desk. Mary gave it to me. When I sit down, I turn it. When the sand has run out, my shift is finished. There is no negotiation with the sand.

Every novel I have written has gone through fourteen drafts. The first three are about discovering what the book is. The middle four are about making the story work. The last seven are about making the prose work. I have, on occasion, written more — Kane and Abel went to eighteen, Adam and Eve, my final novel, to twenty.

I once went to see Sir Matthew Pritchard, Agatha Christie’s grandson, who was very kind to me. I told him I was on draft sixteen of a book. He looked at me and said: only sixteen, seventeen, eighteen?

What it taught me was simple. If you want to be Sir Matthew Pritchard, or indeed Charles Dickens, or Agatha Christie, you have got to work, you have got to work damn hard.

You will not become a novelist by reading about novel-writing. You become a novelist by sitting down and writing one. Then writing it again. Then writing it again. The sand does the rest.

A few practical notes

• Pick your hours and defend them. Most writers can’t manage four shifts; one is enough if it’s daily. Half an hour every morning before the family is awake produces a novel a year.
• Aim for 500–1,000 words a day. 500 words a day for a year is 180,000 words — two novels. A draft accumulates faster than non-writers believe.
• Target word counts: 80,000–100,000 words for a debut novel. That’s the comfortable mid-range for most genres. Romance and YA can be shorter (60–80k); literary and historical can run longer (100–130k). Outside this, the agent’s job becomes harder.
• First draft, second draft, third draft — different jobs. Draft one is to discover what the book is. Drafts 2–4 fix structure (chapter order, character arcs, pacing). Drafts 5+ work the prose. Don’t try to do all three at once.
• Don’t edit while you draft. Most first-time novelists rewrite chapter one twenty times and never finish. Get to ‘The End’ first. Edit second.
• Write the scene you most want to write. If you’re stuck, jump to the scene you’ve been imagining since the start. Write that. The connecting tissue comes later.
• Read in your genre while you write. Not for ideas — for rhythm and standard. The ear absorbs what the conscious mind misses.