Just Keep Writing
As a young author—I published my first novel at 22 years old—many people will ask me how I know how to write a book. When people ask me this, I feel like I have something to prove, as if I am too young to have sufficient experience writing novels.
But what people often don’t know is that I have been writing stories since as early as the eighth grade, if not earlier. They started as dramatic episodes about all my friends in some half-fantastical world, and I never finished them. Soon I became interested in original characters, and I tried my hand at a science fiction novel, also never finished. I still have all those drafts saved in a folder on my Google Drive entitled “Dead & Buried.” Yet it was those drafts where I tried and failed to craft a story from start to finish and where I planted the seeds for learning how to write.
From there, full length stories grew gradually. My first novel had fifteen chapters at most. The second had twenty or thirty. The next fifty. I posted these for free online, both original stories and fanfiction, receiving a lot of feedback in real time from readers. Some of it was negative, most of it was positive, and those positive comments spurred me on to write more and write better. This process occurred over six years as I developed my writing style, learning how to balance prose and dialogue, description and inner monologue, comparing my writing to my favorite authors and continually making small adjustments. I also became familiar with story structure, outlining in detail the rise and fall of the action, how to develop characters, maintain good pacing, architect a twist, and weave greater themes into the narrative.
My first published novel was one of these stories that I had first written at 16 and revised 6 years later, but it was my next novel, which took me two full years to research, write, rewrite, and revise in the latter half of my college years that I consider the most polished novel I have produced.
So when people ask me how I learned to write novels, I think back on the countless drafts I started and abandoned over the last ten years, the full-length novels that will never be published for profit, and my most recent novel blooming out of all that effort like the fruit at the top of a tree. It is the most beautiful result to behold, but it couldn’t exist without the rest of the tree, from roots no one has ever seen to the trunk to the branches to the tiniest leaf. And already I am looking forward to the next flower to blossom, and the next, and I know each new story will be the best story I ever told, thanks to all the ones that came before it.
So when someone asks me for advice on how to write a book, a part of me knows that there really isn’t anything I can say besides just write. Write and write and write. The blank page is your best teacher, trial and error, draft after draft until telling a story comes as naturally as breathing. Yes, outlining is important, sentence variety and sharp dialogue too, and word choice and writing flow will all come into play, but while those things can be taught and given as advice on writing platforms until kingdom come, an innate understanding of story can only come from writing a story over and over again. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
