writing craft Archives | A.S. Akkalon

The only advice you need to write your first novel

Here’s the best advice out there on how to write your first novel. I know because I wrote it. You should still ignore it.

Eighty-three percent of people want to write a novel.*

* Like 97 percent of statistics, this number is made up.

But perhaps you do want to write a novel. You’ve always loved to tell stories, and fantastic lands and tortured characters clamour in your head. You must set them free in the world for the good of all mankind.

Being the intelligent person you are, you do some research on how to write a novel and are promptly overwhelmed.

Amazon gives over 2000 results for “how to write a novel”, Google gives nearly 800 million. It’s probably not feasible to read all those before dinnertime.

But fear not, because I have the only advice you need to write the masterpiece that’s fermenting in your head and bubbling out your ears.

Taking stock of my writing activities

Writing a novel involves a lot more than just drafting and editing. Here I enumerate my writing activities and try to figure out why I never have time for them all.

It struck me recently that I have all these writing-related activities that I don’t do as often as I’d like or have stopped doing entirely. When I did them I thought they were valuable, but now it’s hard to find time.

Which is crazy because I’m literally working 20 hours a week from my living room chair (by the fire because it’s cold).

I should have time to do everything I want, so why don’t I?

In an effort to (begin to) answer this question, I thought I’d enumerate what these writing-related activities are. Then maybe I’ll discover some of them aren’t important. Or that I’m really lazy.

I guess we’re about to find out.

Reading about writing craft

Flower: writing craft

I told myself I wasn’t going to write about writing too often on this blog. Writing about reading about writing is different though, right?

Okay, I know it’s not really different. But this is my blog, and I can write about writing or write about reading about writing too much if I want to.

Now that that’s out of my system (you’d think I was drunk, wouldn’t you? I’m not, I promise), I want to talk about reading books on writing craft.

I wrote for a decade before I realised writing craft books were a thing. Now I love them and I read them all the time. Maybe you don’t. Hey, I’m not judging.

Continue reading “Reading about writing craft”