At time of writing, I have completed three books, with a fourth in progress and a fifth and sixth in the offing. This doesn't make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination. Possibly there are no experts.
At any rate, I thought I'd share a rundown of my experiences and a few tips...because there's nothing a budding novelist likes better than reading stuff about writing while procrastinating. (Don't look at me like that. I know you. I am you.)
Attempt #1: The Autumn Year
Started at age 14, The Autumn Year was a piece of melodramatic teenage fluff about a lead singer who had dream-visions of a twisted 'younger self' muse. There was a lot of fire and blood and a two-dimensional love interest (sadly, even women are not immune from writing cardboard women, especially in the early years). By the time I finished it, in college, it was roughly 40k words long...a novella. I was very proud for about five minutes. After scanning it for typos, I submitted it to a small press, who very kindly responded, in essence, Oh, honey. Give us a call in ten years when you're ripe. A prodigy, I was not. But I was trying.
Attempt #2: Midway
In between plays, poems, paintings, and other flailings of my early twenties, I started a book called Midway. This one had a feel that currently floods YA: Chosen ones, good vs. evil, star-crossed crushes, etc.. Most of the story happened in churches and carnivals. I meticulously outlined every plot point and strained symbolism before writing 3k and dropping it unfinished in a drawer forever. It belonged there.
Attempt #3: The Big Book of Post-Collapse Fun
Either I finally learned to write what I knew, or I finally knew something worth writing. I'll never know which. But the third time was the charm, and while impulsively attempting NaNoWriMo 2012, I wrote 50k words in 30 days about a feminist blogger surviving the apocalypse. I finished it in January, poked and prodded it until I was sure it was good, and then decided it was too weird for traditional publishers. I self-published it. It's done surprisingly well for itself. I also got to check that little box on my résumé: Novelist. Lady who writes god damn whole entire books. How do you like me now.
Attempt #4: Phaethon
Science fiction and fantasy have always been good friends of mine, and in Phaethon, I mashed them together like some kind of Star Trek transporter accident. The basic premise (What if your cell phone were run by a living, thinking creature?) had been kicking around in my head, and when I sat down to write it, hackers and faeries exploded from my fingertips. I had no idea how it ended. I just ran. After a bit of polishing, I put it out there, and Pandamoon snapped it up for release in Fall of 2016.
Attempt #5: A Word and A Bullet
My first attempt at a sequel, which resulted in a mixed bag. Post-Collapse Fun was a story with one character. My plan was to write a trilogy from three different social perspectives: A loner, a member of group, and half of a romantic couple. This one had LARPers and sassy horses. In the end, while I think it's a worthy follow-up, I also think that I made a mistake in planning so thoroughly. Parts of it feel predictable. Some of my style got pushed out in the headlong rush to the next plot point. We live and learn. From now on, I keep my outlines to sticky notes and hunches.
This brings us to the work in progress, the final installment of the Planetary Tarantella Trilogy, called An Epitaph for Everything Else. On this one, I'm back to flying by the fraying seat of my lucky jeans. It features a pagan couple living on a farm northeast of Yellowstone (which, in the Planetary Tarantella, blows up). I'm not going to tell you what happens after that. In truth, I don't know. But I am going to use observations on my current state of existence (i.e., working) to give you a little insight into what writing a novel is actually like.
If a book gets scary, picture the author in their underwear...because that's probably what they had on when they wrote it. Author photos are lying to you. By and large, we're in front of a notebook or a netbook somewhere with messy hair and no socks, surrounded by empty mugs from which we have sucked every drop of caffeine. Nobody puts on high heels for a date with the muse. There are exceptions to this rule, but for my part, the polished look and the work getting done are generally exclusive. I need that energy to make words.
For at least a little while, every day, everything else has to come second. This includes dishes and spouses. Woolf wasn't kidding about a room of one's own. If you don't set aside a time and a place for your book, there will be no book. If the author's house is a disaster, you know the writing is probably going well. Conversely, if the house is sparkling clean, the writing is probably going terribly, because there's nothing like getting stuck to give a writer the sudden urge to re-grout the shower tile.
Like constraints on time and space, a writer will also have constraints on brain power. Around halfway through the book is when mine usually starts blinking Warning: Low Available Memory. We're dreaming about the story. We're scribbling notes on the subway. We sometimes forget how to talk about anything else. By the time the book is nearing completion, we might as well be drunk (assuming we are not, in fact, actually drunk). We become prone to leaving lunch in the microwave for three days or accidentally adopting new pets. Because none of it matters. None of it is real. We live in the book now.
Relatedly, hitting a writing block may make us cry. Especially if there's thirty or forty thousand words down and now the unfinished book is just laying there like a dead cockroach. An author may turn to any person trying to comfort them and say something melodramatic like You don't understand, the world is stuck. Melodramatic, but for them, not inaccurate.
We will love it and hate it and love it and hate it and fear it and tower over that fear and keep putting down word after word after word. It's what we do. When it's finished, we usually love it more than we ever thought we could. We'll hate it again in a week. This dies down when it's finally published and there's nothing more we can do about it. But it only dies down a little.
Are these exaggerations? Maybe, sure. Maybe I just wrote all this stuff to be funny. Maybe writers are perfectly normal people doing a job like any other. Maybe we're stable and well-rounded adults who brush our teeth twice a day and always have matching socks, who would never consider living on coffee and microwave popcorn, who go to sleep at a regular time and think mostly regular thoughts.
Maybe.
But if you're writing a book, you know better.