My Plan To Write Novels And How I'm Going To Make It Happen (I Hope)

  Morning all, It’s 730am on the 7th of October and today I want to walk through my simple plan with you to get back into writing. When I say ‘writing’ I mean ‘writing-writing’ - i.e novels. Not ‘self-help literature’ as such (which I want to write as well) - but storytelling. There’s something magical about storytelling that has been passed down the ages and is something I see as a little bit of my Everest. So what I’ve already (historically) been able to do - is put together the first draft of a novel in ‘The Death of Richard Finkford’. What I’ve struggled to do - is to go through the editing. I’ve thought about it multiple times and even begun to attempt it - but with no luck. I decided just the other day that I would continue working with my writing coach - Chris Sowers - and have kindly asked him if he could edit the novel. He has happily said yes - and with that, it’ll mean he can solve the ‘challenge’ of the edit and work his way through it. This would be a massive burden off my shoulders and will mean I can head heavily into writing another novel myself. The plan then is as follows:

• Finish reading ‘Save the Cat! Writes a novel’ - this will provide me with the bones of a storytelling framework
• Based upon this book determine the plan for the next novel - and plan it out
• Once I’m reading - begin writing 1-2k words per day 5-6 days per week with a view to finishing draft 1 within 60 days
• Potentially I will ‘write one day/edit the next’ and follow this format - I’m not sure

In some respects, I guess the plan is relatively straightforward in principle. I know along the way, however, there will be an absolute multitude of challenges I will encounter that I’ll need to overcome. Many of them as of yet remain unknown to me - but I’m determined to move forward with this - and to begin this journey this week. Here’s the book I finally finished reading this morning: There were some awesome takeaways from this novel that I plan to incorporate when I start writing this new ‘novel’ that’s inside of me. Having finished this I am also excited to reread: [convertful id="197358"] I was checking my audible and I noticed I’d already listened to 4 or 5 hours of this instructional guide - but it was so dense with insights that I didn’t get through much more. Looking at how this book is able to identify patterns in basically all literature - I want to see what happens when I try and apply this framework to another new novel I’ll write. The whole concept of getting back onto this path excites me. Writing (as you can tell) is a huge love of mine. A day that goes by without writing is not a proper day for me. It’s a place to reveal my thoughts about everything to the world and use it as a forum to clear my thoughts. But as I’ve said in the past about writing a novel and here I will say it again - I feel like I have words inside of me. That there are stories untold that I must pen and write and I would feel remiss if I didn’t do my best to put them together. So then - here’s what I would like to do (literally next) with this in mind:

1. Writing this blog post is a little bit of a ‘call to action for me
2. I’ll then tell 3-5 people that I’m going to write a novel and it’ll be done before Jan 1st (the first draft that is)
3. I’m going to have a marathon audible session somehow and get that audible listened to by next Friday so I have all the knowledge I need to make this happen.
4. I’m going to record a podcast about this tomorrow in more detail so I can cement it in my mind

And then that’s it! Let’s see where we go from here guys :)