Secrets to Starting a New Novel

The process that works for me every time.

I mentioned that my third book is going through editing in coming weeks so I’ll be diving into those pages. In the meantime I’ve been gearing up to start book four. Book four! Can you even believe it? It makes me so happy (proud! incredulous! confused! elated!) that I’ve actually managed to eke out a living daydreaming up characters and plots all day. (BTW I’m determined to write a scene in a flower shop like this one because I’m obsessed with Les Fleurs and the owner’s new book French Blooms.) Anyway, I digress…

As a writer, I often get two questions on repeat: Are any of your characters based on you or someone you know? (Answer: They are all composites of my experiences and people I’ve interviewed and known over time.) The second question is…Now that you’ve done this a few times, does writing a novel get easier?

Gosh, wouldn’t that be lovely? The answer is writing never gets easier, but if you love to write as much as I do then you relish in its challenge. If I were to sit down at my office, fire off a novel in a couple months and clap my hands at its completion, writing books would get pretty boring. If you don’t continue to learn then how are you growing? Sure, I have a better sense of the timing of emotional beats in a story, when a section is going on too long and how to deepen a character, but the actual work of fleshing out all of those things isn’t like ticking a box. You spend months, sometimes years, honing different parts of a story.

My process always begins with excitement and trepidation, and in the beginning I don’t sleep well at night. (This happens again as I write toward the novel’s climax.) My subconscious wakes me up at random times in the dark and I get that nervous/excited feeling you get when you’re about to board a roller coaster. Last night I woke up three times with the following thoughts in my head: Should I tell the story with three different narrators or should I stick with one perspective? I hemmed and hawed a bit before forcing myself to fall back asleep. Most annoying is the fact that I didn’t settle on an answer before hand.

But (BUT!!) my number one secret to success in starting a novel is this: I get off my computer. It’s so hard to do this because you want to get going already — you have 90,000 words ahead of you! Yet it’s so critical to break away from the screen. Instead I’ll carry a notebook to a quiet corner of my house with a cup of chamomile tea. If it’s summer, I’ll be on a beach with the notebook balanced on my lap.

And I begin to sketch.

Not illustrations. I’m drawing up descriptions of setting and place and character and plot. I don’t edit myself at all — I scribble things down, cross stuff out. What is my main character’s name? (Oooh, gosh how I love naming my characters.) What is the only thing they want? What are they failing at? Why am I starting at this age to tell their story rather than a later or earlier point in time?

The reason writers need to get off the computer at first is this: You’ll be too tempted to start writing. And often, this early in the process, many of us have zero idea what the story is. I’m not an outliner — I will just begin furiously typing away at a certain point. Count the beginning though as the exploratory phase, where you’re playing puppeteer. Very early in the process of writing ON GIN LANE, I typed up a draft of Everleigh arriving at the hotel in Southampton (which is still the first chapter). But I remember finishing it and thinking: Wow, I have no idea what happens next yet. That’s when I went to my pencils and paper!

And that’s where I’m headed this entire week. To embrace this period of fictional wanderings, when literally anything can happen in my pages.