Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
If you’ve spent three or four years revising the same novel, starting over, and wondering why you still haven’t finished, I want you to consider something.
For many writers, I don’t think a novel is the thing you should be writing right now.
I know. That’s a sentence that could make you close the page. Hear me out.
I love novels. I love trilogies and series. If you want to write one, I want to support you in that. What I’m offering here is my current best approach for writers who feel overwhelmed: try a smaller whole story, get to the end of a draft, and give yourself another chance to learn.
Your current ability to handle a large project isn’t the same as your creative potential. Choosing something smaller can help you build the experience you need -- and discover what kind of writing you enjoy along the way.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
Why You Should Stop Writing Your Novel | ep 008
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When did a novel become the starting line?
In the writing circles I’m part of, the novel has quietly become the standard unit of measure for being a “real author.” Sometimes the advice goes further: if you’re serious, start planning your trilogy. Plan your series.
I understand the commercial reasoning. Another book can bring readers back to the earlier ones. A finished series can be sold as a bundle. Page reads matter to writers publishing through Kindle Unlimited. There are reasons people give that advice.
But advice about selling books can turn into an assumption about how you should begin learning to write them.
Then I see writers beating themselves up because they haven’t finished their first novel. They’re revising it again. Starting it over again. Shorter work starts to feel less important, as though it doesn’t quite count.
I want you to question that starting point. What size of project would give you a useful challenge and a chance to finish?
Cook a meal before catering a wedding
Imagine you want to become a better cook.
You could start by planning and catering a wedding for a hundred people. Or two hundred. Now you’re dealing with timing, menu balance, coordination, food safety and pressure, all at once.
Or you could cook a meal for yourself or your family. Pick one challenging recipe and work on it over a couple of weekends. Cook a few nights a week and build your repertoire.
That second path gives you repetition and manageable challenges. You cook the meal, taste it, adjust, and cook again. You get a finished experience to learn from.
Writing can make it tempting to skip straight to the wedding banquet. That’s how you break into the biz, kid.
But a novel brings its own set of things to coordinate. If you’re still learning how to finish a story, taking on all of them together can make it harder to get the experience you need.
Build the endurance for the work
The other comparison that comes to mind is running.
If you’re becoming a runner, you don’t usually begin with an untrained marathon. I’ve seen someone try that kind of leap with a triathlon. It didn’t go well, and they got injured.
A more gradual path might begin with shorter distances. If it’s been a while, it might begin with walking down the block. You build strength, learn pacing, and develop endurance over time.
I think something similar can happen with writing. A writer takes on a novel before they’ve built the creative conditioning to handle its size. Structure, plot, pacing and all the other decisions pile up. The project collapses under the weight.
And the conclusion can become, “I’m not cut out for this.”
But your current creative conditioning is different from your creative potential. You may need more experience handling the work. That’s something you can build.
Give yourself more complete experiences
In many disciplines, learning happens through a cycle: you attempt something, finish it, learn from it, and try again.
Each time through, you have more experience to work with. Your instincts can become sharper. You get another opportunity to try a different choice and see what it does.
A novel can make that cycle very slow. If you spend years on one attempt and keep restarting it, you may get a lot of practice beginning without much experience reaching an ending.
A smaller story gives you a chance to work through a whole piece. You can see what your beginning set up, what your middle did with it, and where the ending takes you.
That’s the experience I want you to have more often. It gives you something to carry into the next attempt.
Learn what a word count actually feels like
Repetition taught me another skill: scope. That means getting a sense of the size of a project and what it will take me to make it.
When I started writing, if you’d asked me for 2,000 words, I wouldn’t have known what that meant in practical terms. Two thousand. Five thousand. Fifty thousand. They all sounded big. I didn’t know how much work it would take me to make those numbers exist on a page.
The reverse problem was just as mysterious. How could I fit a story into 2,000 words without it growing to 5,000? Could I keep a chapter to 1,000 words? Could I stay within the word count for a freelance assignment?
For me, doing the work repeatedly made those numbers mean something.
When you’ve had those experiences, a 70,000- or 100,000-word novel is easier to think about in practical pieces. What size pieces might you break it into? What can you do each week with your schedule and your health? Roughly how many chapters might that become?
You’re still making estimates. But now you have some experience behind them. You know more about both producing the words and keeping the story within the space it has.
Find out which forms you love
There’s a quieter benefit to trying work at different sizes: you get to discover what kind of writer you are.
If a novel is the first form you attempt, and the only one you have time to attempt, you might never find out how much you enjoy short stories. Or essays. Or serialized fiction. Or experimental work.
Some writers come alive in compact stories where every word carries a lot of weight. Others love building a story piece by piece. Maybe you’d enjoy writing episodically, or making a webcomic with someone you’re collaborating with.
What form excites you? Where does your energy naturally go? What feels sustainable over time?
It’s hard to answer those questions without points of comparison. A novel takes so much time and effort that it can be difficult to explore other forms alongside it.
I discovered something like this with screenwriting. It turns out I talk too much and write too much to be a screenwriter. I prefer prose fiction: I get to be the director and the editor, and there’s no production budget limiting the scene I imagine.
I learned that by trying different shapes and comparing the experience. I want you to have that freedom too.
You might come back to novels with more experience and a clearer sense of what you want to make. You might discover that another form is the one you love. Either discovery is useful.
Try a 5,000-word story
Here’s my homework for you: write a 5,000-word short story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
If you can, try to have a draft done in a month. Thirty days. Look at your calendar and work backward from there.
- Choose a story to attempt at that size. Give yourself a whole piece to work on, with a beginning, middle and end.
- Aim for a complete draft. The month-long goal is a draft you can learn from. It doesn’t have to be polished and ready to publish.
- If you can, plan backward from a date 30 days away. Think about how the work can fit into the time you have.
You’ll have a more manageable piece to work toward. And as you do it, you’ll start learning what that amount of writing takes for you.
So yes, I’m saying: jog a 5K.
I noticed that connection while recording. Five thousand words. A 5K. That was a happy accident, and now I need to work it into the way I teach.
The point is to give yourself a challenge you can work through, then learn from the experience. You don’t have to turn this into another way to beat yourself up about whether you’re a real writer.
You can still want to write the novel
I hope you write your novel. I hope you write several. Write your trilogy. Write your series.
I’m offering this smaller project because I want you to have more experience to draw on when you take on the larger one. More clarity about scope. More understanding of how you work. More finished drafts to learn from.
If you’ve chosen a smaller story but are hesitating at the page, How to Start Writing When You Don’t Feel Like It gives you a rough opening move to try.
For now, give the 5K a go. Make a story with a beginning, middle and end, and see what the experience teaches you.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.