have you ever wondered how to write the first draft of a novel in less than a year? buckle up, because i’ll show you how i did it in five steps.

step 1: decide

in late december 2023, i decided i was going to write a novel in 2024 as one of my new year’s resolutions.

you just have to decide you’re going to do it. and in a serious way. not: oh, maybe i’ll try it out for a few weeks, do a test run.

no. i’m going to write a novel next year. and i’m going to finish it. be serious about your dreams. they come true the more you focus on them.

 

step 2: choose a story idea that sticks

i spent about two weeks and several sleepless nights thinking what my book was going to be about.

what would i write about? what would the genre be? would it be YA? fantasy? sci-fi? i had about 2-3 false starts in terms of coming up with the idea. in other words, i wrote about 30,000 words of a sci-fi book that i eventually stopped; i started experiencing burnout after forcing myself to write every day. i wrote 15,000 words combined for two other ideas until i finally arrived at the right one.

choose a story idea and wait to see if it sticks. what i mean by this is, let’s say you decide on your story idea and that it’s going to be historical fantasy for YA readers. you spend 14 days typing out an outline (or writing out a draft) and for whatever reason, the idea isn’t sticking. losing interest is a big sign of a story idea not sticking. if this happens, immediately scrap it and wait. shuffle again through the ideas you have (we’re not worrying about if it will sell at this point) and wait until something fresh and exciting presents itself to you.

think about how you feel as you’re writing the story. do you feel truly immersed in the experience of exploring the world, or is your mind half in, half out? are you already getting distracted by your thoughts? if your thoughts are distracting you, your idea probably isn’t strong enough. good story ideas enchant you completely. they take over you. don’t stop sifting through ideas until you find that.

also: DO NOT spend literal years thinking on this. why? because most likely, the results you come up with will change and you’ll have wasted time. the goal is to have you zoom through step 2 as quickly as possible so you can dedicate a longer time to step 3. the idea is what’s most important, because it’s what you’ll be spending the next several months with. if you’re using brain space that isn’t directed toward developing your story idea, abandon it for now. if a story idea seemed exciting in the first few days or weeks of writing it and then your feelings for it start to peter out, don’t be afraid to start new. you must LOVE your story idea for you to finish a book.

with that being said, however, there is a big difference between scrapping a story idea because you haven’t found the enchanting story yet, and scrapping a story idea because you’re not pushing yourself to stay disciplined and stay on track with your goal to finish the novel.

as you go through the journey of writing the book day by day, you’re going to have to be able to tell the difference.

 

step 3: you will no longer ‘write by the seat of your pants.’ it’s time to make a detailed outline.

i created a document of a super super super EXTREMELY detailed first draft outline.

i had multiple 3-hour, 8-hour, 10-hour blocks where i would spend all day just writing out the outline, writing whatever came to mind. i didn’t use any outline templates and didn’t use any question prompts online to guide me. throughout the entire process, i mostly stuck to my own resources and focused on getting down my ideas instead of trying to look at what was working for other people.

to look for one or two resources others incorporate into their writing routine (like this one) is good to help yourself along the journey, especially if you’re starting out for the first time. but at some point you need to just get to the task of writing. i don’t think i need to write a five page paper convincing anyone how distracting the online world can get. it’s easy to feel like you’re making progress on your book because you’re researching how to make progress on your book. but writing a book and researching how to write a book are not the same thing.

i’ll repeat: you’re not making any real progress unless you’re actually sitting and writing the book.

for the outline, i used a 10-phase structure (not the 3-act structure from SAVE THE CAT! WRITES A NOVEL — i hadn’t gotten my hands on the book at that point). since i didn’t have any prompts or particular structure for the outline, i just kept thinking about the story and then wrote the ideas that came to me. one thing would lead to another, so this way, no prompts were needed.

as to what the outline actually contained, i included the characters and what their motivations were. i asked myself what were the lies they believed — i started with the characters first in order to figure out the external obstacles (A story) that were going to challenge their internal flaws (B story).

the key is that i wrote down anything that came to mind first. that means i didn’t pressure myself to know everything all at once from chapter 1 to chapter 100. whatever followed from that would follow, but i wasn’t going to concern myself with pulling all of it out of myself when my brain wasn’t yet ready to think about particular crevices in the story.

i spent about 45 days working vigorously at the outline. it eventually came out to be 107 pages, or a little over 50,000 words. one of the most useful sections of my outline was called “scenes hanging by a thread.” this was where i wrote out the scenes i envisioned in the actual draft. this wasn’t me forcing my hand to think about scenes, either. as i was writing up my characters’ motivations and such, naturally what came to mind was conversations between those characters and the sorts of conflict that would definitely come up because of personality clashes. this would all be pivotal for plot and character development, so i jotted everything down.

the section was essentially for writing down the scenes i was most excited to write, even if they weren’t in order or were literally the very last scenes of the book. as you’re writing the draft, you can always work your way backward from those exciting scenes scenes by asking yourself the question: what needs to have happened earlier on in order for this current scene to make sense?

 

step 4: transitioning from detailed outline to first draft –> know when to stop the outline

i created the outline and continued working on it throughout the first two months of the year (jan-feb). when march 1st hit, i opened a blank document and started writing the first draft.

sounds fairly simple, right? at that point, i had fleshed out my story idea enough that i was familiar with it, yet making the transition from outline to draft took an extreme amount of discipline.

writing an outline is far easier than writing a real draft. writing an outline doesn’t require you to connect scenes, to understand characters and do their personalities justice. writing an outline does not show that you know how to write character development well from beginning, middle, to end. while an outline might be bursting with great ideas, it doesn’t mean you’ve executed yet. an idea can be great and can also be executed poorly. by working on an outline, you’re getting a lot of the hard work out of the way, but you still haven’t done the work of molding it into an effortless thing called a story.

that’s where writing your first draft comes in. that is what writing your first draft will teach you.

at some point, you’re going to finish up your 10 phases (my writing structure) or the 3-act phase (standard structure) and you’re going to scratch your head and feel that you’ve finished. what more is there to write? you’ve gotten as specific as you can, you understand what’s going to happen by the end. …and yet, you keep writing. you add and add and add to your outline, desperately.

because now you understand what’s happening: you’re starting to procrastinate.

working on an outline isn’t always helpful. there’s a point where you start to realize that working on it is just keeping you from the daunting task of having to start a blank document all over again.

but you have to do it. so much of writing is just pushing through — blank pages, blank heads, hangovers, whatever. you have to sit your brain down and make them come to the understanding that it’s no longer about what you want to do anymore.

it’s about what you have to do.

 

step 5: (use throughout entire process) find out what kind of writer you are and lean into it

i also want to make a disclaimer: i did not write every day. i hate restricting myself to the same word count goal, or to the goal of “you must write every day in order to be successful or finish your book.” the reason i was able to have such a high word count done in eight months is because i made up for it by having extremely long sessions of writing. i am capable of sitting in front of my computer for long hours and get it all out of me. within those hours, i write very quickly. writing little tiny bits every day kills me. on the other hand, writing a lot every day makes it feel like a real job, which is the challenge i need it to be. the several false starts i had with the first draft turned out to be a great experience because i learned all these things about myself.

if that’s not the kind of writer you are, you have to figure out what works for you, what rules help other writers that are already out there that might really work for you. maybe what might work best is creating your own rules that work for you. but the only way to do that is to sit down and literally get started. right now, before the new year so the habit is already in you, and you don’t fall off after three weeks in january.

 

 

after you’ve finished the “shitty first draft”

i had certain feelings of hatred after finishing the first draft of my book, quite frankly because it was very bad. my error was in ignoring all the advice online (online writing communities are helpful up to the point they’re not) that once you finish your work, you need to put it the fuck down and go touch grass.

well. i was very impatient and did not want to do that. i had convinced myself (and my friends and anyone who would listen) that it made perfect sense to start revising my book right away, because by the time i finished writing the last chapter of the book, it had been many many months since i had worked on the first half of the book. so i got my document printed and bound at my local university printing shop and lugged the big ol thing home with me.

i don’t know what your post-writing process is going to look like or how that’s going to work for you, but for me, immediately diving into a work i had spent months with my head completely filled of nothing else, in was a mistake. you need time every from it, and if you need a valid reason why — like i did — here it is.

i mentioned earlier a section in my outline called “scenes hanging by a thread.” after reading parts of the first draft recently, i was stunned to find that basically everything i had wanted to get across in the draft actually made it into the draft. the draft was also awfully clean. for the first time in my life, after years of being unable to avoid writing the infamous ‘shitty first drafts’, i had managed to write a clean draft. and guess what? it was all thanks to the detailed outline i had spent a month or month and a half working on.

something i noticed after reading excerpts of the draft recently is that many of the scenes i hadn’t anticipated writing were actually shaped by the scenes i had written beforehand in the outline. what was even more confusing was that despite my initial hatred of the first draft and feeling that it was very dull and there was no way anyone was going to read this, something dawned on me (yes, we’re being dramatic). there were clear moments in the text that showed my writing had improved!! my craft wasn’t totally shitty!! the characters, though i undeniably hated them, showed their flaws most during pivotal moments in the plot. they showed that they still hadn’t learned Their Big Fat Lesson, and they wouldn’t learn it until they lost everything that mattered.

by getting through the entire draft (through the PRACTICE of it), somewhere i’d gained a sense of where things needed to fit, where they belonged. meaning, purposefulness, some boisterous author confidence had found its way into my work somehow. and taking my eyes away from the draft all this time is the only thing that’s allowed to be led to these conclusions.

there are still many things wrong with the draft, many things alive in there that i need to tackle down and kill. but the wonderful thing about a first draft is that it’s a first draft and no one cares yet. i can have as many failed test runs as i need until it feels exactly how i need it to feel. and that’s the wonderful thing about writing too, is the reward of seeing your hand improved, and all the experience you’ve lived up to this point there in ink for anyone to see, shining and glimmering and lifting from the page.

 

 

what went wrong with my detailed outline (added)

these are some areas of improvement i noticed as i was sifting through the outline for draft 1 recently.

another portion of my outline contained questions i had that i needed to answer to flesh out certain plot points. many of them were questions i had never answered in the outline, and so naturally never answered in the draft.

this was where i needed to be most thorough — answering the immediate questions i had, the information i lacked about the characters. writers are readers. we’re both smart; a reader is certainly going to be asking the same things a writer is. they’re going to feel that something is off or incomplete or not fleshed out enough. so if you want to do this method, do it properly.

as you write, you need to pinpoint the areas where you need to be thorough. in other words, you need to be good at identifying the areas that need the most attention. since i tried to go from detailed outline to clean draft, that meant my clean draft imitated the structure of my outline. if the outline is lacking and shows how little time spent on a character, that same feeling is going to carry to the draft. you can always work on fleshing out the character as you’re working on the draft, but you may as well do all the hard thinking during the outline. after all, that’s what it’s for.

all in all, everything written in the outline should be intentional. really take your time with it. if something doesn’t belong, delete it. you want to have no distractions on the page, especially if there are a bunch of old ideas you’re no longer entertaining. i had a separate document where i pasted all my old ideas in case i needed to return to them. that way, my outline could always be kept up to date.

because let’s face it: by the end, your clean draft is going to hold the same essence as your outline. it’s going to follow it quite well that it surprises you. so if you really want to have a clean draft, focus on making a clean outline for your future self two months down the line.

lastly, you don’t want to spend a long time on the outline just to feel like you’re doing good work. don’t let what i said earlier scare you. if you need help, go online. search for the specific problem you’re stuck on. for instance, if i needed help identifying which area i needed help, i might look it up briefly.

(tip: i’ve found that doing a lot of thinking on world-building isn’t helpful. you can make world-building up as you go in the draft and it won’t mess up what you already have for the plot; it can only add to it. for me, time spent on understanding the characters, reading their dialogue over again to gain clues of who they are is usually time well spent. because understanding character motivations drives the entire story forward, especially when you have multiple characters with conflicting wants and desires.)

for your novel, what are the areas you know you need to do the most thinking?

 

 

tips for balancing writing while leading a double life (jk)

being a college student and having a schedule where i have to go to classes every day, do the readings, write papers, make in-class presentations, do my best on final exams, and have multiple meetings for my jobs does not allow one the flexibility of a full-time writing schedule. i even studied abroad in japan this year for five months. i was also focusing on achieving my other new year’s resolutions i had set and trying to live my life as a new and improved person. writing this book, however, was always a priority. over any of that. and that’s what i want to get across. once you’ve made something a priority, once you’ve let your brain see it that way, there’s a point where you can’t let yourself down. it’s not that you’re going to let yourself fail all your exams and not show up to your meetings. it’s that you’ve already decided. you’ve told your brain, “this is what we’re gonna get up to for the next twelve months whether you like it or not.” it’s being serious with your dreams because your dreams are serious things.

so no matter what was going on in my life (culture shock; really low points in a foreign country where i didn’t want to go outside or do anything, let alone write; an extremely heavy class schedule both in japan and in nyc, 5-7 work meetings per week; maintaining a social life/networking life), i still wrote, and wrote, and wrote. all throughout the year, no matter what was happening around me.

when you sit down to write, it isn’t always going to feel fun. it isn’t always going to feel like your one book idea is going to change the world. sometimes even the mere sight of your manuscript is going to give you the ick. sometimes you will hate your idea so much it makes you cry and you feel the urge to chuck your laptop across the room. you’re going to grab lunch with your friends smack in the middle of your draft and they’re never going to want to get lunch with you again because all you can do is wail about how much one of your characters is giving you a hard time.

these things will happen over and over again, but no matter what, you push through. because this is your dream. if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have found this, and you wouldn’t have read this far.

 

closing point

right when i was reaching the very end stages of writing the book, i had a major block. i mean MAJOR. i had wanted to quit several times throughout the book, but for some reason it was strongest at this particular point. what i didn’t know was that the reason it was hitting me so strongly was because i was almost there, i was almost done with the book. literally ALL YOU WANT is on the other side of that block. that block has often been described as you standing in the middle of a pitch-black forest. the deeper you walk into the forest, your flashlight starts to peter out. the light gets weaker and weaker the farther you walk, but it’s your only lifeline. you have to keep going; you go back the way you came would have made it all for nothing. you have no other choice, because you’re a writer.

right on the other side of that terrifying block, i started gaining momentum again. suddenly very, very quickly. but that was only because i had dragged myself through the mud of my words. it was slow, and terrible and felt totally pointless at times. but once i reached the other side, i knew i was nearing the end. it was just a feeling, maybe a writer’s sixth sense. somehow i had found myself at the arrival point of one of the final scenes. trust me, there is no greater feeling or reward than knowing you are almost there.

so every time you find yourself having walked straight into hard times or the middle of a dark forest, it could very well be one of those times that your book is coming to a close. but you won’t ever be able to see it through if you don’t finish what’s in front of you now.

you have to keep going. no one is going to yell at you if you give up, and that idea is horrifying to every writer. that right now, no one cares if i stop writing, if my book never sees itself to a second draft or third, if it never makes it into the hands of an agent or publisher. because i haven’t proven myself yet.

you have to make people care, and by doing that, you write. find whatever works for you, what times of day you are most productive, what times of day you most give a fuck about what you’re doing — so that one day people are going to care if you stop writing.

one day people are going to recognize what’s inside you, if you just keep going and beating the odds against yourself. you have to pick yourself up continuously every day even when it feels hopeless.

but it’s all going to be worth it.

i promise.