Nine Insights that Helped Me Finish My First Novel
I worked on my first novel for ten years, scrapping dozens of failed drafts without ever finishing them. Over time I was able to identify flaws in my process that caused me the same problems again and again. Addressing those problems changed everything, and this month I finally finished a novel I’m proud of.
It didn’t come down to the mechanics of my writing or any superficial technique. What held me back lay in the broader process and construction of the story, lessons that took me years to properly identify but can be simply conveyed to anyone.
Hopefully one of these ideas can help you get out of the same place I’ve been stuck in for the last decade.
Intrigue is a structure of information with a hole in it. The job of a story is to enter that gap like a tunnel, to explore it and find out what’s at the bottom.
Intrigue can be as simple as “what will happen next?” or as complex as “what happened before the story?” or “what’s really going on here?”
The best novels involve some degree of all three.
Intrigue is not something that exists intrinsically within the story. It’s something that exists within the mind of a reader…
