How To Write A Novel

People think that because I am a writer, I produce novels just for the sake of writing. A bit of this statement is true. But the right answer to that is that I don’t. I don’t write novels for selfish reasons or for the money which in the grand scheme of things, books have a terrible margin. The Times recently published the hourly rate of most authors. It’s less than £2 per hour. Given my investment into my author business, I think I have worked for free, I should have registered charity written under my name. 

Novel writing is self-expression that has almost become a solitary hobby for the creative person, and while I would collaborate with other like-minded people, that would be an additional way to get my creativity juices flowing. I write not because I want to, because I do, but there’s more of a compulsion to write – a drive, to get something down. It helps my brain in processing the chaos that is swirling around inside of me, and that’s always been there. Poor parenting, poor development, the inability to show any emotion other than happiness throughout my childhood has created synapses that haven’t quite figured shit out. I turned 50 last year, and things are finally coming together. So if you’re reading this as a rudderless twenty something, hang in there, there’s hope for you yet.

A writer is simply someone who has accesses the written word. All great literature is written in words that provoke something. A novelist uses words to conjure emotional responses in readers and, by doing so, guides an individual through these emotional triggers. Even books that you hate may have hit the mark if you were really honest with yourself. Books are there to elicit something in you. The novel becomes a richly detailed representation of a person’s true-life experience. This is how the mind creates its own reality. However, it is not only a healthy toll on the body that a novel takes into its mix, but it also is a mind depth experience that has the potential for tremendous healing, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist springs to mind or Jay Shetty’s Think Line A Monk. Perhaps this will happen from time to time, and may be a good thing, but the novelist can create books filled with these images to remove the reality of the individual’s actual place in time and space – some might call escapism. One book that changed my life forever was a book that I read in 1999. Written by Professor Shad Helmstetter – What To Say When You Talk To Yourself. So impactful was this book. My whole life took on a completely new direction, and to Prof Helmstetter, I will be forever eternally grateful.

A book for me is a window of opportunity, the dawning of a new world, a reality that I can choose. I can’t remember who said you you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a book, is so true.

As a writer, it’s my job to take you, the reader, away from your reality. It’s one reason you picked the book up in the first place, right? To take you by the hand and take you through the journey of my story, take you from whatever is happening in your world. It doesn’t matter what the genre is because you’ll always only read what you love. Believe me, I have tried. Both erotic fiction does nothing for me and yet, the polar opposite, a cozy romance equally, yep, nothing but tumbleweed.

Give me Reacher, or a Struan, or the analytical mind of Pekkola – then you have my attention right to the full stop when the book says The End.

The only trouble with a wonderful book is the immersive experience the book offers. Let me give you the perfect example – People think Quidditch is a real life sport and there are people that walk among us that speak fluent Klingon.

That’s the power of a story.

The principle skills a writer needs to understand is this posh phrase – Cognitive Dissonance – so you smoke, you chose to, right? That’s behavior in action. The choice to smoke is yours, yet you know that smoking is not good for you. Empirical evidence is overwhelming, it would be churlish of you to argue against this. This is the cognitive side of your thinking, creating a cognitive dissonance in your mind.

This is a simplistic example of cognitive dissonance, and there are many more, more complex examples you live each day. Bourne out of parental teaching, schooling, media, your own psychological wellbeing… It’s the writers’ job to tap into that dissonance as part of the human condition. We see the similarity in how people behave; it doesn’t matter if the spaceship is drifting on the other side of the known universe with no hope to get home, a lover who has been jilted, a murderer is creaking about in the hallway downstairs. The story is the same, and it’s those mirrored emotions that brim over while you read that are contained in the narrative of your book. They don’t have to match your own life, just the sensations the characters are going through. Could this happen to me, would this be true, what would I do?

The book might be a dog of a read, but if there’s a resonance in the plot and the characters to your own life, you’re going to see the book through to the end, and that’s when the writer has done their job. The writer may have even taught you something, Cueolo’s book The Alchemist is a must, if you want to learn something on a deep level, if there’s anything you should take form this blog post is the link to Amazon and buy yourself a life changing read.