Writing a novel is difficult. It's incredibly taxing on your skills as a writer, your patience, and yourself as a person because whatever you write about is going to come from you, and if it doesn't go so well you feel like a failure. It's good to know that if you don't finish the novel you're working on you are, by no means, a failure. Practically every writer has started a novel and been unable to see it to the finish, and ended up scraping it. Some writers even write to the finish only to have today's publishers deem their novel unmarketable. That's okay. These things happen and they are not a total waste. You learn from them. Writing is a process. It builds and builds and builds. There is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing or a perfect writer.
Most writers can't handle the novel length, which is normally 60,000 words to 90,000 words but can be an upwards of 120,000+. It's just too long and we end up being bored by the story, or things aren't going exactly as you thought it would. The characters are all sounding the same, the plot keeps going in circles or isn't consistent. You want to start over-no, instead, you want to start something entirely different, a fresh new idea. So you do, and a couple of months later, you're faced with the same problem.
Some writers don't even know what a novel is really supposed to be like. It sounds silly, but novels do have a structure and certain things in the plot and characters do have to come up that, by the end of the novel, are ultimately solved. I'm mainly talking about the beginning, middle, and end of a novel, as well as the conflict and sub-conflicts, all of which have to be resolved at or before (in terms of sub-conflicts) the end of the novel. Writers staring down at a blank screen are like that because they don't know much about the novel itself, never mind the actual writing.
Other writers just don't yet have the skills to tackle a novel. Too many beginner writers want to make it as great novelists and so start with their first novel idea and find, at the end of writing it, that the novel is far too autobiographical. This is common for beginner writers, who are usually young and therefore lack the experience and the necessary skills to write a thought-provoking and overall powerful novel. The best advice to these beginner novelists is to write short stories first, one finished short story a week. And if you don't like writing short stories, for whatever reason, write scenes, anything that comes to mind or that interests you that you wish to explore (even if you haven't explored it in your life personally-whatever, be creative). At the same time, read the latest and the best in the genre you're most interested in writing. Get used to the different styles, and the words and characters other writers have used so you can a) avoid them and start developing your own style and characters, and b) familiarize yourself with an actual finished product of what you ultimately want to do. Then, when you've done all that for about six months to a year, come back here and read the rest of this article.
Most of the difficulties of tackling a novel can be solved if you read more and write more. But there's still that problem that writing a novel is too much for you to handle. You get bored and you're having a difficult time keeping track of all the story's elements (plot, character, setting, conflict, etc.). You're constantly at arms against writer's block. The good news is there's something you can do about all of this. Below are several tips on how best to tackle a novel so you a) finish it, and b) finish it in such a way publishers will want to publish it.
Outlining
Have an outline of the entire novel. The outline should be simple and easy to follow. It should have your novel separated into scenes along with who the point of view character is going to be for that scene. By outlining your novel in scenes you get rid of doing too much narration and not enough exposition. Scenes make the novel. If you're not writing scenes, you're not writing fiction. Write articles or essays if you can't wrap your head around scenes.
There are writers who don't like to write up outlines and just go with the flow of writing. Sometimes this can work, but only with a writer who is truly devoted to what she's writing, who is used to doing things spontaneously, and who has a very good grasp of the story and characters she is writing about. In other words, they do have an outline, only it's all in their head and they stick to it. Most of us aren't like this, and the writer who tries to be like this ends up losing track of what she's doing and becomes frustrated. So, by all means, do an outline.
