How to write novels? Just do it!

Writing is as much an art as a craft, much like carpentry or plumbing. Here is how I learnt it, from gurus like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood.

My career as a novelist started with a tweet. On March 11, 2022, the news agency ANI tweeted: “On 9 March 2022, in the course of routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile.” It was followed by another tweet that said: “The Government of India has taken a serious view and ordered a high-level Court of Enquiry: Ministry of Defence. It is learnt that the missile landed in an area of Pakistan. While the incident is deeply regrettable, it is also a matter of relief that there has been no loss of life due to the accident: Ministry of Defence.”

In response, @DiscourseDancer, whom I follow on X, tweeted: “I still stand by my web series idea of a show like The Office but based in the PMO.” To this I replied: “think will purloin this to write novel.”

And so started a difficult journey that taught me a lot of things. Some 12,000 words into my purported novel, I realised that novels are not the same as TV shows. The former requires that characters move and change; the latter is about static characters. Joey and Phoebe and Chandler remain the same from the first to last episode of Friends. After this realisation, I threw away what I had written and began afresh. The novel that I wrote ultimately did not resemble the idea I had started with. What follows are some of the things I learnt on the way.

Two ways

Writing is as much an art as a craft, much like carpentry or plumbing. The apprentice has to learn the craft from a master. These days, aspiring writers attend expensive creative writing courses to hone their skills. However, it is also possible to get guidance from books and free YouTube videos, as I did. I watched videos of writers like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood elaborating on their methods to get a handle on the process of writing.

So far as I understand it, a novel can be written in two ways. The first is to begin with a premise (“what if…”) and then work one’s way through the story, imagining reactions and outcomes and changes in characters as things come up and the action unfolds. This is the manner in which the suspense novelist Stephen King functions.

Hemingway wrote standing up, in longhand on sheaves of paper at night. | Photo Credit: Flickr 

There is a delightful video on YouTube called “How Stephen King gets his ideas”, which parodies this format. A person acting as King comes up with one-liners on this what-if theme and then shows what the resulting novel would be. While the video is humorous, it does not reveal much about King’s format.

However, King does offer useful, if basic, tips in the video. He says that he writes every day and gets six pages in—something like 1,000 or 1,500 words (P.G. Wodehouse wrote 500 words a day, every day). Writing is “self-hypnosis”, King says, and that without a routine it is not easy to have a regular output. I too have felt that a routine is probably the decisive factor which separates writers from those who intend to “become” writers but are unable to.

What I found most intriguing is King’s advice to writers that they should “go where the story leads [them]”. What does that mean? He explains that a story reveals itself to a writer, and characters come alive and have their own agency. This is not strictly true, of course, because everything ultimately comes out of the writer’s mind. But I agree that putting imaginary characters in one situation after the other produces new avenues and possibilities and also helps construct their identities.

Stephen King offers valuable tips on writing | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, said that the first thing he did with a novel was to write the last line. And this is the second method of writing a book: first lay out the framework and then fill it up. Irving’s is the most extreme form of this architectural style, but we can see how it differs from King’s. King, who is a friend of Irving, says that he finds the idea repulsive. According to him, spontaneity is more important than planning.

Asked if he keeps notes, King says that such a diary would be the best way to preserve bad ideas. Good ideas stick around, he says, and do not need to be recorded. I found this slightly misleading. King himself says somewhere with regard to one of his novels—The Stand—that he was having trouble finding the ending, and so went out for a walk, in the course of which all the strands suddenly came together in his mind and he wrote them down, so as not to forget.

Writing rituals

And here we come upon another element which is fundamental to writing. The act of writing is not limited to the time and effort spent in front of the computer or over a notebook. A lot of “writing” happens in the mind, often serendipitously (probably in an inebriated state), outside the time that one ritually spends on actually writing the text. But it is vital that this material is set down on paper, or on the phone, so that it is not forgotten. To not record it on the assumption that it will stay in memory is foolish.

It is an important factor to observe the writing rituals of writers. Vladimir Nabokov wrote post-it sized scenes and then pieced them together, as one might a jigsaw puzzle. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up, in longhand on sheaves of paper at night, and his assistant was required to collect the papers and make sense of it all in the morning.

In his book On Writing and in interviews elsewhere, King remarks that he is saddened at not being recognised as a writer, presumably by those who review literature. Being recognised by serious readers and critics always seems important, even if one has sold millions of copies and been validated by popularity. However, I do not think that popularity or getting published is what defines a writer.

A writer is someone who writes. Whether or not they are published (so as to become the grandiose sounding “author”) is irrelevant to me. The critical thing is to do it.

Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works. His latest novel is After Messiah.