8 Tips for Writing a Novel this November

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Ulysses, a NaNoWriMo 2015 sponsor, is offering all participants a free trial of their writing software through December 7. Plus, to help you get going, they asked author David Hewson for his tips on how to start writing a novel: 

David, can you tell how many words you write during one month, on average?

I generally write a book of more than 100K words in six months or so. But I’m a bad example because I’m writing commissioned books to a particular timescale. Before this I wrote much more quickly for some reason. My second book Epiphany was 160K words and I wrote it in ten weeks. But I was younger then and I guess that book was just waiting to come out. 

You’ve published more than 20 novels. How does it actually work to write a novel? Do you have some tips to get started?

The best teaching tool for writing is readily available. It’s the book. If you’ve read widely and thought about the books you like and dislike you should have a hang of what’s going on in mainstream narrative fiction. Yes, it’s a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also a journey, from life to death, ignorance to knowledge, love to hate or vice versa. 

When you think of a book as a journey you then realise you need waypoints, movement, progress. Before I start writing I always develop a few of these starting with what is often called the inciting incident—an event that makes the story happen, even though it will often be revealed part way through the piece. 

So perhaps I have an inciting incident that looks like this…

The mound that’s appeared in the playground turns out to be the hull of a space ship.

Once I’ve written that, I know several things. I need to create characters to make this discovery. I need to describe the playground and the school to which it’s presumably attached. Already I have the three cornerstones of narrative fiction: the world in which the story takes place, the characters that populate that world, and the events that drive the story.

So now I would add in some scenes before the inciting event.

Danny arrives at school to discover there’s excitement about something weird.

On the way in he’s bullied by Joe and picked on by nasty teacher Williamson.

Jenny, a friend he’s secretly in love with comes to his rescue.

Barnes, the dry, distant head teacher tells them about the discovery and through this we begin to learn about the school. It’s a grim, prison-like place. They’re under strict orders to go nowhere near the mystery object.

Joe picks on Danny again and dares him to break the rules for once and disobey the headmaster even though the risks are immense. Foolishly trying to impress Jenny, Danny agrees to do it.

And here we make the discovery of the inciting incident… The mound that’s appeared in the playground turns out to be the hull of a space ship.

There are at least seven or eight scenes there and I’d guess 10,000 words waiting to be written. I may not know what they are but at least I have an idea of where the story’s headed and I have gaps to fill in. I always finish a scene in one day in rough then begin the next day by editing it then writing the next one. I never leave the computer without a rough heading indicating what’s going to be written next.

Note this is a rough story skeleton not a true outline—I don’t know what happens when Danny encounters the space ship. I’m also open to allowing the characters to develop and reshape the story as it goes along. 

Which tools do you use for writing?

Over the years I must have bought every story tool ever produced, from outliners to theory applications to writing apps supposedly dedicated to fiction. 

My firm conclusion now is this: use the bare minimum and keep it simple. If you’re writing something like Game of Thrones you might argue you need very detailed timeline and story management apps to control every last detail. But George RR Martin uses Wordstar and a Rolodex file. So you don’t. And most of us aren’t writing things that complex anyway.

About 98% of my time is spent in Ulysses, both for writing the actual book manuscript and managing the project through a book diary, character lists and any research I’ve picked up along the way. For casual note-keeping I use Google Keep and occasionally Microsoft OneNote (though I’m using the latter less and less and tending to keep important stuff in Ulysses). 

I also use a great Android/Chrome app called Journey for keeping a book diary. The joy is, I can use it on my Android phone too (if I had an iPhone I’d use Day One). I have a few outlining apps which I pull out from time to time to play with, but that is usually as a pathetic work-avoidance routine (yes, we all have them). 

You have published a book about using Ulysses for novel writing, so it seems to be particularly suitable for that purpose. What do you like about it?

The longer I’ve spent writing the more I’ve been convinced that simplicity beats complexity every time. But a lot of minimalist writing apps are just too simple. As soon as you get beyond a few thousand words you realise there’s no way you can manage a long document with them.

Ulysses is the only app I know that combines a very minimalist writing interface with the backend power to manage and shuffle around the many different parts and scenes that go into a book. 

I’ll spend most of my time in a single sheet working on a scene. But when I need to split that scene or move it through the manuscript it’s dead easy. And I can edit non-contiguous scenes just by selecting them with the Command key. This is incredibly powerful but also very simple to use and understand. 

Ulysses can bounce between the three principal views of a book in a keystroke: the master overview, the section view and the individual scene. The story skeleton idea I sketched out above works brilliantly in it. All I do is put at the top of each scene a comment outlining what’s going to happen, then add in and split more scenes as the story grows. The writing happens inside the narrative itself, not in the cold, dry field of research. 

Another important aspect for me is the way Ulysses syncs through iCloud across Macs and the iPad, too. This means I can edit and write pretty much anywhere and never have to worry about losing data, or having to go through a painful manual sync process. It’s important to take advantage of every possible writing moment, especially for something like NaNoWriMo.

I love it.

Hundreds of thousands of people will commit to write a novel during November, many of them on top of their regular obligations. As an expert in this field, what would you advise them?

• Choose the right tool and stick with it — don’t even think of moving to something else part way through.

• Keep it simple. Don’t fool yourself into thinking complexity will cover up for a lack of ideas.

• Listen to your characters. Let them talk in your head. Note down what they say. Make sure they have individual voices. Get them right and they’ll start to write at least part of the story for you.

• Manage your time effectively — you won’t have as much as you want or need. Keep the book alive by making notes on your phone—with apps like Journey, Google Keep, Day One—when you have spare moments.

• When you get stuck go for a walk, a beer, do something different. Many seemingly intractable problems don’t appear so bad a day later.

• When faced with really intractable problems remember — when in doubt, cut it out. It’s usually easier to excise them than fix them.

• Don’t ask for anyone’s opinion. You don’t have time… and besides it’s your story, not theirs. 

• Most of all… have fun. If writing is a pain it will be very apparent in the reading.
  

Good luck!

Remember, Ulysses is offering a free trial version of their writing software to all NaNoWriMo participants through December 7. Plus, if you’re one of the first 200 to purchase the software, you’ll also receive David Hewson’s “Writing a Novel with Ulysses” for free!

David Hewson was a journalist for The Times and The Independent before he started writing mystery novels. To date he has published more than 20 novels and several guidebooks for aspiring authors, among them “Writing a Novel with Ulysses”. Hewson’s books have been translated into more than 25 languages and his latest series, set in Amsterdam and launched with The House of Dolls, is in development for Dutch TV.