How to Write a Novel: Eight Stages, and Where They Go Wrong

Test the Idea Before You Owe It Anything

Most novel ideas arrive as a situation or a mood, and neither can carry 80,000 words. A premise can: a specific person wants something, something stands in the way, and going on costs them.

Here is one, invented for this page. Maureen Ashby, a driving examiner in Grimsby, passes a seventeen-year-old she should have failed, because his mother is her oldest friend. Three weeks later he kills a cyclist on the A180. Only Maureen knows what the boy did at the roundabout on his test.

Two tests will tell you whether a premise has a book in it, and they take an evening.

The ten-scene test. Without worrying about order, write down ten scenes you would enjoy writing. Maureen at the inquest, hearing the boy called a careful driver. Maureen at her friend’s kitchen table, being thanked. If you run dry at five, you may have a short story, which is a fine thing to have and better discovered now than on page 200.

The do-nothing test. Ask what happens if your main character does nothing. If the answer is “she’s fine”, the story has no engine, so build one. Maureen can stay quiet for the rest of her life, unless the cyclist’s widow, who never learned to drive because he did it for her, books a test. Now the silence has a date on it.

Try the Voice on One Scene, Three Ways

Before you settle in, write the same short scene three ways: in first person, in close third, and with a narrator who knows more than anyone in the story and has opinions about it. Give each one twenty minutes.

This decides more than style. It decides what the book can hide. Maureen in first person can lie to us for a hundred pages. In close third she can only avoid thinking about things, which is often better. A knowing narrator can tell us on page one that this boy will kill someone, then make us sit through his test. John Gardner called the gap between reader and character psychic distance, and the few pages he gives it in The Art of Fiction are worth finding.

Pick the version where the sentences seem to have an attitude without your help. Changing later is a big job, but not a fatal one.

Plan as Much as Your Nerve Requires

Some novelists plan every scene and some start with a list of names. Both kinds have finished books, so the useful question is what stops you. If you stall because you don’t know what happens next, plan more. If you stall because you know exactly what happens and can’t be bothered to type it, plan less.

A workable minimum is the opening situation, an ending you’re allowed to change, and one large turn around the middle that makes the second half a different book from the first. For Maureen: the widow finds out who signed the boy’s pass, and tells no one. Our guide to outlining a novel runs one story through three acts, Save the Cat and the snowflake method, and covers what to do when the plan stops matching the book. It will.

Keep a Small Record of the Facts

As soon as you have pages, you have facts: Maureen’s age, the date of the test, which way the roundabout runs. Start a file with names, ages, dates and anything you’ve had to look up twice. That file is the beginning of a story bible, a useful thing that can grow into a beautiful object and take the place of the book, so keep it small and let the draft feed it.

Draft in Scenes, and Keep Walking

Write one scene at a time. A scene has someone who wants something, something opposing them, and a result that leaves things changed. Dwight Swain set this out as goal, conflict, disaster in Techniques of the Selling Writer, and it is still the quickest check there is: if nothing has changed by the end, what you have is notes.

The arithmetic is less frightening than the idea of a novel, and you should do it once:

Words per session	Sessions for 80,000 words	At five sessions a week
300	267	about a year
500	160	about seven months
1,000	80	about four months
1,667	48	about ten weeks

The last row is the pace of National Novel Writing Month, 50,000 words in thirty days. The organisation behind it closed in 2025, though nothing stops you borrowing November. If you’re wondering about the 80,000, we have a page on how long a novel should be.

Four habits do more here than willpower.

Leave a re-entry note. The real argument for writing often has little to do with virtue. A book goes cold, and after a week away you’ll spend a whole session rereading to remember who’s angry with whom. End every session with two lines to yourself: where you are, and what happens next. Hemingway stopped when he knew what came next. You can go further and stop in the middle of a sentence, since finishing a sentence is easier than starting a day.

Don’t go back. Rewriting chapter one is the most respectable way there is of not writing a novel. When you discover on page 140 that Maureen needs a brother in the traffic police, don’t return and add him. Put a line in a fix-later file (Alan, traffic police, plant him early) and carry on as if he had always been there. Nobody will ever read this stretch of the draft except you.

Use placeholders. Journalists write TK, for “to come”, where a fact is missing, and because hardly any English word has those letters side by side, a search finds them all later. She marked the sheet with her TK. Look up what examiners carry these days when you revise, once you know the scene has survived.

Keep each scene in its own file. A novel in one long document turns every move into surgery. Scrivener made the binder of small pieces standard, and Shiro, which we make, works the same way on plain files. Word or Google Docs will do if you use headings and the navigation pane, and the software guide goes through the choices. Whether AI belongs anywhere near a draft is a separate question with its own page.

Get Through the Middle

Somewhere past the first third, the pleasure of setting things up has been spent and the ending is still out of sight. Many novels are abandoned around here. The symptoms differ, and so do the cures.

• Nothing is changing. Spend a secret early. Let the widow discover at 40,000 words what you were saving for 70,000. You won’t know what comes next, and now you have something to find out.
• You don’t know what happens next. List twenty things that could. The first ten will be what anyone would think of. Around fifteen, you’ll start writing things that slightly embarrass you. Those are the ones to look at.
• You know, and you can’t face it. There’s usually one scene you’ve been circling: the confrontation, the death, the sex scene your mother will read. Write it badly, today, in an hour. The book tends to loosen afterwards.
• You’ve gone off the whole thing. Jump ahead and write the scene you’ve been looking forward to for months, then build towards it. Nobody is reading this in order yet.

Then finish, even thinly. The last chapters of a first draft can be half summary and half notes to yourself. Anne Lamott’s chapter on this stage in Bird by Bird has a title that is both rude and correct. A finished bad draft can be repaired, and it will tell you what the book is about, which no quantity of exquisite opening pages can do.

Let It Cool, Then Revise From the Biggest Problem Down

Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is six weeks in a drawer before you reread, and his formula for the second draft is the first draft minus ten per cent. If you underwrite, you’ll need different maths, but the same drawer. When you take it out, read it in a few long sittings, as a reader would, and make notes without changing anything.

Then work in passes: structure first, because there’s no point polishing a scene you’re about to cut, then scenes, then characters and continuity, then sentences, then typos. The revision guide takes these one at a time, starting with a reverse outline, the most useful morning you will spend on the book after finishing it.

Find Readers Who Owe You Nothing

Once you’ve fixed what you can see, you need people who aren’t you. Three to five is plenty, and they should read the kind of book you’ve written and be people you won’t have to sit opposite at Christmas if it goes badly.

Don’t ask whether they liked it, since everyone who is fond of you has only one answer to that. Ask these instead:

• Where did you put it down, or want to?
• Who did you stop believing?
• At the halfway point, what did you think was going to happen?
• What confused you, and when did it clear up?

Readers are reliable about where it hurts and much less so about the remedy. If three of them stumble on the same page, the page has a problem, whatever they each think the problem is.

Decide What Finished Is For

The last decision is where the book goes. For an agent or a publisher, you’ll need a query letter, a synopsis and a tolerance for silence. If you’re publishing it yourself, you’re also hiring an editor, buying a cover and formatting the files.

Either way, start the next book while you wait. It’s the one part of the business that answers to you.

The Questions People Ask

How long does it take to write a novel?

An 80,000-word first draft takes 160 sessions at 500 words each, or about seven months at five sessions a week. Plan on revision taking at least as long again. Plenty of first novels take years, usually because the writer also has a life.

How many words should I write a day?

Whatever you could still manage in a bad week. A target of 300 words you hit five times a week finishes a draft in about a year. A target of 2,000 you abandon in March finishes nothing.

Do I have to start at the beginning?

No. Write the scene you can see most clearly and work out from it. Many writers end up replacing their first chapter anyway, once they know what the book is about.

Do I need an outline?

You need to know as much as stops you stalling, and that varies a lot. A workable minimum is the opening situation, an ending you’re allowed to change, and one large turn around the middle.

How do I know if my idea is good enough for a novel?

Try to list ten scenes you’d enjoy writing, then ask what happens if your main character does nothing. If you run dry at five, or if doing nothing costs them nothing, the idea needs more work or wants to be a short story.

Last revised November 2026.