Writing A Novel

Writing a novel begins with an idea. It can be as simple as "a wanna-be rape victim with no personality falls in LOVE with a boring/abusive stalker/homosexual", or as complex as a whole plot. It's just a place to get you started. Think of it like a seed. Your idea is just something that you think is worth spending a lot of time on.

The idea doesn't need to be brilliant, but good enough to merit spending a lot of time on. You'll need to set aside time to plan, write, revise, pimp and possibly publish eventually. "Cookies," while delicious, is not a good idea. "Cookies that take over the world to force everyone to eat cake and only an incontinent midget named Cadbury can stop them," now that's an idea.

You now have your idea, the cookie fighting midget with a unique name. Now you're excited to publish it, sell it and rake in millions. Then you make more millions for the three movie deal, billions in merchandising (fanboys LOVE the midget/cookie action figures.) You then trade your current family for a sexier Swedish upgrade, and have lots of sex atop your money mountain with Inga, your bouncy, blonde and very experimental new bride.

Then you remember you have to write the damn thing first.

Before that, it's a very good idea to come up with some kind of plan. This is where you can create three-dimensional characters (some authors skip this step), a realistic setting (place and time) for those characters to occupy, and some semblance of a plot (what happens to the characters).

Now that you have your plan, you know more about Cadbury and that he wets his pants as a defense mechanism against bullies ever since he was a child, and that he's a midget from a large family of giant (see what we did there?) circus performers who eat fire and breed ligers and tigons, and he has a scar on his hand from feeding a liger cub.

Cadbury lives in 1950's era upstate New York, the same time period Oreo cookies were getting popular, that the cookies are going to gain sentience from a strange lab mishap involving radiation because if it's good enough for Marvel then it's good enough for you, dammit!

You throw in a love interest because everyone who hears you're thinking of writing a novel tells you to add a love interest even if it doesn't belong in the story so you include Inga, the Swedish midget with a gambling problem who loves cake because you're still thinking of your future Swedish harlot and you figure midget Inga will fall in love with Cadbury because they're both midgets and this is the 50's and midgets back then probably all knew each other and the cake thing adds a connection to the plot idea of Cookies forcing you to eat cake. And gambling is just awesome.

Add a couple more characters like Chunky, the leader of the cookies and Dr. Pete Stimmlerbergvonstein, the one responsible for the botched cookie experiment.

Your basic plot outline can be "Cookies want to take over the world, but Cadbury the midget won't let them." Or it can be more in depth with cool word clouds, outlines, flow charts, etc. etc. etc.

Now that you have an idea of what's going to happen, it's time to write the fucking thing.

Websites like Nanowrimo.org and many others claim that you can write a first draft in a month. The idea is that you just get the words down and you can edit them all later. Don't worry about grammer or, syntaks or speling- just write the damn thing!

That's it. No excuses. Write. It. All. Down. Writing a novel in a month means (If you're assuming 50,000 words for the novel) you're also assuming about 1,667 words a day. The average page is 300 words and we're sick of doing the math. But there's no trick, no tactic better than sit your ass down and write.

Hemingway, widely held as one of the greatest writers pretty much ever, when asked how he wrote, said "I write one true sentence after another." Which proves that Hemingway, in addition to having one, was a massive dick.

We're not saying it's not good advice, just that it's like the saying "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." No shit, Confucius. But just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not true. Write. Then write. then Write. Then... write.

Hemingway also said "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit," which is a proportion many of us can only hope for. The whole point of writing your novel isn't to motorboat Inga's perfectly spherical twins, nor is it to Ducktales dive into your own personal bin of cartoon cash. The point of writing a novel is to edit the shit out of it. Hemingway (there are other writers too, but why bother with lesser amateurs?) rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. Unless you're better than Hemingway (and since you're getting advice on novel writing from Cracked.com, we're betting our cookies you're not) you should remember to revise and rewrite and edit like crazy. Many writers will say a novel is never complete, it's only abandoned.

Bu this is what separates writers from amateurs, successful Hollywood author from a loser at a party telling you his genius idea that he can't find anyone to publish. Revision means fixing all the shit you wrote that month, realizing that Cadbury needs a better way to fight the cookies than his powerful urinating, Inga needs more personality than her midget titties, even that the Cookies forcing everyone to eat cake is probably a dumbass idea.

This is where the novel gets written, and this is where your story becomes a novel.

So you've gotten an idea, you've planned it out, written a draft, cut out that gay pirate orgy scene, shortened the circus backstory, added a sub plot involving Cadbury's brother Bunbury aboard a Nazi submarine, changed the evil cookies to evil Nachos and made it an allegory to the queen of England's trip to Norway. Now comes time to get the monster you've created published.

But... that's another topic. What you really need to do is take a nap, rest your hand (all that writing and Inga-themed masturbating really took it out of you) and start thinking of your next idea.

Vampires! on ICE! In SPACE! with LASERS!