Writing A Novel Tips Novels & Stories

Writing a novel isn't a clean, linear process for me. I used to drown in plot outlines, thinking if I got the sequence of events right, the characters would just slot in. They didn't. They felt like chess pieces. The shift happened when I stopped writing about them and started letting them drive stupid, small moments. Like, I’d throw a character into a mundane situation—waiting in a long line at the bank—and just write how they’d react. Would they sigh loudly, strike up a conversation with a stranger, or silently fume? That’ service scene, totally unconnected to the main plot, often revealed more about their patience, social anxiety, or entitlement than any backstory dump I could craft.

Another thing that clicked was embracing inconsistency early on. My first drafts have characters who are all over the place—one minute brave, the next cowardly. Instead of forcing them into a rigid mold, I examine those contradictions. Why are they brave in this specific context but not that one? That friction often points to a deeper wound or a flawed self-perception, which is way more human than a static 'trait.' It's less about following a tip like 'give them a hobby' and more about letting them be wrong, messy, and occasionally hypocritical, then figuring out the 'why' in revision.

Dialogue is another goldmine, but not for the reasons you'd think. I record conversations I overhear in cafes or on buses—the cadence, the interruptions, the things left unsaid. Real people rarely speak in perfect, plot-advancing sentences. Letting a character ramble, change the subject mid-thought, or use repetitive filler words can instantly ground them. A character who always says 'um' before lying, or who deflects questions with jokes, tells you volumes about their internal state without needing a single line of narration. The improvement comes from treating them as entities with their own faulty communication styles, not just as mouthpieces for the author's themes.

Ultimately, tips are scaffolding. The real development happens in the revision trenches, where you go from a collection of behaviors to understanding the core engine driving them. I often ask, 'What does this person lie to themselves about?' The answer to that question informs every choice they make, big or small, and ties the scattered threads together. It makes the character feel inevitable, not constructed.

One angle I rarely see mentioned is letting your first draft be deliberately bad. Seriously. I wasted years trying to polish each chapter as I went, and it killed my momentum. Pros talk about getting the clay on the wheel first. Don't worry about elegant prose or perfect dialogue in that initial pass. Just get the story down, even if it's messy and full of placeholder notes like [describe the castle here]. You can't edit a blank page, but you can absolutely carve something beautiful out of a lumpy, misshapen first draft.

Another tip that transformed my process was writing the ending first. Not everyone does it, but knowing my destination completely changed how I planted clues and developed characters in the early chapters. It stopped me from meandering into dead-end subplots. The middle still sagged, of course—middles always do—but at least I had a beacon to aim for.

Finally, read your dialogue out loud. It sounds so simple, but it's the quickest way to spot clunky, unnatural speech. If you stumble over it, or if it sounds like a textbook, your character probably wouldn't say it.

Man, what works for me is almost embarrassingly simple: just stop trying to write the novel. Seriously. Whenever I freeze up staring at the blinking cursor, I switch to writing the world’s worst fanfiction about my own characters. Not even kidding. I’ll take my protagonist and throw them into a ridiculous grocery store argument, or have them get stuck in traffic with their nemesis. The goal is to write something with zero stakes, where the prose can be garbage and the plot nonsensical. It sounds stupid, but it reminds me why I like these people and their voices, without the pressure of it 'counting.' After a few hundred words of that nonsense, I can usually sneak back into the actual manuscript.

Another thing that gets me unstuck is literally changing the medium. I write on a laptop, so when I’m blocked, I’ll grab a cheap notebook and a pen I hate, or even open the notes app on my phone and type with my thumbs. The sheer physical shift seems to bypass whatever mental barrier the usual setup has become. The writing is often terrible, but it’s writing, and that’ s the only objective. Sometimes the solution isn’t a grand psychological breakthrough; it’s just tricking your brain into a different lane.

Lastly, I’ve stopped viewing a block as a monolithic enemy. Now I treat it like a diagnostic tool. Am I blocked because the next scene is boring? Then maybe it shouldn’t exist. Is it because I don’t know a character’s motivation? Time to interview them like a weirdo in a separate doc. Often, the block is just the project’s way of telling me I took a wrong turn a few pages back. So I don’t fight it head-on anymore; I listen to it, backtrack, and fix the root cause. It’s less about 'overcoming' and more about sidestepping or interrogating the feeling until it dissipates.