Earlier this month at LitFest, there were quite a few people who wanted to know if there was any advice I could give to new authors. It came up during an interview I did with CSFJ as well. And while there’s always a lot of advice, I tend to go right back to what my old standby is.
Try everything. Keep trying things until you find what works for you.
There’s reams of writing advice out there, and that advice will run from writing a thousand words a day to finish the novel in a month to revise as you go. You should plot everything, plot nothing, plot only a couple things and leave the rest up in the air. You should know everything about your characters before you start or you should get to know them as you write. The advice is wildly contradictory between sources, and not even every author can agree on what the best way is to do things.
That’s because the best way doesn’t exist. There’s only the best way for you. And figuring out what that best way for you is to try out a bunch of methods and not getting too upset if something isn’t right. Write every day and see if that’s working for you. Try powering through a first draft and see if the need to go back and revise while you write is too great. Try NaNoWriMo once to see if your brain likes it.
It’s important to understand that there is no one right way to get your story out in the world. That’s going to mean trying a bunch of things until you get your weird routine for writing down and figure out what works for you, your life, your brain. It doesn’t matter how other people do it. You have to figure out how you do it and know that your way is the right way for you.