In this week’s episode, we share five tips and tricks for finishing your novel during National Novel Writing Month.
This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF SHARDS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF SHARDS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:
NOVSHARDS
The coupon code is valid through December 8th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Thanksgiving travel, we’ve got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 176 of. The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 19th, 2023, and today we’re going to talk about how to finish a novel in November. Before we get into that, let’s have Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Shards as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Shards for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: NOVSHARDS and that is NOVSHARDS. You can find the coupon code and the link in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through December 8th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Thanksgiving travel, we’ve got you covered.
Before we get into our main topic, let’s also have an update on my current writing projects. I am very, very pleased to report that Cloak of Embers is finished and published and out in the world. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, my Payhip Store, and Smashwords. It is selling very briskly, so thank all for that. The initial reactions are very positive, so also thank you for that. You can get that at your favorite ebook retailer and if you need something to read over the Thanksgiving break, we’ve got you covered.
In audiobook news, I am also pleased to report that Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock is now out, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get the audiobook at Audible, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Chirp, Storytel, Spotify, and my Payhip store. And believe it or not, we will hopefully have a three more audiobooks coming out before the end of 2023. Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, that’s almost done. Should be wrapped up on Monday and hopefully be coming out not too long after that. The audiobook of Ghost in the Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. The audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, I will talk a bit more about that once it is done. Now that Cloak of Embers is out, I’m currently writing on my next book. I am 18,000 words into it and I will talk a bit more about it next time we record an episode in December. So tune in for more news on that.
00:02:10 Main Topic: How to Finish a Novel
Now to our main topic: how to finish a novel in November or any other month. I was so busy trying to finish Cloak of Embers is that I totally forgot that November is National Novel Writing Month. Of course, I’ve been doing this long enough now that every month is National Novel Writing Month for me. The whole point of NaNoWriMo, of course, is to write an entire novel in the space of the month or barring that, to get 50,000 words down of your novel. The entire exercise is to encourage people to learn to finish their novel. This is because finishing the novel is really quite hard, and some writers never managed to get that far. Like there are a lot of people who have started numerous novels, but they always run out of gas about 1/3 of the way through or, they get really excited about writing the first chapter or the real cool opening scene, but can never get past that point. So learning to finish novels is a vital skill if you actually do want to write novels, but it’s a hurdle that some people never get over, and no doubt about it, it is a fairly significant hurdle. However, Cloak of Embers is my 146th novel. I had to look it up, which shows how many novels I have written. I can’t remember the number off my top of my head. Let’s take a look at some of the tips and tricks I’ve used to finish books in the past.
#1: it really does help to plot in advance in the writing world. Writers tend to break down into two camps, those who outline in advance and those who do not. That this is sometimes called plotters and pantsers, i.e. riding by the seat of your pants, though given that pants means something somewhat different in the UK than it typically does in the US, people have proposed the more dignified terms discovery writers or writing into the dark for writing without an outline. People who write without an outline, say that the process of figuring out what happens is part of the joy of writing, hence the term discovery writer. That said, I really do think you can save yourself both a lot of headaches and a lot of doubt if you outline at least somewhat in advance. It does offer many advantages. If you think through the plot in advance, you can potentially avoid any plot holes by working through the story first.
Outlining in advance will also let you avoid running into a problem where your characters get stuck in a situation or conversation and you don’t know how to resolve it because you can’t think of a solution on the spot. Advanced outlining is also more efficient. You generally have to spend less time in rewrites and editing because you are less likely to spend writing time going down blind alleys that will need to be removed from the story later. I’ve heard people say that they tried out outlining and found it too confining and were much happier once they started discovery writing. The reverse may also be true. If you find yourself running out of gas as you try to write a novel, outlining the plot in advance might help.
#2: start short. There was a post on a famous author’s blog where a reader emailed to say that he wanted to write a 12 volume epic fantasy series with like twenty point of view characters for his very first writing project and the author gently suggested that perhaps the idea was just slightly too ambitious for a first project. You see the same thing at the gym after New Year’s Day. Suddenly a bunch of new people turn up and they will sprint at maximum speed on the treadmill like for a tenth of a mile before having to stop or load as many plates onto the bar as possible and attempt to deadlift. Except that isn’t how sensible exercise works. You should start small and then build on what you have done every week or every two weeks.
Trying to sprint an eight minute mile your very first time or attempting a 250 pound deadlift for the first time, means at best you’ll just get discouraged and at worst, you might mess your back up if you don’t do the deadlifts properly. Thankfully, the chance of physical injury while writing is much lower than deadlifts, though you should still practice good ergonomics. I used to know a college professor who would complain about his back was bothering him if he typed too long and the way he would type is he would sit on the very edge of his seat, lean forward at like a 60° angle, so it was hunched over the laptop keyboard and type that way. Do not type that way, but that was a digression. But it might be wiser to let your first bite at writing fiction be smaller. Maybe a short story, maybe a novella, or perhaps a shorter novel instead of a 12 volume fantasy epic. Perhaps a 50,000 word sword and sorcery tale with a single point of view character. Learning to finish novels, like muscles, is something that is best built up gradually.
#3: Persistence. Like many other areas of life, in writing, there is no substitute for plodding persistence in the face of obstacles. Many of the basic writing guides say to start out by writing 1,000 words a day. Even though it might be a bit much if especially if you have a lot of other things going on in your life. If 1,000 is too much, why not aim for 500? Five hundred words a day is very often very manageable. You don’t even need an actual computer with a keyboard anymore. You don’t open up a Google Doc on your phone and thumb type in 500 words. Some people easily compose thousands of words of text messages and social media updates every day. Why not take out 500 of them for fiction? A little bit every day it builds over time and setting a minimum for yourself can help you get through some of the harder parts of the book to write, which we’re going to talk about right now.
#4: the middle is always a slog. It’s important to understand that no matter how many books you’ve written, no matter how long you’ve been doing this, no matter how experienced you are, the middle of the book is always a slog to write. Every single time! Beginnings are fun. You’ve got all these shiny new ideas in your head and it’s time to put them down on the page. The endings are pretty fun too. You’ve probably had the climactic scenes in your mind’s eye for a while, and it’s time to write them. The middle, though, that’s where people tend to get stuck. If you haven’t outlined in advance, that’s where you realize you haven’t figured out how to get from Point A to Point B or that you’ve written yourself into a corner or a potential plot hole, even if you have outlined in advance and you have a pretty good idea of where you’re going. Sometimes you arrive in the middle and figure out they are outline just isn’t going to work and you’re going to have to redo it or it is in fact working, but you just have to sit down and actually do the work you’re putting in the words, day after day after day. But the ending somehow seems to be getting farther and farther away with every chapter you write. This is simply part of the process. It’s also true of a lot of other things. The middle of a workout almost always seems to be the hardest, or a 300 mile road trip seems to seems like it will take forever somewhere around mile 130 or so. I don’t think there’s any fancy trick, but to keep going. Plodding persistence always wins out in the end.
#5: Done is better than perfect. As I’ve said many times before, never let perfect be the enemy of the possible. This is a manifestation of my favorite logical fallacy, the Nirvana Fallacy, which is a cognitive error that says that if the perfect outcome is not achievable, then it’s not worth doing. This overlooks the reality that 60% of a good thing is definitely better than 0%. Pizza is a good metaphor for this. Obviously you’d like to eat the entire pizza, but a single slice of pizza is still better than no pizza at all. The Nirvana Fallacy is refusing to eat any pizza at all if you don’t get to eat the entire pizza. Writers and creatives in general seem particularly prone to this. Like they’ll get in the loop of endlessly polishing in the first chapter, but never getting past that point or rewriting their first draft over and over, and attempt to finally make it perfect. But perfection in this life is much like attempting to go faster than the speed of light, it cannot be done and it takes infinite energy to even attempt it. In the case of perfection, the energy you spent trying to make your book achieve perfection could have been better spent on writing and finishing new books.
I’ve never written any book I would consider perfect. I always look back years later and think I should have done this or that differently, but you know what? I still finished those books and a lot of people enjoyed them, even if I think them hindsight, I would change various things. A finished yet imperfect book is better than the perfect one that exists only in the imagination of the writer and will only ever exist in the imagination of the writer. So I think learning to accept I did the very best I could and now it’s time to set this finished project aside and move on to something else as a necessary attitude for a writer to develop. Or, as Steve Jobs famously put it, real artists ship, which I am putting into practice myself as I have just published Cloak of Embers and I’m moving on to my next book Half-Elven Thief and we’ll share more details about that in the next episode.
I hope these tips and tricks will help you finish your book. So that is it for this week. There is not going to be an episode of the show the first week of December because this week is the Thanksgiving holiday and so I’m taking a few days off for that. I hope you all have a happy and safe Thanksgiving and safe travels if you travel anywhere. The Pulp Writer Show will be back the second week of December with a new episode. Thanks for listening to the show. I hope you found this podcast useful. A reminder, you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week or the week after next week, in this case. Goodbye now.
