Part i. Following Through

                                    

                                          
Getting to "The End"

                          
Getting to the final scene, the final paragraph, the final word, the final period for the first time is an epic, milestone moment. Getting there requires discipline and an enormous leap of faith. There are joys and potholes you should expect to encounter as you work your way to that magical moment when you get to type: The End.
                          
Get Serious
                          
It takes time, determination, and persistence to write a novel. If you take your writing seriously, the other people in your life will take your writing seriously, too. Setting aside time and space to write are first and foremost.
                          
Here's some basic advice for getting started:
                          
• Schedule time to write: Set yourself a schedule and set aside at least one-two hours, preferably more, each day to write.
                          
• Write when you're at your best: Are you a night owl or do you prefer the stillness in the early morning? Set aside that part each day when you are at your sharpest.
                          
• Create a dedicated space: Set up a place where you can write, uninterrupted by the ebb and flow of your home life; if not a separate room, then at the very least block off a corner of a room.
                          
• Get disconnected: When you start writing each day, turn off your phone and logout of social media; you might even disconnect your computer from the Internet so you are less likely to get sidetracked.
                          
• Give yourself a deadline or a goal: Giving yourself a "due date" may help you to finish that scene or chapter. Give yourself a wordcount you must reach before taking a break from writing. Don't forget to reward yourself once you reach that deadline or goal.
                          
Turn Off Your Inner Editor
                          
This is the most difficult part of writing for me, but believe me, you won't be able to get that first draft written quickly enough unless you turn off your inner editor.
                          
Every writer has one, and you probably do, too. It probably pipes up in the back of your head whenever you hear someone use a double negative or wrong verb tense. You might notice every time there is a period where there is a question asked. Grammatical and spelling errors that no one else notices seems to pop off signs and billboards.
                          
It's that inner editor that makes writers their own toughest critics. They may not be able to see holes in their plots or character flaws because they're too intimately enmeshed in them. But the bloopers in spelling, grammar, and punctuation that they see in their work will haunt them like an irritating jingle.
                          
It's difficult, but to get that first draft written, you'll have to put your inner editor in a box and slam the lid. Don't let that whiney voice keep you from telling the story by making you picky-picky-picky about every word choice and comma. That's what later revisions are for. Too much obsessing over details at this stage will distract you and you'll never get the novel written.
                          
Learn to ignore these minor problems. Resist the urge to correct everything you see. Repeat to yourself: "Perfection is the enemy of a finished first draft." From a finished first draft, you can revise your way to excellence.
                          
Stay Flexible
                          
Sometimes you will be writing along, dutifully turning your outline or synopsis into a lovely drama. Then you get to the scene where your character is supposed to do something. You try and you try to write that scene but it's as if the character just won't go there.
                          
This is a frustrating, but potentially wonderful and insightful moment. Instead of forcing your character to do what you want, stop and think about why she's unwilling. Is it possible that what seemed like a perfectly plausible thing for her to do when you were writing your outline, weeks, if not months, earlier, seem preposterous now that the character has developed into a full-fledged being on the pages of your as-yet-unfinished novel?
                          
Sometimes it seems as if a character develops a mind of her own. You write a scene that you have planned and the character does something completely different. You may be writing, but the character has taken over the keyboard. Yes, you could hit the delete button and force her back on the beaten path. Or maybe not.
                          
Stay flexible. Allow your characters to drive your plot, don't allow your plot to herd your characters. If it a character is hesitant and won't go wherever "there" is, then there's probably a good reason.
                          
Take some time to stop and think about this fork in the road. Then continue writing, following this new track for at least a few pages more and see whether you like where it's going. If the turn of events surprised you, then it's going to surprise the reader. And that's a good thing.
                          
Revise as You Go
                          
Some writers just write, straight through from beginning to end with barely a look back. If that works for you, do it.
                          
But more writers find it helpful to start each writing day by reviewing and revising the writing that they did the day or two previous (I prefer to do this, too). Revising can give you a running start and put you back in the groove you were in when you left off. It can also be encouraging to find that the words that yesterday might have seemed forced and lame are actually not that bad and can be salvaged with a little spit and polish.
                          
Printed pages look and feel different than pages on your computer screen. So, from time to time, it's also useful to print out some pages and take a look back at a larger chunk. Print out the last 50 pages, for example, or the entire work thus far to give you a refreshed perspective on where your novel is headed.
                          
But don't fall into the trap of spending so much time polishing yesterday's words to lapidary perfection that you fail to move forward. This is where you need to tell your inner editor to stop. Get to work writing new pages as quickly as you can.
                          
An up-to-date outline that reflects what you've actually written will become one of your most useful tools when it comes time to revise. So as you go along, it's a good idea to create, or update, your preliminary scene-by-scene outline of the novel so it reflects what you are writing.
                          
This can be barebones, just a timestamp with a single-sentence description of what happens in each scene, or something more in-depth. Figure out what works best for you.
                          
Please vote if you have faith in yourself to follow through and finish your first draft!