How To Finish Your Book

I was so busy trying to finish CLOAK OF EMBERS that I totally forgot November is National Novel Writing Month. Of course, I’ve been doing this long enough that every month is NaNoWriMo for me. 🙂

The whole point of NaNoWriMo, of course, is to write an entire novel in the space of a month, or barring that, to get 50,000 words down of your novel. The entire exercise is to encourage people to learn to finish a novel.

This is because finishing a novel is hard, and some writers never manage to get that far. Like, there are a lot of people who have started numerous novels, but always run out of gas about a third of the way through. Or they get really excited about writing the first chapter or the really cool opening scene, but then can never get past it.

So learning to finish novels is a vital skill if you actually want to write novels, but it’s a hurdle some people never get over. And, no doubt about it, it is a pretty significant hurdle.

However, CLOAK OF EMBERS is going to be my 146th novel. (I had to look it up, which shows how many novels I’ve written, I can’t remember the number off the top of my head any more.) So 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. This is sometimes called “plotters” and “pantsers” (ie, writing 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 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 a conversation and you don’t know how to resolve it because you can’t think of a solution on the spot. Advance 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 outlining and found it too confining and were much happier once they started discovery writing. The reverse may also may 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 twelve-volume epic fantasy series with like 20 POV characters for his very first writing project, and the author gently suggested that perhaps that idea was just slightly too ambitious for a first project.

You can 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 for like a tenth of a mile before having to stop, or load as many plates onto the bar as possible and attempt a 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 a eight minute mile your first time or attempting a 250 pound deadlift the first time means, at best, you’ll just get discouraged and give up, and at worst, you might mess your back up if you don’t do the deadlift properly.

Thankfully, the chance of physical injury while writing is much lower. 🙂

But it might be wiser to to let your first bite at writing fiction to 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 POV? 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 that might be a bit much, 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 definitely manageable. You don’t even need an actual computer with a keyboard any more – you can open up a Google doc on your phone and thumb-type in five hundred words. (Some people easily compose thousands of words of text messages and social media updates a day, why not five hundred words of fiction?) A little bit every day builds over time, and setting a minimum for yourself can help you get through some of the harder parts of the book to write.

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 its time to put them down. The endings are pretty fun, too – you’ve probably had the climactic scenes in your mind’s eye for a while and its 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 that 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 where you’re going, sometimes you arrive in the middle and figure out that your outline isn’t going to work and you have to redo it. Or it’s working, but you just have to do it. You’re putting in the words day after day after day, but the ending somehow seems to be getting farther and farther away.

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 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 before many times, never let perfect be the enemy of the possible. That is a manifestation of my favorite logical fallacy, the Nirvana Fallacy, which is a cognitive error that says if a 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 a loop of endlessly polishing the first chapter but never getting past that point, or rewriting their first draft over and over in an 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 that in 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.

So I think learning to accept “I did the very best I could, now it’s time to set this finished project aside and move on to something else” is a necessary attitude for a writer to develop.

Which I am about to put in practice myself, since as I reach the end of this blog post I just finished CLOAK OF EMBERS, and I’m about to move onto my next book, HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

I hope these tips and tricks will help you finish your book.

-JM