Novel Writing: A Labour of Love.

As many readers know I'm currently trying to finish a novel by the end of the year and am trying to write 500 words each day to keep to my schedule. I decided to join a creative writing website to keep myself on track during the writing process. Not only did I find that I was much, much older than most of the aspiring writers, many of whom were in their early to mid teens, but many of them shared the same problems as me before coming to university: they often lacked the concentration and discipline to work on a novel/story until the end.
They would often throw around ideas and feel positive about them and write for fun until something new came along, like dogs chasing cars.

Now I recognise that as a starting writer myself it is somewhat presumptuous to dish out advice to other writers in the same position but if this degree in creative writing has taught me anything it is that writing a novel is different from writing as a hobby.
Even now as I type this my fingers do not float gleefully across the keyboard. When I write anything I pause, I think, I have moments of feeling stuck. This is writing.

Many of us set out hoping to write a book based on a strain of an idea we have with very little idea of how we plan to map the story, where it's going or how we want it to end. If treated lightly, I doubt much progress will be made. Many think that the act of writing a book should be fun since it's something you're in control of but we forget how, as humans, we are so easily sidetracked. Writing a novel should not be a fun experience, but a labour of love; a laborious process of crafting and creating until something of interest has been created.

To finish a novel requires the discipline to really commit to the story and devote yourself to the aims and needs of the characters. Without such discipline a novel will remain as notes. In my time I've known many people who have great ideas but none of them have ever finished writing out their ideas. Perhaps this is because writing a novel feels daunting, but having written a university dissertation of almost 11,000 words I can recall how daunting that felt mere months ago. My advice to a new writer aiming to create a full book is to set yourself deadlines and keep to them. Though writing an entire book may seem impossible if you took the word count of all you've written on Facebook, in emails and on blogs on a monthly basis you'd probably have at least a small novella already. The task of writing a novel in theory isn't that hard, it's learning to discipline yourself enough to write it that poses the real challenge.