Writing a novel is hard -- obvious realizations coming in late

Here's the gist of it straight: the rules I set up for myself are great and force me to be super duper disciplined and actually the perfect template to start writing a novel, at this point anyway. The problem is, I'm not yet, not a hundred percent ready to commit to full-time novel-writing in my free time. Allow me to explain.

I've been doing freewriting in small broken-up timeslots all the time. A post or two in the morning, a post or two in the commute, a post or two just when I'm hanging out. Whenever there's an interesting observation, a snippet or two expanded into a post. Etcetera. You know short low-commitment pieces that don't need a large chunk of time.

Additionally, outside of writing pieces that generally tend to follow one another or are generally based in the same universe or storyline, there hasn't been any real effort to string pieces together really. What a novel needs is a bunch of connected passages that are connected to each other not just thematically but also emotionally. The recommended 'gap' in writing a novel is a couple of days between chapters/scenes. Writers have gone for years without touching a novel before coming back to finish it but when they are back they really do write it in one lump part and not say five lines at a time. It's hard because you need to be in the same headspace as your characters in their universe and once you let your real life get the hold of you, the imaginary universes begin losing their grip.

So here's what we need: I should set aside at least an hour, preferably two hours every day to do nothing but mostly write on the same topic. Not just that, the same topic across different days. As in, I need to be working on a single piece of writing every day for at least a couple of weeks for it to go anywhere. Not different parts of different novels everyday for 2 hours each. And then I can get anywhere near the 'nanowrimo' achievement.


I'm not there yet. I only started writing regularly three months ago and this might be the test that breaks my back. Additionally every time I write something I pretty much always start from scratch...only on rare occasions do I refer to an earlier post to create connections to it, which is the diametric opposite attitude a novel-writer should have. I should be in the same novel 'mindzone' every day after work with a fire of writerly flame burning bright in my heart moving my fingers and hands getting those words out to the screen. That needs more commitment and discipline I currently have. It's all about practice actually, and to frame it in that context my practice as of right now has only been writing pieces from scratch with nothing to influence them. That's what I'm going to do...write pieces that are at least somewhat related to some piece (or pieces) I've written in the past, whether that be in the same universe, a callout or a meta wink at the readers.

That's all I'm going to say for right now. Maybe I'll lowkey keep working on the novel but my primary approach is still going to be get the words, get something legible or readable and hopefully something people are not embarrassed to receive or read. That's it. So this is a 'forgival' post to myself letting myself know that it's not extremely urgent to start on various novel(s) as long as I know what I'm doing and what the right time would be.