Exactly fifty-three days ago, I began a novel based on a single idea that had been swirling around in my head for some time. Currently, this novel sits at 320 pages with 110,000 words. While it is still very much a work in progress (the editing stages have only just begun for the first part of the book), there have been so many great things I have learned about writing, particularly my own style of writing, along this journey.

The first thing I learned is just how important characters are to a story. If your characters are completely figured out and you know who they are inside and out and how they will react to what others say or do, you really don’t need much else. I started this story with nothing but a main character/narrator and three supporting characters who I had fully fleshed out. Funny enough, I understood them so well because they were characters my husband and I created for our various D&D campaigns. However, you can do a lot to learn about your character without playing as them in a game, but I would highly recommend giving it a try anyway.

When I started writing the story, the only piece of setting I had was the place were the characters start and the only plot I had was that they all somehow meet through the main character’s mentor. Following my characters, I just allowed the world to fill in around them and the plot to develop through their actions, reactions, and the motives they carried around with them. This method of writing made every writing session feel fun and easy, and before I knew it, I had a novel length story on my hands.

There have been so many writing projects I’ve started that I was trying to make a certain event or series of events happen and just plopped down my characters to play their role. I didn’t understand why I kept getting stuck. Even though I knew where I wanted to go, I could never seem to get there, or if I did, it always felt forced. It was annoying and discouraging, but now I feel like I’ve found the cure to my ailment.

The second thing I learned was how beneficial consistency has been for my writing. Even though I have a crazy schedule and a lot of demands pulling me this way and that in my life, nothing can stand in the way of my writing when I have consistent times I write each day. For me, these times are from 6-7 in the morning before I need to start getting ready for work, my lunch break (when I have one), and an hour or two right when I get home from work. The past two months, I have been doing this every single day, with only a few exceptions, and it has allowed me to write more than I have in the past three years combined.

Before this, I used to be big on goal setting, such as the NaNoWriMo competition of reaching 50,000 words in a month. Others also included “finish my novel by the end of the year” and “write 1000 words every day.” None of these goals worked. In fact, I think they might have even hindered my writing. What I didn’t understand every time I set those goals is that my true issue with not getting any writing done was because I had not established a habit for my writing.

Thanks to this story, turned novel, that I am currently writing, I was able to establish the consistent habit of writing, putting in multiple writing session each day. Sure, it has taken away from my time to watch TV, play video games, and read books, but even when I have had a serious lack of motivation with my writing, I still wrote because my brain now sees that time for nothing else. 

Learning what I have about my writing is a beautiful thing, in my opinion, and I see myself spring boarding into a fairly successful writing career because of it. If I can write a 100,000 word novel in just two months, without even really feeling like I was trying that hard, then just imagine what I can do within a year’s time. Because of this, I am excited to see what the future holds with my writing career.