The Myth of the “Right Time” to Write a Novel | 3 Reasons Why You Haven't Finished Your Draft

Ah, the elusive forest creature that circulates through writer spaces like a bad virus in a kindergarten classroom. 

You know the one.

I know the one. 

It usually turns up in its little cloak. Gets in our heads. Whispers stuff like: 

"I don't have time."
"Are you kidding? I don't know what I'm doing."
"I need to watch 15,000 YouTube videos on how to do this before I can even think about starting!"
"Maybe when I'm older."

Or even better, how about the classic? The foil of parents everywhere: 

"Maybe when the kids are older. My schedule is just too insane right now." 

The Right Time to Write a Novel. 

There's always a "better time", right? 

When things calm down. 

When life cuts you a break. 

When you're more experienced. More organized. More something. 

And then you'll write. 

Right? 

Spoiler: that magical moment isn't coming. 

Why "The Right Time" is a Pretty Lie 

1) Life Has No Chill 

You might've heard it said a million times, but this time I need you to listen, okay? 

(And I say this lovingly 🥰) 

LIFE REALLY HAS NO CHILL 

One minute, she's a quirky little sugar momma handing out all the gifts. 

The next: she's ignoring our screams while we're drowning in problems. 
Things'll be fine again for a while. Life's back to being wonderful, and we love her. 

Then we blink. 

Suddenly, she's on one, and we're dealing with a Week From Hell that came entirely out of left field. 

Home girl needs her meds. 

Problem is, whoever's in charge here lost them before any of us were even thought about. 

So there's really only one thing we can do:

Show up anyway.

Literally no one else in the world can tell your story. 

If anyone else wrote it down, it wouldn't be yours, would it?

If you're waiting for life to calm down before writing your novel… 

Yeah, it's going to be a while. 

The kids, whether they be littles or a little older, will always have fits and not use their words. 

Bosses everywhere will still go to their secret conventions on how to master the art of assholery. 

That never-ending list of responsibilities that come with adulting, unfortunately, is going nowhere. 

But here's the good news: writers are stubborn beings. 

We don't need life to behave. We just need to make words. 

2) There Is No Trying. Only Doing. No Doing = No Confidence 

“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

"...The biggest obstacle I encountered was the negativity of other people. I had teachers, friends, family members tell me that what I was writing (fantasy) wasn't "real" writing, that fantasy books weren't worthwhile, that I should focus on other career paths, should write other/worthier things, etc., etc….

And I refused to listen to them."

― Sarah J. Maas, quoted from an interview posted on Goodreads

Did you notice something here? 

No? 

Let's take another look... 

There's not a single word that hints at anything resembling "I waited until I felt ready." 

These two authors are vastly different in their genres. However, they do have one thing in common.

Neither of them waited around for the Word Gods to bless them.

They just parked their butts in the chair and did. 

When they wrote their few lines, neither of them knew what the hell they were doing.
They just stared at a blank page and told their brains, "Okay. Time to make words." 

And they did. 

I’m willing to bet they looked at their first drafts and seriously considered setting them on fire.

For example, did you know that Stephen King actually tossed Carrie in the trash? 
The man literally looked at his draft and just... threw the whole thing away. His wife had to save it! 

That's because the authors we admire are exactly like you and me: human. 

Getting it right doesn't happen on the first try. Or the second. 

It comes after a couple hundred really, really ugly pages.... 

and a ton of revisions. 

You don't prep your way into a finished draft. 

You write your way there. One word at a time. 

3) Preparation Can Become Socially Acceptable Procrastination

I'm not saying don't watch the YouTube video. 

Or that you shouldn't read the book. 

Or that you should bypass the course you feel you need. (Be careful with those, though!) 

What I am saying is that binge-watching every tutorial imaginable for two weeks straight—

Reading twenty different books, solely on the how-to's of the writing craft, by a dozen different authors that all have different opinions on everything, so now you have to pick up a dozen more because now you're confused—

Honey, that's procrastinating. 

The difference is, it looks like you're just taking things seriously. 

And to a point... the perception's true. But it's more than that. 

This sort of procrastinating is what happens when you don't believe in yourself. 

Because somewhere along the way, we stopped telling stories just for fun and started caring a lot more about other people's opinions of us when we tell them. 

And that's the difference between hesitating over the keyboard and putting off taking the trash out. 

The Only Way To Start... Is To Start 

Nobody's saying you need to crank out 1,500 - 2,000 words a day.

Or that you need to carve out four or five hours for a writing session. 

Just... take ten minutes. Fifteen if you have it. 

Do it when your littles are napping. Or at school. 

Or visiting Auntie/Mawmaw/Bestie.

Go for it if you have a few minutes before work. On your lunch break. 

If you can hold your eyes open, take a few before bed. 

Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither will your novel. 

So here is what I want you to do: 

Give yourself some grace and take a few minutes today—not tomorrow, not next week, TODAY— just write five hundred words. 

That's all. 

Five hundred messy, ugly, we're-definitely-editing-this-later words. 

Because every good book that ever existed started with a cringeworthy first draft. 

The sooner you get back to work, the sooner you can celebrate typing, "The End." 

They can literally just be something like: 

I don't know. I have nothing at the moment, but
[This is kind of what I'm going for and I think it will be really cool if this thing right here happens]. 

The following bit is literally a chunk of text that's in my Word doc right now:

I don’t exactly have the words to throw this scene together. Right now all I’ve really got is this is the part where Thea walks into the house—of course her skin trying to go on strike settles down, so we see the effect getting out of the sun has on vampires. This is the part where she sits down with Senora Reyes, the granddaughter that I still have no name for [Mila] goes to pull a gun on Thea when she goes to reach into her pocket for Senora’s payment, and this is the part where the reader realizes that pure lead can kill vampires.

You know why that's there? 

It's a hell of a lot easier to edit something than it is to do anything with a blank page.

Don't have words? 

Stop overthinking the big picture. Just picture the first moment that you want to write. 

The very first second of the next moment you want to write. 

What's happening? 

In the example I gave you, the very first second of the moment I'm working on is Thea walking through the front door of Señora Reyes' house. 

So what's the first step to getting her through that front door? 

Well—

I know that, because of my vampire lore, Thea wasn't in any danger of catching on fire. But because she'd been walking around in the nineteenth-century Texas summer sun, she had been extremely uncomfortable despite being covered from head to toe. 

So... 

Coolness hit my face the moment I stepped into the shadow darkening the Reyes’ doorway. 

Alright. Thea's in the shade. Now what? 

What comes next? 

Well, we need to describe the relief, right? It would make sense to dig into the actual sensory and physical effects of getting out of the sun. We're getting into the next second, then the next, until we get Thea from the porch and into the house. 

The second-degree sunburn ache in my body immediately melted away. It was like somebody dropped me into a fifty-gallon vat of aloe, and if I could have stretched out on the rug covering their dirt floor and enjoyed the relief, I might’ve done it. 

Well, shit. Now we have a few words on the page! 🥳🍾

Now it's your turn. 

Go forth. Open your doc. 

Write the ugliest 500 words you've ever written. 

Then come back and tell me how it went. 

Until next time, 

Elise