How to FINISH your SF Novel

By Zak Zyz

First: why should you listen to me? I haven’t won any awards. I don’t have a bestseller. I’m not even wearing pants.

But! If you don’t have a lot of time to listen to successful pants-wearing people, I will tell you everything you need to know to actually finish your book in the next 15 minutes. Finishing books is something I was absolutely terrible at and I have found all kinds of tricks to dupe myself into doing it.

This video is meant for people like me who are:

* Stubborn

* Poorly educated

* Determined to write without market considerations

If you’re willing to listen, you can learn from all the stupid mistakes I made trying to figure this out on my own. Hopefully you will succeed where I have so gloriously failed. Godspeed.

1. Should you write and publish your own science fiction novel?

Nope. That’s my first advice. Don’t write a novel.

Instead, write a short story of 5000-7500 words. Join a writer’s group and participate in critique sessions. Keep writing these short stories until you can sell one to to Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or Uncanny. Do this a bunch of times until you are well known and someone is willing to pay you in advance to write a novel. Otherwise, you’ll spend thousands of hours laboring in obscurity for a very minimal chance at success. It’s important to know that most first novels are unpublishable, and most books lose money.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write them! If you’re here, it’s because you HAVE to write that book. It’s clawing inside you like a xenomorph and you won’t be happy until it’s published. I think we both know you’re going to do this the hard way, so let’s go ahead and do something stupid.

2. Getting started.

Step one.

I’m going to recommend you read two short books.

Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

Read both of these and refer to them. The advice in both is generally good, but just like this advice, it's not applicable to every writer or every book. Use the parts that make sense to you, and feel free to ignore the parts that don’t until they bite you in the ass later.

Step 2. Keep a notebook for your ideas.

Use the notes function on your phone and jot down every idea that comes to you in the dead of the night, in the shower, or when you’re supposed to be working. Do this even if you don’t think they’re good. Document everything.

The best places to find ideas are liminal spaces, in transition between two states of being. Lasting inspiration comes from suffering. If you’re not inspired, you need more pain in your life. You can easily add more by getting a job or significant other. Traveling outside of your comfort zone, reading, and learning new things will also help. Things that will sap your inspiration include: video games, marijuana, alcohol, food, and in general getting the things you want. Desire is suffering.

When you get an idea, stop what you are doing. Write down the idea. You don’t have to use every idea, but you need to write down every idea. Cultivate a compulsion, nothing else is more important.

Make sure these notes are backed up to the cloud and make a regular offline backup. If you want to keep a paper notebook, make a practice of transcribing your notes into a phone or onto your computer every night, or you will definitely lose your notebook at some point and anguish over it. More on transcribing later.

Step 3. Recognizing a good idea.

Eventually you will find an idea that insists on being a book. In general, if something keeps popping to mind for a couple weeks, it’s a good candidate. You won’t really know until you’re about ten to fifteen thousand words in. If it feels like the story is driving itself, and every scene snowballs into two others, then it’s a good idea. If you have to work for every page, either the idea isn’t good enough to be a book or you’re attacking it from the wrong angle. You should get one good book for every four or five of these candidates. Save the ones that don’t work out! You can always revisit them later or cannibalize sections.

When you start to think you’re on the trail of a good idea, document it! Expand your initial notes into something that captures the most critical parts of what you want to say.

Some people like to plan out their entire book here, if that’s your style go for it. Be careful you don’t spend so long plotting you lose the magic. Don’t wait! Dive into the work as soon as possible, more ideas will pop up as you work.

Even if you hate planning things out, it’s a good idea to spend a session writing an abstract. Try to capture the most evocative, important elements of the idea. A few critical lines of dialogue, a vision of an otherworldly landscape, someone who ought to exist. You just need a page or two, ripples to suggest something enormous beneath the surface.

This document is a keeper of the sacred flame. Later, when you inevitably forget why this story was so important to you, return to it to rekindle your idea.

Step 4. How to establish a writing practice.

Establish a daily writing practice and do it every day. This needs to be your #1 priority in life. Blow off your friends, abandon your children, ignore commands from police officers. Make that block of time a sacred ritual and drive off or destroy anyone who tries to stop you from doing it.

Every writer will benefit from a daily writing practice. There are no cheat days, you don’t need to rest. Do it every day, no matter what.

Writing well is an incredible rush. Writing poorly is agonizing. Because of this, it’s important to find the unique practice that works best for you. Everyone will be different, some people write best in the dead of the night, some at the break of dawn. Some people need to be alone in a quiet space. Others work better surrounded by insufferable hipsters in a coffee shop. As you’re developing your practice, try experimenting, changing one thing at a time and seeing if it helps. Here are some recommendations for people who are just starting out:

Find a place where people can’t bother you. If your home sucks, you may need to write in a park, at a coffee shop, a diner, or at a library. Find the most comfortable spot where you can get away from the distractions in your life on a consistent basis. Once you find your place, defend it with your life.

Schedule the time to be there, and don’t allow anything to interrupt it. When you’re starting out, 30 minutes is a good goal to hit every day. You do not need to be writing for this entire time, you can just stare at a blank page if you want. Try to think about what you want to write, to wonder about it, and continue to jot down ideas you have. Your goal is to establish the practice, not to write something amazing every day. Work this up to an hour, then two hours, then on from there, as much as you can do. You will find your maximum quickly, and it will grow as you do.

3. Eliminate all opposition. While you’re at your writing practice, turn off your phone. Don’t go on the internet. Don’t have a television in your field of vision. If you’re in a crowded place like a coffee shop, you can listen to music to drown people out. In general your word count will be higher without music. Remove any annoyances you can, tune out those you cannot.

4. Keep doing it. Do it every day. You don’t have to like it, or have fun at first. That will come later. It’s ok to dread doing this, just keep doing it. Your goal is to work at your writing practice every day, for fourteen days straight. Then for twenty eight days straight. Then for a hundred. Then a thousand. If you fail, don’t take a break. Return the next day and start over. Never stop.

STEP 5: The goal of writing:

Inspired writing springs from a Zen state of effortless effort. If you can reach it, you will feel complete joy. Starting off as a writer is searching for a path to this place. The reward for writing well is a state of unlimited power and potential. Hard to reach, impossible to maintain, you must somehow strive for it without trying. You will understand immediately when it happens.

Good writing comes from practice and effort. Most good books are a few shining moments of serendipity spanned by a great of deal of well-edited writing. Solid pages are the painstakingly carved steps up the mountain. If you build a better path, more people will attempt the climb.

I always have a GOAL with a book, an image or concept I have a deep desire to express. As I build the book, I try to erect a scaffolding of complete characters, living landscapes, and plausible plotting. The whole apparatus is a promise: trust me and I’ll take you somewhere amazing. The true realization of that effort is rapport with the reader, an indelible moment where we share the same dream and agree:

“I wish this was.”

Step 6: Useful Tips for actually writing.

Like some other self-involved acts, writing is deeply personal and everyone must discover a unique way that works for them. Here’s a few tips I had to learn the hard way.

1. DRINK COFFEE.

Drink coffee as you write (and only when you write). It’s an addictive stimulant that will supply some much-needed motivation. By limiting coffee to writing, you can transfer some of that addiction to writing.

2. DON’T DO DRUGS.

I find smoking pot makes my writing worse the next day, so I don’t do it. Drinking alcohol makes writing harder, so I try to minimize it. The rush of writing well eventually became more important to me than getting high. This will be different for everyone, examine your writing, find out what makes it worse and don’t do it. Adderal, Ritalin, and Methamphetamine are great for churning out huge amounts of writing that seems great at the time, then later you find it’s absolute garbage. Ever write down a great idea while you’re high and then it makes no sense whatsoever the next day? The reader will feel the same way. While there have been many great books written with the aid of drugs, many more were irreparably harmed and ultimately unfinished.

3. WRITE IN INK, ON PAPER.

When you are beginning to learn how to write a novel, I recommend you start by writing on paper, with a pen.

A: It prevents you from writing too quickly, and forces you to spend more time in full awareness of what you are writing.

B: You will place more emotional importance on words that you make in wet lines of ink on a tangible page you can touch.

C: Because it’s ink, you can’t erase or edit it. Don’t cross things out, don’t go back. Keep moving forward, finish the chapter.

Writing and editing are two diametrically opposed acts that use different parts of the mind, do not co-mingle them. Very few great writers are also great editors. You want to build the practice of finishing and executing a rough draft of your idea that’s as complete as possible. Let the words and ink flow first. Finishing is the goal.

When you write in ink, a critical part in this process is typing up your handwritten pages. Don’t do it during your writing time, make some time later and type up your work from the day. Then you can correct errors, look things up, and do all the other things you weren’t allowed to while writing. During the transcribing process, you will discover many things. Remember when I said the best ideas come from liminal spaces? As you’re transforming your ink letters into bytes, you will be looking at them from a new angle, and seeing them in a new way. More on editing later, but don’t skip this step! You don’t want to lose days of work because you were too lazy to type them up. Hammer out those pages, it will pay dividends later.

Once you are strong enough to resist tampering with your first draft, you can abandon the pen for the word processor. Later, if you find yourself slipping into editing and missing the flow state, try returning to longhand to recapture some of your early zeal. Finish first! Tinker later.

4. DON’T TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE WRITING.

DON’T TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE WRITING.

DON’T TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE WRITING.

Don’t tell anyone your idea while you are writing it, or while you’re working on the first edit. Don’t say anything! Not one word to another person until the manuscript is complete and you have finished your first edit. If someone asks what you’re working on tell them “It’s a secret.”

Telling someone about your idea tricks your mind into thinking you’ve worked on it and saps your motivation. An unfinished idea is worse than worthless. Strangle the temptation to talk! Loose lips sink manuscripts.

Don’t let anyone read your novel until it’s done, and you have completed a full edit. You don’t need help to figure out how to finish it. You don’t need someone else’s ideas or input. It’s YOUR manuscript, only you can write it. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not, odds are it isn’t. You’re learning, finishing is the goal.

Use that desire to show off, and subvert it into completing your novel. If you respect your friends, show them by not asking them to read a manuscript you haven’t bothered to finish or to fully edit. There’s nothing more interesting than a secret project that drops on you out of nowhere. There’s nothing more tedious than being saddled with pretending to like some half-baked abortion of an idea someone has yammered about for years.

Step 7: The long haul

Depending on its scope, the process of writing a novel might take you six months, or it might take a decade. It’s a very long haul, and there’s no oversight. No one is forcing you to finish your novel. No one will call and ask you why you were tardy to writing every morning this week. That’s why it’s so critical to keep the engine turning.

An idle manuscript will rust up with doubt. A poisonous, lazy idea will coil around your dream. You were never going to finish this beast, you were a fool to attempt it, you’ll fuck this up too, and on and on. Ignore the serpent. Keep working on the novel anyway, even if you don’t want to. The weakness will pass.

Even if it’s a day where you feel utterly uninspired, and you can’t possibly create anything, you’re not off the hook. You can always edit, or work on a different story, or try rewriting a problematic chapter. You can brainstorm solutions to a plot problem, you can draw a map, you can attack from another angle. There’s always something you can do. There are no blocked writers, just lazy ones. Not every writing session will be a success, but as you work harder, the bad days will dwindle, eventually you will reach a point where you can find real value even in your failures.

Some people like to work on multiple books simultaneously, shifting off to a work when they start to lose steam on a project. This is a slower way to work, but you will spend more time in the zone, writing out of a place of inspiration.

However, when you start to get somewhere between 60% and 80% done on a book, you must become monogamous. Books get much harder towards the end, and the siren song of your other, less complicated affairs must be resisted. Set those other books aside, and exclusively commit towards finishing that novel. It’s ok to hate it! It’s ok to arrive at your conclusion out of pure desperation. It’s ok to fuck up the ending. Finish your first draft, there will be ample time to fix it later.

Step 8. Finishing the rough draft.

If you followed those steps, you will inevitably complete a rough draft of your book. That’s all it is. You did not finish your novel, you don’t get to celebrate yet. You built half a house, no one can live in it yet. The last 10% of making a book is as hard as the first 90%. Now you get to edit.

Before you show this book to anyone, you MUST edit the rough draft. I recommend you let the book cool for at least a month so you can forget some of it before you return to it. The more distance you have, the more objective you can be during the edit. You are trying to read the book with new eyes, as a reader might.

To do your rough draft edit, first, read your entire book from start to finish and take notes. Note anywhere the pace drags, or something doesn’t make sense, anything you love and don’t want to lose, anywhere you think needs to be improved. Don’t fix them yet. You have a limited budget for the number of times you can read a a work and feel what you have written. The better your memory is, the fewer passes you can make with feeling. Make one strong effort to read and understand here, take careful notes, and sit on them again for another 2-4 weeks. Give your thoughts time to sink in, allow yourself time to worry about problems in the manuscript, and carefully note ideas you have during this time.

Re-read your original abstract, and try to identify areas where you succeed, and think of ways to fix where you failed. It’s natural and desirable for a story to greatly diverge from your original intent, but you may need to reel it back. Now is the time to brush up on your grammar, re-read Elements of Style, or whatever reference manual you think is best.

Now, begin to edit. There are many methods, and you will need to discover the best for you. Here’s mine.

Start at the beginning of the book. Read each line aloud. Change it until it sounds right. The next day, read through the section again without vocalizing it. If it looks good, move to the next. If it doesn’t, do it over.

That’s it! You will feel dumb reading aloud but do it anyway. Just like you found new things when you transcribed your handwritten manuscript, speaking each line aloud is engaging a different part of your mind and giving you a new perspective on your book. It’s the next-best thing to another person. You will find so many awkward phrases! If it’s too hard to say, it’s too hard to read! Whittle and hone everything until reading it aloud feels smooth and natural.

If possible, have a second screen or a tablet or another computer during this process. Have a copy of your notes, a dictionary, thesaurus, and some pertinent resource sites close at hand. Fact check! Search for what words really mean. Look up pronunciations. Take your time! The harder you work here, the less work you’ll leave for your editor, and the more time they can spend on the things you’re too dumb to fix yourself.

As you are editing, format your book into manuscript format. Leave comments for later you to do second-passes on parts you can’t figure out how to fix, and explanations where necessary for your editor. Note key places in the book where things happen. As you finish each chapter, write a summary of everything that happened in a separate document. This chapter summary will be very useful for creating a synopsis and keeping track of the structure of your book. Make sure to give a copy to your editor.

* this is an aside. * If you know my work, you know I do rough draft edits online in front of an audience. I would caution you not to do this before you finish a novel or two. As fun as it looks, I was not strong enough to do it for a long time. I waited until I had published five books to do it, and thought I was a strong enough writer. Additionally I had been in broadcasting for decades. All that experience left me resilient and arrogant enough to edit before an audience, but I think it would have harmed my development had I done it sooner. Follow your heart, but I would urge to to get a couple good books under your belt before you do it. //

Step 9. Working with an editor.

AN EDITOR IS ESSENTIAL.

Before a book is edited by someone who is not you, it is only about half as good as it could be. This applies to EVERY book ever. The Bible certainly could have used another pass.

All the effort you put into your book is completely wasted on everyone who doesn’t read it. You want to make picking it up and getting into it as painless as possible.

Half of your story is on the page, the rest is tumbling in your subconscious and outsiders can only guess at what you meant. A professional editor serves as a critical check on how far afield you’ve flown. They tell you if you’re pulling off clever and witty, or coming across clumsy and shitty. They are there to save you from yourself.

Working with an editor is a delicate dance of knowing when to stand up for your creative vision, and knowing when to swallow your pride. Here’s a rule for new writers:

You are very, very wrong 95% of the time. If you’re not, you need a better editor. One in twenty times, a point is worth arguing. Even then, you’re probably still slightly wrong and should deeply consider what they’re saying and see if you can implement it another way.

Writers ignoring their editors is how books wind up with non-nazarene characters coming back from the dead, insufferable wish-fulfillment flops into fairyland, and hundred-page speeches about how money is good. Never fall into the terrible trap of thinking you know best!

Writing and revising is only a quarter of the work of a book. Your editor and proofreader are doing a full quarter of the work, equally important to yours. The other half of the work is done by the reader, who makes magic while plowing through your prose. I repeat, you are 1/4 of your book. A quarter! Act like it.

It’s natural to argue, part of what allowed you to write a book was the insistence of your vision. Try to approach each edit with the understanding that you are wrong, and come to terms with it. I would suggest digesting the feedback slowly, taking notes, and stewing on it for a month or longer. Each big edit is a grieving process. Recognizing you are wrong can take a great deal of time and distance. I have received good edits that only made sense to me years later. When that happens, be sure to send a “YOU WERE RIGHT” message. Editors live for those.

You will get many excellent edits that don’t make sense to you at first. They seem wrong, because you aren’t a strong enough writer to implement them yet. You’ll get edits that seem hopelessly hard. They aren’t! They aren’t! It always takes less time to fix things than you think. The lazy mind makes mountains out of tiny tasks. Plug away, it’s always easier than it seems.

Editing is a skill, separate from creative writing, that must be cultivated with a great deal of practice. Initially it’s as painful as learning the violin for both you and everyone else involved. But just like writing, as you gain skill, it will become supremely satisfying. As you become a stronger writer, you become better able to recognize and realize the good advice your editor gives you. Solutions will spring to mind, and you will feel the improvement with every pass. Be patient! It takes a decade to get here, and then you’ve only begun to see how wrong you really are.

Step 10. I’M DONE, WHAT NOW?

Haha, I wish I knew. Congratulations, and good luck out there. You’ve reached the sad end of what I feel qualified to tell you. Someday hopefully I can give you some tips on how to self-publish a bestseller but for now, this is it! If you get there before me and this was helpful to you, feel free to send me a big sack of money. Don’t give up!