You have your characters, you have your locations and you
have your plot. You are now ready to write your first draft. What’s important
is that you just write, do not spend time thinking about the perfect word,
spelling, whether or not you have too much description or if your dialogue
sounds natural, all of these will be perfected when you edit.
At this stage it is better to type your first draft directly
onto a computer or to dictate it using a voice recorder or speech to text
software; this helps you stay in the flow as you can get the words down fairly
quickly and not worry about how neat your writing is. Turn off the autocorrect
feature as, when typing at speed, you may make typos that are corrected
incorrectly!
Realistically you will be able to type at 30 words a minute
minimum as long as you just tell the story. Aim to write in 20 minute spurts
completing approximately 500 words each session. Do just two sessions a day and
you will complete 1000 words each and every day. Add in additional sessions and
you can increase your daily word count considerably.
Depending on how you write your first draft you will either
have too many words that you will reduce or your writing will be more in note
form which will need expanding. Either way is fine, what you want to end up with
is a completed first draft that you can then edit and polish.
Once you have completed your first draft congratulate
yourself and put your work away for a week or two – keep writing during this
time, perhaps enter a writing competition. After two weeks start editing and
rewriting, take your time working on one scene at a time until you have a novel
that is as good as you can get it. Once you have completed your novel why not
self-publish your work and make it available to readers.
Happy writing.
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