”You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.” —Gene Wolfe
I’ve known my entire life that I wanted to write novels, but I didn’t know how to go about it. As a super-practical individual, I set aside those ambitions while I threw myself into a serious corporate job. I could gain real-world experience that might someday provide fictional fodder while putting a roof over my head and cold pizza in the refrigerator.
Then, in 2002, my friend and colleague Phoebe Moore introduced me to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which challenged participants to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. This absurd proposition seemed as good a place to start as any, so I drafted my first novel.
Not surprisingly, this manuscript needed work, and I spent years following the characters and story wherever they led me. Finally, I realized that I had drafted more than 200,000 words with no end in sight.
Fast forward to the fall of 2011. I was working through The Artist's Way with friend and fellow writer Travis Heermann, may he rest in peace. Both of us had an almost mystical experience during Week 5 of the 12-week process: we woke from vivid dreams that sent us straight to the page, scribbling down everything we could remember. Travis’s dream turned into an award-winning screenplay, and mine became my first finished novel.
90 Days (or 9 Months) to a Complete Novel Manuscript
Unlike my various NaNoWriMo manuscripts—I had drafted several by this time—this novel was carefully planned and structured. The premise: a woman experiences two very different lives, depending on a decision made years earlier. Weaving these story lines together required some forethought.
I started noodling on the story architecture. In a flash of insight, I pictured the story as a double helix—yep, the classic DNA model—with a central thread running through the manuscript as earlier events propel the protagonist toward her fateful choice. One obstacle down.
Next, I realized that I needed a plan. I stumbled upon 90 Days to Your Novel by Sarah Domet around this time and decided to use that roadmap. While I didn’t come close to Domet’s aggressive timeline, I worked steadily through the first third of her book, during which I created detailed character sketches, planned the overall story arcs, drafted scene cards, and wrote a 35,000-word synopsis. I officially started the project on April 1, 2012, and I wrote “The End” on December 31 that same year.
The writing experience was unlike any other up to that point. I enjoyed the process so much that part of me didn’t want it to end. Also, I knew that I was producing the best writing of my life, and this manuscript ultimately led to a contract with my dream agent. Consequently, I concluded that I was not, in fact, a pantser. I could write a novel without a plan, but figuring things out in advance seemed far more efficient.
A Decade of Writing with Nothing to Show for My Efforts
While I was working through manuscript revisions with my soon-to-be agent, November and NaNoWriMo rolled around again. I had started planning another elaborate novel in which some parts of the story occurred in modern times while others transpired in China during the Han Dynasty, but my creative process seemed stuck. Deciding that writing anything—even copious quantities of crap—was better than banging my head against the wall, I opted to take part in NaNoWriMo again. I even had a rough idea of what I would write, but that plan vanished on October 28, when another intense dream had me writing down every scrap I could remember.
Aha! I thought. This is what I was missing. Divine inspiration!
If only.
I did indeed secure a NaNoWriMo victory in that I drafted at least 50,000 words that brought my story arc to a close. Unfortunately, I once again found myself with a disaster on my hands that I couldn’t quite figure out how to fix.
By this time, I had learned how to rewrite and revise a novel-length manuscript. But this manuscript was in such wretched shape that I couldn’t see my way forward. I concluded that I had to work through the planning process retroactively, starting with character sheets, potential scenes, etc.
Nine depressing years later, which included a global pandemic and stints at middle-grade fiction and short stories, I seemed no closer to a working draft than when I typed “The End” around midnight on November 30. I had filled multiple notebooks and populated a robust Scrivener project, but the story itself had morphed and expanded into something epic. I mean this in the literal sense: good vs. evil, existential crises, social commentary. It was all in my head, and I had no idea how to get it onto the page in a cohesive tale of fewer than 300,000 words.
How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Write My Way Forward
Enter William Kenower, the author of Fearless Writing. I had signed up for a Writers Digest webinar with him, which put me on a mailing list, which ultimately resulted in my reaching out for personal coaching. I didn’t know if it would help, but by this time, I had grown fairly desperate.
After all, I’d spent nearly a decade fumbling in the dark with no draft in sight. I needed to try something new.
During our initial sessions, Bill quickly determined that I was afraid. Specifically, I feared that this new project wouldn’t meet my perhaps-unrealistic expectations, based on my previous novel.
This should not have surprised me. By then, I had already spent nearly a year spinning my wheels for every active month I’d spent successfully planning and drafting that earlier manuscript.
In those early sessions, Bill encouraged me to write scenes, while I insisted that I needed to plan. But planning hadn’t gotten me very far, so I finally started writing my way forward from the opening scene, one I’d drafted several years earlier. This was early January 2024. In late March, I had written 16,000 words, which grew to roughly 70,000 by the end of the year.
I reached “The End” in August 2025, after passing 157,000 words.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Elated to have a complete draft—even if it was completely unreadable—I set it aside to create some emotional distance. I had this brilliant plan to spend the time polishing a few short stories and submitting them for publication. While I did revise some short fiction, I mostly confronted the humbling truth that I’m not especially skilled at writing short stories.
In the midst of this rude clash with reality, I received an email from Dabble Writer announcing a 60-Day Novel-Writing Challenge—their answer to the now-defunct NaNoWriMo. This seemed like a fantastic opportunity to crank out a draft of a cozy mystery inspired by a failed short story. The Dabble challenge combined the productivity of NaNoWriMo with planning resources.
I signed up for a two-month trial of Dabble Writer and eagerly awaited October 1.
When I sat down to start planning my cozy mystery, however, I could not find the planning guide. I simply sat at my writing desk, staring at a blank page, with no clue what to do next.
So I started writing about the fact that I knew I wanted to write a cozy mystery and not much beyond that. I wrote everything that I knew, based on what I liked about the unsuccessful short story, and then, I made a list of questions that I needed to answer. Who was the protagonist? What was her situation? Where did the story take place? Who were the other characters?
As I wrote, answers and possibilities popped into my head. Sometimes they were based on rational thought, such as the reality that New York City isn’t exactly appropriate for a cozy murder mystery. After all, the NYPD has quite a bit of experience—and dedicated manpower—handling murders. Other times, the ideas niggled at the back of my brain, waiting for me to make sense of these vague impressions.
Two hours later, I had written 1,000 rambling words that bore no resemblance to a story, but the exercise had engaged my imagination. Different possibilities and even a few certainties bounced around my head as I walked the dog that afternoon, and I rushed back to my computer to create what Dwight Swain calls a “white-hot document” in Techniques of the Selling Writer: a file that captures all your excitement and everything you know about a potential writing project.
Even though I located and opened Dabble’s novel-planning guide the next day, I barely looked through it.
I also signed up for a plotting workshop by Damon Suede on InkedVoices.com, but I didn’t follow his excellent advice, either.
Instead, I did a casting call for my characters and created basic sheets in Dabble that consisted of names and photographs. Once I could see the characters in my head, I had the anchor I needed to sit and listen to what they had to say, to see what they wanted to show me.
I began drafting scenes in January 2026, and I completed a 77,000-word manuscript on September 11, not quite eight months later.
Lessons Learned: A Tale of Two Manuscripts
My cozy mystery project differed from the previous novel, an urban fantasy, in every way. It came together even more quickly than my dual-storyline manuscript, and I had just as much fun writing it. Even better, I didn’t fear this amazing experience was a fluke; I was certain I could tap into and channel the same excitement for future projects.
Why had the mystery novel flowed naturally while the previous one had involved much head-banging and gnashing of teeth?
In early 2024, shortly after Bill Kenower helped me move past my planning block, I came across the Gene Wolfe quote about only learning how to write the book you’re writing while listening to Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats. This observation from an experienced novelist depressed me to no end.
Yes, I had already internalized that this project was completely different from my previous one, but the idea that none of my writing experience would likely transfer from one novel to the next? I wanted to curl up and cry.
Later, with a completed draft of my problem-child project and an ever-growing cozy manuscript, I began thinking about the Wolfe quote and my personal writing process in a different light. I even went back to my polished-but-unpublished novel and the unfinished doorstopper draft on which I’d labored for years.
I concluded that the dream project—the one I had literally dreamed about, planned, and written as if receiving divine dictation—was the outlier. That specific book required planning, but my natural writing style relied heavily on intuition, an observation borne out by my short fiction, in which I do some initial scribbling but discover the story as I go.
A New Creative (Side) Quest
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to turn down the volume on my critical, rational mind so I can heed my intuition. Now that I have some raw drafts under my belt, my analytical faculties are eager to jump back into action. These observations about my personal writing process and different projects requiring different tools and approaches revealed what I considered a significant gap in the many books on writing process and craft.
Specifically, the resources I’ve read over the years do a good job of presenting different approaches, but I haven’t found any designed to help writers uncover their natural writing process(es).
I will remain eternally grateful that I encountered Domet’s book when I did. It was the right guide for that particular novel. Trying to apply it to other projects, however, merely taught me more ways not to write a novel.
Because I am a recovering productivity junkie, I’m embarking on a journey to help writers home in on their innate writing processes, while also building a toolbox for tackling outlier projects. Sure, if we stick with writing long enough, we’ll eventually figure out what works (often by struggling through many things that don’t work), but life is short. If I can help a single person find his or her personal writing process that much faster, then this pursuit will be worthwhile.
Many, many things in life bring me great joy. A writing project that’s going well? That has to rank near the tippy top of the list. I want to help other writers experience more elation and less frustration as they struggle to capture the stories swirling through their hearts and brains.
Also, to be honest, I’m hoping to stockpile my own creative arsenal for the next problem-child project that comes along.
Shall we begin?
