What I learned from writing my novel by hand

I’ve been working on a couple of long-form fiction projects over the last year and a half and have been writing both of them out by hand.

One of them took me about eight months to get a rough draft of. I’m currently in the process of typing it up now.

My last novel, The Mouth is a Coven, took me about eight years to finish. It’s not a long novel but a lot happened in my life as I was writing it and I often got pulled away from it. Also, eight years is a long time in a human’s life: I changed a lot along the way, and the things that might have inspired me at the beginning didn’t all hold toward the end.

As writers we need to give space to our work. Writing doesn’t always happen on a linear timeline. Some books come out faster than others.

But for me, getting the finish line with a first draft makes a huge difference. With The Mouth is a Coven I couldn’t stop myself from editing along the way. I went over and over the earliest chapters, spending way too much time making changes before I knew where the book was headed.

I didn’t want to repeat that process again.

I also have realized that since becoming self-employed in 2015, my relationship to my writing has changed a lot.

When I worked a 9-5 I would get up early to write. Or I would come home from work, eat quickly, and spend the evening working on my projects.

When I started a business working from home I thought I would get so much more writing done. But I don’t have the same division between my work and home life that I did when I went to an office.

Back then, my work life existed on a separate computer in a separate place. Now, my work life and creative life happen on the same laptop, at the same desk, in the same room.

I can’t let this hold me back from writing creatively anymore.

So I started writing by hand in a spiral notebook, just to get away from my laptop and get my ideas on the page, from start to finish, before I input them into a Word document.

It worked when it came to getting a first draft finished. Within eight months I drafted what I hope will become a new novel.

Now I’m in the process of typing it all up.

I would be lying if I said it didn’t need work: It does.

It will likely become a totally different book than what it has started out as.

But writing it by hand pushed me to take a much slower approach with my characters. I’ve had a tendency to underwrite certain scenes and character profiles in the past. When I slowed down and started sorting out my thoughts with pen and paper, I learned so much about what my story could, and who my characters are.

It has also given me a clearer idea of what I need to do with the second draft already.

There are different ways to approach a hand-written first draft. Some authors type up their entries as they go along, logging each day’s writing in a Word document before returning to their notebooks.

I didn’t do that, but I might try it next time, just to organize my ideas and refine some of the writing a bit more.

Right now my novel is in three spiral-bound books and I’m still typing up the first one: It does take time.

Would I do it again, though?

Absolutely.

It has reinspired me to write fiction again. And I enjoy being able to just pack up a notebook and go, rather than lugging my laptop all over if I want to write at a café somewhere.

But more importantly, it has been a way to push myself to write more complex storylines than I have before. Writing is daunting either way, but there is something freeing about putting your words on a page without staring down the word count at the bottom of the screen or feeling overwhelmed by a sprawling Word document before the story is even finished.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is getting that first draft down.

We’ll see where we go from here, but so far, so good.

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My new poetry collection, Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, launches October 22 with Book*hug Press! Details are here.

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