Ready. Set. Write.: Planning, Preparing, and Writing Your Novel This Year

It’s the beginning of another year, which means people have set New Year’s Resolutions (I set measurable, personally achievable goals instead). And this is the year you’ve promised yourself that you’re finally going to get around to writing that novel. The one that you’ve always dreamed of writing but have never actually sat down to do.

Or this is the year that you’ve resolved to finish your manuscript. Or this is the year that you’re going to write two, three, or more manuscripts—but you just aren’t sure how to do it since it takes you a year or longer to get one story down on paper just right.

Hopefully this new series, Ready. Set. Write., will help you in achieving the goal of a complete manuscript this year. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or if you’ve completed multiple manuscripts. My hope is that there will be something for all of us to learn together in this process.

Obviously, there will be lots of parts to this series—each of the three components contains enough information to keep me blogging about it for over a year. So, when I can’t be comprehensive due to time/word-count constraints, I’ll try my best to give you lists of resources for further study.

In order to make sure that I’m covering questions that are most pressing:

What are your biggest problems with getting started with a new story idea?