Step 10: Get your first readers’ feedback, and listen to it. This is the difficult part: you need to listen to your first readers. Really, really listen. You cannot argue with them. At all. They’re going to try to sugar-coat their criticisms, because they don’t want to make you angry or disappointed. And they’re going to be biased anyway, because they’re your friends and they probably share your worldview to a certain extent. So you need to very patiently coax the truth out of them, and let them do most of the talking….

Step 14: Make decisions, and stick to them. Just like you have to commit to writing your novel, you need to get serious about making tough decisions in the writing of it. Can’t decide if your characters should act a certain way, or if you should use a certain point-of-view, or if you should include a particular scene? You’ll need to make these tough decisions at some point, and you’ll need to stick to them…. When confronting tough decisions, it helps if you stop thinking of your choices as a shell game, where the “right” answer lies under one of your decisions. Every writing choice is the right choice, as long as you make it the right choice. There’s no Big English Professor in the Sky passing judgment on your work. Commit to a choice and make it work, and you’ll never go wrong.

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Excerpts:

Step 2: Noodle around and figure out if your idea is novel-worthy.… Your first real challenge is to explore that idea to see if it’s worthy of spending a year or two of your life on. This is not a light decision to make. These characters are going to set up camp in your dreams, they’re going to pop out at you from the side of the road while you’re driving. You’re going to find yourself standing in a 7-11 wondering which flavor of Slurpee your protagonist would choose and how they would pay for it (corporate credit card? cash from wad in pocket? five finger discount?). You need to know if you can live with these people….

Step 5: Structure as you go. Some writers can zip through a draft of a novel by the seat of their pants. Others diligently outline every step their character’s going to take over the next hundred thousand words. It’s likely your process will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Regardless, you need to have some idea of structure if you expect your novel to work. You might not know what that structure is when you start, and you might change it drastically as you go, but you can’t just expect Frodo and Sam to wander to Mount Doom by themselves. Either they’ll wander around aimlessly or they’ll wind up at the Cracks of Doom at the end of chapter 3, and then your novel will be in big trouble.

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