Starting your Middle Grade or Young Adult Novel, Cont...

A few guidelines to help you to stay on track:

Because a novel—even a short one—is a large undertaking, it’s a good idea to start with an outline. It doesn’t have to be huge. Whatever you feel comfortable with will do. But you should at least know who your main character is, what she wants, and how she’s going to go about getting it.

Write a set amount of words each day. This is a trick that all professional writers know, and one that’s well worth learning early. If you set an amount of words to write instead of an amount of time to write, you’ll discover that your work flows much more easily. If you tell yourself you’re going to write for an hour, you may stare at a blank screen the whole time, or rewrite the same sentence sixteen different ways. But if you set a quantity of words, paragraphs, or pages for yourself, you’ll find that your brain kicks in pretty quickly, knowing that—as soon as the two pages or two paragraphs or two sentences are completed—your work is done for the day.

If you don’t have huge hunks of time to devote to you’re writing, write in spurts. I worked for ten years as a writer-for-hire for various Sweet Valley Twins series while holding a full time job and working on my own books. The Sweet Valley Twins novels have a strict deadline of six weeks for two drafts. And no, I didn’t stay up until the wee hours of the morning or get by on only a couple hours’ sleep to get the work done. I worked on my lunch hour, and in the morning for fifteen or twenty minutes before work. When I had fifteen minutes, or five minutes, or two minutes of downtime, I worked on the novel.

If you can’t find fifteen or thirty minutes a day to devote to your writing, then perhaps you need to re-prioritize your life. You can’t write a book without some dedication to the process. That means that writing has to be one of your main priorities, even if it requires missing your favorite TV show or cutting your workout down to 30 minutes instead of an hour.

When it’s time for you to stop writing, leave a notation at the point you left off about where the next section/sentence/chapter is going, so you can jump right in the next day. I find it’s best to stop at a point where you know exactly what’s going to happen next, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time warming up later. Finally, enjoy the process. Be playful. If you don’t enjoy writing the book, chances are no one’s going to enjoy reading it. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

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M. Rachel Plummer, a Sweet Valley Series writer since 1992, is the author of the award-winning YA novel, The Painting in the Attic, available at all online bookstores. Personally autographed copies—a perfect gift for both teen readers and collectors—are available at http://www.mrpbooks.com/order.htm. Also, check out Rachel’s e-book, which walks you through the structuring, writing, editing and publishing of a novel at www.how2writeabook.com.