by nissa_amas_katoj

Created on: November 13, 2008

Whether or not you can write a better novel than some of those which have seen publication depends mostly on you. Do you have imagination, determination, and a decent command of the English language? Or are you one of those who believes that writing a novel is an easy road to riches?

For those who have tried it, writing a novel isn't easy at all. And if you finish, and get published, you may find that your monetary returns on your work are less than minimum wage for the hours you put in. If your only motive for wanting to write a novel is a dream of riches, you might as well quit right now and find some other line of work.

A person who has a chance of success is a person who imagines. Do you make up stories in your head? And are they creative, or just daydreams about everyday situations? Could the stories you make up be turned into publishable fiction? If so, writing a novel may be something you can be good at.

A writer also needs determination. You have to work long hours at your novel, and there are no guarantees that it will be good enough to publish. There will be no boss standing over you forcing you to write. You just have to keep at it, on your own, no matter how many times you fail, until at last you succeed.

Do you have good English language skills? It's very difficult to write good fiction if you are a poor speller, or don't know how to write grammatical sentences. And you have to have a sense for which words are the right ones for the situation. Some would-be writers use too many long or obscure words in an attempt to sound clever.

What do you do if your English language skills fall short? Learn. Work on your spelling and grammar, and read a lot of books by skillful authors. Find out where your shortcomings are and correct them. There are published authors out there who, when they first started, could not write a sensible sentence to save their life, but they worked at it and got better. You can, too.

One turning point in any would-be writer's life comes when you read a book, published by a commercial publisher and presumably meeting the publisher's standards of quality writing, and you find that the author has made a mistake that you would not make. In my own case, it was a historical novel which used old-fashioned language that was unintentionally funny, in a scene that was supposed to be horrific. I thought to myself, I
would never make a mistake like that.

In another instance I read a novel about intrigue in the Catholic Church. An important plot point was based on a mistaken idea about what the Church actually teaches about divine visions. Again, I thought that I could have done better.

In both cases, the mistakes made by published authors made me believe that there was hope for me as a writer, that I had the skills I would need to succeed. If you have had similar experiences yourself, let them give you hope as well. Remember, every published book out there is proof that writing a novel is a possible dream.

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