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When you’re starting to write a new book, you might still be figuring out your individual style: when to write, the environment you need, what keeps you motivated, and how to maintain consistency.
But if you find it challenging to get stuck into your first draft, these tips from The Novelry writing coach and internationally bestselling author Kate Riordan can be applied to your writing practice today. We all have our idiosyncratic ways to get into the creative zone—and, with seven books under her belt, Kate knows exactly what keeps her writing ticking along in the early stages of the first draft.
Kate is the author of the brand new crime novel The Liars, written as Katherine Fleet, and, as Kate Riordan, suspense novels The Heatwave and Summer Fever, historical fiction novel The Girl in the Photograph, and many more. She coaches suspense, mystery and historical fiction at The Novelry and, with a book published almost every year, she knows how to stay consistent and confident when transforming an idea into a finished draft. Spoiler alert: it often involves a lot of bribery and self-deception.
Kate’s most recent novel The Liars is available now from booksellers and online. To celebrate her publication, she shares her tips for tackling the first draft in this article for The Novelry.
Getting into your first draft
My new psychological thriller The Liars has just been published but the strange thing is that, even though I’ve seen the novel on bookshelves in the supermarket, that story already feels quite remote. This is because it coincides with my attempts to get stuck into my next book—a familiar scenario to many writers contractually required to produce a new novel every year (or less, eek).
Writers at The Novelry will know I take a somewhat painful approach to writing, particularly the first draft. I like to be honest about this, even though we do encourage happy writing. After all, self-awareness is half the battle and, over the years, I have learned to work with my sheer bloody-minded resistance to do something I actually love and have somehow managed to make my main job.
While we’re all uniquely quirky in these matters, some of the ways I use bribery could work for you too. And yes, I am talking about bribing myself. The deep space of the unwritten first draft cleaves me neatly in two. One half is sulky teenager, face-down on the bed wailing, ‘I so totally hate everything about this’. The other half is patient parent proffering chocolate from the doorway saying, ‘Come on, love, you know you always feel better when you do a bit’. Yes, it’s exhausting.
So, if you’re as weird as I am, read on for how I get my books done. Because I do get them done, after a fashion, and in between the nuttiness. The Liars is my sixth novel for Penguin, and no one could be more surprised about that than me.
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1. Notebooks and longhand writing
Now, I could recommend you buy a lovely new notebook to start your lovely new work of fiction, which is exactly what we suggest at the beginning of The Ninety Day Novel Class. It’s a great idea because it’s not only a treat (more on those below), but it makes eminent sense to keep all your ideas and random notions for this book-to-be in one place.
For me, it’s not so much about new stationery but the refuge from the blinking cursor on my screen. The stakes don’t feel nearly so high when I’m jotting in my notebook. Sometimes, when stroppy teenager me is watching Below Deck, patient mother me might quietly start writing longhand in the planning notebook. I won’t start a new page, because that would attract attention from Madam on the sofa. I’ll just slyly segue into prose, under the radar. Obviously, if it’s half-decent, I’ll have to type it up at some point, and that’s a cunning and easy way into ‘actual writing’ on another day.
2. Narrow down your writing window
The one-hour-a-day writing method we call ‘Golden Hour’ isn’t a gimmick. It leaves you hungry for more tomorrow. And, for the chronically resistant writer, limiting your expectations of yourself to a mere 60 minutes is really helpful. Couple that with the suggestion to do it early in the morning, and you’re looking at a blissfully guilt-free rest of the day.
Others might try the Pomodoro Method (named for those red plastic tomato cooking timers). This involves 25 minutes of timed writing, followed by five minutes of rest. Not reading through what you’ve just written, but getting up and stretching. Or going outside to get some air. Or fetching a snack. Then you go back to it for another 25 minutes. When you’ve done four of these, you get an hour off.
3. Literal bribery
When I was a kid, I was terrified of the dark. Or, rather, the night-time, because I was allowed to keep the light on (my mum wasn’t when she was a scaredy-cat child herself, so she was never going to put me through that). Still, the light provided only scant comfort and so I used to creep along the hall to her and my stepdad’s room with my pillow and a blanket and try to bed down on the floor next to them, like a dog. Sadly, the parental advice at the time was to always take a child back to their own bed, and so I would be returned, outwardly resigned but secretly planning to go through the whole rigmarole again in an hour. Mum was a full-time teacher and almost as tired as me so, in desperation, she drew up a star chart.
If I didn’t wake her for a whole night, I got a gold star on the chart, and if I got a whole week’s worth of stickers, we’d go to the toyshop and I’d pick out a new My Little Pony or Care Bear. She’ll kill me for relating this, but it worked. I was a stoic from then on and got my treats every Friday after school. To be clear: I didn’t sleep. I just read all night while waiting for the burglars and ghosts to arrive. Which is how I ended up in this job, basically. Gold stars and silver linings…
The point is, bribery works. I now sleep in my pitch-dark cottage in the countryside with no qualms, so these days it’s the writing I reward. The prizes have changed with age too, of course, and physical treats now include a glass of cold wine; salt scrubs and shimmery make-up from Beauty Pie; or a pretty but totally unnecessary trinket from Etsy. And why not, if it helps get words on the page? I never did have much of a Puritan work ethic.
4. Leave the house
I’m lucky enough to have a nice study with a swivel chair and a view across a lush green valley dotted with stone cottages and shiny-flanked horses. But, naturally, working in that lovely room would be too easy. So I go out.
I pack up my laptop and go on little excursions. I’m always looking for the perfect place: somewhere warm enough in winter, a shady garden in summer, with plugs available, not too noisy, and not too small so I feel bad for loitering. I much prefer pubs as they’re quieter in the day and less likely to be full of toddlers and men conducting important Zoom meetings, neither of which I can tune out.
5. Call it a day if the writing feels forced
If I’m just typing rather than writing, I stop. It’s counter-productive to keep trucking on if it’s just going to make me feel like I’m in the wrong job. A sure sign that it’s one of those days is finding it impossible to make my character cross a room and exit it. If I’m thinking things like, ‘But how do people open doors?’, I need to do something else for a bit.
6. Think of writing as a reward
Following on from my last tip, I find that if I don’t push it on the ‘pulling teeth’ days, then I can try to reframe writing as a treat in itself: something to look forward to instead of dreading.
This is a recent approach—like a vaccine for a crafty virus, my avoidance cures have to constantly evolve—and I credit fellow The Novelry coach Emylia Hall with this one. She has really helped me to see that it’s the writing itself which can be the reward. Yes, really!
Writing is frequently Emylia’s escape and solace. I love that radical concept, and have been trying to emulate it with some success. (Mind you, she does also do the treat thing, as her Instagram profile—full of posh coffees and cakes—will attest.)
7. Find a soundtrack to match your story idea
My recent books have been set mainly in the recent past, and I have taken full advantage of my little portable speaker and headphones so that I can have music on while I write.
I have used music to accompany work since school, when I was avoiding homework rather than writing. I used to put on loud music as a sort of mini rebellion, but these days I more sensibly choose music that offers lots of aural atmosphere without too much distraction.
I wrote The Heatwave to The Beach Boys and Summer Fever to Portishead, and used a very chilled and summery Apple Focus playlist for the Greek island-set The Liars.
My new book, which has a folk-rock-hippy vibe, is currently taking form to Crosby, Stills & Nash. Yes, there are lyrics, but I’ve listened to them so many times already that I don’t really hear them anymore. So if a quiet room feels like too much pressure—too much ‘Haha, are you actually trying to write now?’—then press play and give it a whirl.
8. Learn to count the non-writing as essential preparatory work
I’ve realized over time that I do a lot of thinking about the world and the players of my idea before I start properly writing. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is part of my process, and a very necessary part, too.
With the craft knowledge I’ve gleaned from working at The Novelry, which includes talking one-on-one with writers about their novels (such good exercise for the brain, to dip briefly into someone else’s story!), I am pretty efficient at getting a book out these days. My drafts are quite clean. I also do fewer of them. And I put this down in part to all that strenuous not-writing I do at the start.
It turns out it’s useful and even efficient to make rambling notes about where a plot could go, potential twists, and character traits which will make those twists psychologically plausible.
Even as I’m berating myself for never doing any bloody writing, I’m writing by getting my ducks in a row.
9. Create a world you want to inhabit
Maybe this is the most important of all, at least for me. And it’s kind of a riff on the advice to ‘write what you’d like to read’.
I genuinely think about what I’d love to read next, and then try to serve it up to myself as my next writing project (yep, we’re back to the split personalities and bribery). But I don’t mean that I think, ‘Right, next up, a psychological thriller about female friendship!’. It’s both much more specific and much more nebulous than that. A mental mood board that I sometimes don’t even write down or properly articulate to myself for fear of tarnishing its allure.
I’ve long done this with settings, and everything they encompass. The Heatwave began with an urge to lose myself in a Provençal summer because I missed France. There was real joy in recalling almost-forgotten details of my holidays there as a child in the 90s: the food and the light and old-house smells that are subtly different to those in Britain.
From there, I went to Italy in my mind for Summer Fever and then Paxos for The Liars. For the new book—oddly homesick for a fictional Cotswolds even though I live in the real-life version—I decided to set it in a version of my own valley, in a manor house hidden in the cleft where it narrows to a sharp point.
On one of those rare English summer evenings when it’s warm until late, I took my notebook to a high meadow with a bench that overlooks the place where my story will play out. There wasn’t another soul about, and I made some notes. Which I then turned, quietly, into prose. Prose I don’t hate.
The next day I did none, but that’s ok. It’s just how I seem to roll and, like I said before, it gets done eventually.
Here’s a quick ’n’ vague list of stuff that I’m circling for this book:
- Folk horror
- Late 60s groupies
- Complicated mothers and daughters (standard, for me)
- Plucky orphan girl
- A locked-up shrine of a bedroom
- White dresses, sun shining through them
- Woodsmoke and golden evenings
- Lost cine film
- Ghostly nuns
As much as the wine and brownies, if not more, these are my bribes now. They coax me into opening my laptop. So why not try it with your half-formed idea? You might make the whole project tantalizing again, in a way that fretting over story beats probably won’t.
It’s hard work, writing a novel. But finding it hard is not a sign you can’t do it or that your story is somehow flawed. It’s brave to give a long-held dream a go, and risk failure at it. Acknowledge all this, and then make it as rewarding and comforting as possible for your resistant teenage self. Secretly, she wants to write that novel.
For one-on-one help writing your novel, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry today. Sign up for courses, coaching and a community from the world’s top-rated writing school.
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