How does someone pull off writing that first novel? Can you tell me how to write a book with no experience?
No, I can’t. Because no one has done it.
And you can’t either. It’s utterly impossible.
I’m being a bit cheeky here…so let’s back up for a minute and I’ll explain.
I’ve Never Written Before…How Do I Do It?
The intention behind the question “how do I write with no experience” is likely the following:
How do I write a book if I’ve never done it before?
Where do I start?
Do I need any special training or qualifications?
How have others done it before me (…and how can I be next)?
These are great questions! If you’ve been poking around a bit on this website, you know that I’m all about helping others succeed at their writing by sharing the steps and tips that have worked for me. Virtually any concept related to the writer’s craft, like how to write a great opening to strategies for revising your first draft, can be learned and practiced. ( The One Week Writing Workshop online video course brings together my complete series of writing lessons on writing a novel start-to-finish—so do check it out if you haven’t already!)
But back to my cheeky point—about it being impossible to write with no experience…
If you’ve arrived at the point that you know you want to write a book, even if you’ve never written down the first word, you have some sort of idea (however fledgling and unformed). So…where do ideas, such as the one you’re musing over, come from?
Some might say “from within”, and fair enough—the exact mechanisms or idea generation and inspiration are indeed mysterious. But I would argue that, at least at some level, that idea got within you because of the way that you in particular are experiencing the world. What you love and do, what you think and care about, what you’re drawn to and what sparks your imagination—it all hinges on your unique experience as a person on this planet.
Therefore, you have the experience required to write a novel because, ultimately, your idea has been sparked by your (actual, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or creative) experience.
It goes without saying that you can add to your experience in terms of writing skills that need to be learned, sharpened, and mastered when it comes to writing a novel.
But you can’t have no experience. You have it just by being you.
That brings us to a famous bit of writing wisdom…
Write What You Know
As a young writer, this phrase used to bother me a lot. After all, I wanted to write fantasy stories and create exotic worlds. Even when my story worlds bent toward more realistic settings and situations, I wanted to send my characters on adventures and place them in predicaments that I certainly never experienced firsthand in my own life.
My life was boring, at least in terms of telling a story. Who’d want to read about the things that I did every day? Write what you know?!?! I emphatically wanted to write about what I DIDN’T know!
Of course, the more I thought about and kept hearing people say “write what you know” I realized how literal I was being with this phrase.
What you know doesn’t necessarily mean the facts of your actual life (which probably isn’t as boring as you think, but that’s another topic!). Rather, it can mean what your mind knows through research you’ve done. What your heart knows through the experiences of a certain relationship or a tragic loss. What your imagination knows through play or active daydreaming. What you know about life isn’t just the information we could derive from your driver’s licence. What you know is what you have experienced (there’s that word again!), and experience can happen at many levels of our being.
The way that I teach “write what you know” is to encourage writers, especially at the beginning of the novel writing process, to spend a bit of time reflecting on themselves. One of the early activities in The One Week Writing Workshop involves having you break a notebook page into three categories: ACTIVITIES/EXPERIENCES, DREAMS, and STORIES. Then, I have my writers note down ideas for each of these categories.
They reflect on what they personally know very well through their daily actions or life experience.
They note down what they are drawn to in terms of goals, dreams or fantasies.
Finally, they take inventory of the kinds of stories (books, or even family stories) that have had the greatest impact on their lives.
The exercise creates a telling snapshot of (some of) the things that shape you, and the things that you are drawn to. By doing this, you might spot patterns, or see a little more clearly what you might want to write about and share back into the world…writing what you know. For instance:
Your daily activity working in a coffee shop could form the basis of a cozy mystery series.
Your dream of spending a week at a monastery could provide inspiration for a rich story of a character’s personal awakening.
You recognize that you’re drawn to fantasy stories, or perhaps to family sagas by a particular author. It feels natural to you to write stories in a similar genre or with a similar flavour.
Personal or family stories can be drawn upon, too. Let’s say there are stories your grandma used to tell that you’ve always been fascinated with. Like how she worked at the grand downtown department store that’s now a discount retailer set for demolition. Its elegant past has danced in your mind for years…
Remember that you don’t have to be overly literal or one-to-one with any of it. The coffee shop becomes a bookstore in the same neighborhood with similar patrons. The monastery doesn’t have to be set on planet earth. The friends your grandma told you she worked with could inspire fictional ghosts hiding much darker secrets. Still, rooting your ideas in something you know is going to fuel your own creativity, and help you to write with more authenticity.
Also, writing about what you know doesn’t have to be limited to the big, overarching premise of your story. Tap into your (actual, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or creative) experience to inform how your characters behave and speak, how your settings function, or for ideas about events and situations to insert into your story that will add texture and colour.
Summing Up
You can’t write with no experience—you already have the fundamental experience you need (that of being human).
You can gain more experience with the skills of the craft—building upon your own natural tendencies as a writer, and learning new writing techniques to stretch yourself—but the basic building blocks of your novel, your ideas, should be connected to what your heart, mind, soul or imagination knows.
So spend some time paying attention to what this means for you! Your characters don’t have to be replicas of you, your settings don’t have to be places you’ve visited, and your plots don’t have to be rooted in your biography. But you’ll want to be aware of the connections they have to your experiences as a human being—what you know about them—so that you can write with authenticity (and enjoy doing it).