How I Learned
How to Write A Novel

So I suppose you're wondering who's behind all this "how to write a novel" stuff.

Yeah, I figured you'd ask eventually.

Well, here's my "story" (and I'm sticking to it!).


Once There Was A Girl...

If you've read my homepage, you've read how it all began. How my eighth-grade English teacher lit a fire inside of me by telling me I was good at writing.

Lacking in self-confidence (and social skills with kids my own age), I turned to fantasy for friends and entertainment. (Not that I knew how to write a novel at that point...)

At first, it was all stealing and imitation. Much as it dates me (and embarrasses me), I'll admit the Trixie Belden series of teen mysteries is what truly gave birth to both my desire to write, and the seeds of my still-present characters.

Wow. That's kind of scary. I scribbled (literally - my handwriting's atrocious) on any scrap of paper to hand (though mostly legal pads). I drew pictures of my characters (there were A LOT of orphans, early on, poor things) or cut out magazine pictures to portray them. I created character lists and character sketches by the ream.

And I wrote action scenes. After all, they're the most fun.

When I neared adulthood, I felt I should give this fantasy world up, and forget learning. My mom (bless her) told me never to give up my fantasies! Maybe she understood how much I needed them to stay sane in a not-so-sane world.

So I kept learning how to write a novel.

And I kept writing. On napkins. On scrap paper. On teeny notebooks I hung around my neck with string (think antique mini cassette recorder...). Never more than a few scenes at a time, and never a full novel. Not even a complete plot of one. Though it was beginning to bubble up inside me.

Until one day, my brain boiled over.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.


Finding Time Without Any to Spare

Think you can't learn how to write a novel and finish one? So did I for years.

And who could blame me?

When I got out of college, I was earning less than half of poverty-level income. (Thankfully, I didn't find that wonderful fact out until years later.) Living in Durango, Colorado (oh, what a gorgeous place to be broke!) I was barely making enough to feed and house me and my Snowshoe kitty.

Stress was enough to keep me from completing a novel, though my mom always encouraged me by asking how my writing was going.

It was going. But it was mostly scraps and bits that came to me (sometimes in weird dreams) that I dutifully jotted down without a clue how to write a novel out of them.

I started getting Writer's Digest Magazine about then, and it helped, but I never seemed to get it together. (Yes, it's just an excuse. As are all the following reasons.)

Then, I was back in Minnesota helping my brother move when I saw my old college flame again. Whoa! My heart still tripped quadruple time, just from seeing him walk my direction!

So, he picked me up the next New Year's Day, moved me to Minnesota (in JANUARY no less) and proposed by March. I said yes. (Who wouldn't, to those baby blue eyes and that devilish grin?)

Next thing you know, I was working 40 hours a week (and zoning on TV in the evenings - remember, that's bad for the brain!), and not getting much writing done.

Then we bought a house. One that had been repossessed. Needless to say, the previous, delinquent-on-their-payments-owners were not pleased to be kicked out of their abode.

So they trashed it. And we began (still working 40 hours a week) fixing up our house enough to live in every weeknight and all weekend, every weekend. (It's still just an excuse, you know.)

Once we were settled in, we kept fixing it up in our spare time, which left less spare time for practicing how to write a novel. Not that I stopped novel writing. I could do that as easily as stop breathing.

And novel number one actually was getting written. At work.

Now please don't do something like write at work - unless you have either: 1- Breaks during which you can...

Or

2 - The type of job where you have to be there, but if you've done everything that needs doing and you're just minding phones and typing things for your co-workers when they need it, and keeping things neat for everyone and such (wait, I have to catch my breath!)... you're allowed to occupy yourself with reading or writing.

Please note, I had permission to write at work, as long as my work was done. I'd never have done so except on breaks, otherwise!

And the best part was, I had a computer at my fingertips, a luxury I didn't yet own myself. (PCs were being invented when I was graduating from college, so I didn't have a clue how to use one until this particular job.)

It was ever so much faster than writing long hand!

So, after ten years (yes, it took me ten years to write the first one), I finished my first novel. And somehow, spurred by that (or possessed by my characters), novel number two wrote itself in two weeks, shortly thereafter.

Guess it had been percolating long enough, huh?

I thought I had it figured out. How to write a novel and get to "The End".

Oh, they still needed heavy editing, both of them, but I had the rough drafts finished. I was ecstatic. So I shared number one with my family.


The Good News and the Bad News

From my early writings as a teen, which lacked anything resembling a salable book, I kept playing with my characters (or they played with me, as the case may be) until I finally had the courage to let some of my family read it when book one was done.

Even though none of them knew how to write a novel, I wanted intelligent feedback (I have a smart family, when they aren't being smart-alecks, anyway.) And I wanted honest feedback. So I got four or five of them to read it.

The reactions ranged from "Nicely done" to "I was bored the first half, but the second half was much better" to the one that made both the most sense and the most aggravation to me:

"Your antagonist is a paper tiger. He's got no teeth. He can't really do anything to your protagonist."

Ouch!

My critic was right. Me, a goody-two-shoes was having a hard time being "bad" with my bad guys.

While it hurt a bit, it actually encouraged me. Now I knew why I wasn't enthralled with the book as a whole. If I didn't like all of it, no one else would either. (To this day, that's my first challenge to myself. One I invariably fail until I've really dug down and cleaned everything up.)

Okay. My bad guy wasn't.

Back to the drawing board. More "how to write a novel" guides. More bad guy creation references (my reference library reads like a murder mystery: Deadly Doses, Code Blue, Malicious Intent...), more Writer's Digest Magazines. So I began to pick it apart, while book number three began to nag me to be written. (Not to mention parts of books 4-25... seriously!)

So I was tooling along minding my own business, getting things written and edited to a point, still learning how to write a novel when BAM, I ran into a major obstacle.


Can You Spell Inter... ruption?

After a few years being married, we did what most young married couples do. We got crazy and had a baby.

Our son was colicky. He didn't sleep much, at first.

Guess what. Neither did I.

Ever see that commercial where they show an egg, then a frying pan, then break the egg into it, all sizzling and hot? Their line is "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs."

Well, now picture really runny oatmeal, oozing out of a container. That's your brain on kids. (We had a daughter two-and-a-half years later, too.)

If you can EVER have an uninterrupted thought after you have kids, please tell me how. And mine are now 15 and 18!

Not only was I crazy thinking I could do things after I had kids (in less than five times the amount of time it took before I had kids), but since my income wasn't anything to brag about before we had said kid, we decided I should run my husband's office from home now to make my income.

Cool. Except when the baby's screaming in the background while you're trying to hear what the client's problem is so you can send a technician out to fix it.

Or when the invoicing that you just printed now has bright orange baby food all over it because you were trying to fold it and stuff it into envelopes while your son ate lunch. And you have to spend the evening reprinting and re-stuffing it.

Then, we decided to homeschool our kids. Because public school was not cutting it at all. Yikes. Talk about full days!

Yes, kids make a great excuse not to get things done. But I'm the first to say, "I understand. It'll get better. In about twenty years. I think."

Top all that off, being an introvert in a family of extroverts (meaning I need my time alone or I go stark raving mad) makes quite the challenge out of staying sane enough to learn how to write a novel, much less write one well. One I've overcome by disappearing regularly into my fantasy world.

Now, if I could just get those people to leave me alone when I need it...


What Possessed Me To Steal Time From Novel Writing
To Create This Website?

Here I am today, internally schizophrenic (I hear voices all the time, you know - my characters bugging me ;-), and still living in a fantasy world.

A specific fantasy world.

Still learning how to write a novel (I doubt I'll ever stop learning tricks to it).

I edited my first book twice before letting family and a few friends read it again.

Now the comments were more to the tune of "When's the next one going to be done?" and "You kept me up till 3:00 am because I couldn't put it down!"

Music to my ears!

This was the point at which I thought maybe I should try to sell it.

I got a book on literary agents. I made some lists. I got daunted (being the introvert I am).

Then I got an invitation to the Maui Writer's Retreat (held in Hawaii over Labor Day Weekend each year). And with it was an offer called "Manuscript Marketplace", where you could, for a fee, submit a cover letter, a synopsis and your novel's first chapter (if I remember right) to a panel of agents and editors to see if they'd buy it.

So, I tried it. Though I was told ahead when I called to ask some questions, that few of the agents or editors were looking at fantasies much.

No one bit. (It was reviewed by sixteen panelists.) Which disappointed me, but didn't surprise me, with the panel being made up of people who preferred other genres.

So I put it aside to think about what I wanted to do next.

Did I worry about making money with it? No, I never did. I needed novel writing to survive. If I sold something because of it, great. If not, my characters were still my friends and wouldn't abandon me. So I didn't put in a huge effort to jump right back out to sell it. (I was still working for my husband, after all.)

Instead, I kept practicing how to write a novel and writing my fiction. Reams of fiction. Novel number four was well underway with a great beginning and most of its end (and questions about how to fill in the middle...). One, two and three were all in editing process at once. I was happy. I was living where I liked living best. In my own little world.

So how did I get here, on the internet with all this? Why in the world would I dabble in the real world on the internet about which I know virtually nothing? (Remember, PCs were after my time in school. I remember ticker tape computers and punch card computers, and computers that took up entire rooms.)

Well, there's a funny thing about money at our house. I need to help contribute to the family income still, and as of mid-2006, I quit running my husband's business (thank goodness, as I hate doing accounting and secretarial work!). I do still work at home, though. And you can, too.

In 2006, I attended a very intense five-day "bootcamp" on building websites as a way to make money. I met the man behind the program I use on this site (and two others I started before this one). He's pretty incredible, and he really wants to help people - everyday non-techno-geek people - make money doing things they love to do.

Even though I had no clue how to put up a good website, I managed to create a great one. Slowly, but surely.

It's starting to make money for me. But it's not about novels. And it occurred to me that my most passionate pursuit was being ignored when I should be putting up a website about it.

How to Write a Novel was born from that passion. I want to share everything I've learned in (I'm not telling you how many years - oh, okay) over thirty years. I want you to fulfill your dream of learning how to write a novel, and finishing it! Because I really enjoy helping people. It makes me happier than anything but writing fiction.

Besides, I'm having a blast writing this website now (no, I haven't abandoned the novels. The first one should finally be published sometime this year, with number two and three hopefully following quickly). It's easy, even though it does take some time, and it's so much fun to see pages go up, to get inquiries from you, my reader, and hear when you've accomplished your goals, too.

And, I can make money creating this website as a resource for novelists beginning and beyond.

You can do the same thing. No, I'm not tech-savvy. If anything, I'm a techno-phobe. So whether you're "good at the net" or not, you can build a website, too!

Want to learn more? Check out firsthand how I make another stream of income from my passion .

I hope this helps you, too.

All my best,

Susie Henderson

A funny thing happened on the way to getting published.

Okay, it wasn't funny at the time, but I'm (you guessed it) writing a book about how funny it is after it's over. (Thank goodness!)

In 2008, when the economy was flushing away, we put our Minnesota house on the market. High time we moved (back for me) to Colorado! Everywhere I turned people said, "It'll never sell. Ours has been on the market for over a year and hasn't."

But guess what? I believe in The Secret , and I kept saying to those naysayers, "Yes, it will."

And it did. In one-and-a-half months!

The buyer wasn't the nicest guy on the planet, however, and we had sixteen days to find a rental and move everything out. Yikes!

Fortunately, it wasn't packing for a 1200-mile roadtrip... yet. Our son was in the local technical college finishing up his degree. So we had nine months to twiddle our fingers until we could move to Durango, Colorado.

Which we did in May 2009. And began to build our own house.

Now, the last house we "built", we had a large housing contractor build for us. We chipped in sweat equity, but only for some plumbing, wiring and painting. (Let me tell you, painting with a two-and-a-half-year-old and a newborn underfoot is NOT easy.)

This time, we were "do-it-yourselfers" - mostly.

In Minnesota, our house took 90 days from start to finish.

In Colorado? I thought six months, maybe nine.

How about a year...

And there are still things like trim work and exterior painting to do.

But, we're living in our dream home now! And we wouldn't be if I didn't horse around on the internet like this. I'm now making money from three websites, and having a ball doing it.

Here's my new office:





















And my typical summer office attire:

(If you want to see our house going up, sneak over to my site about Durango Colorado and check out the picture pages (Our Place), with final pictures still to go up.)

If you're at all interested in breaking the "rat-race" cycle in your own life, let me know. You can read more about my success with websites by checking out my behind the scenes peek at how I created (and continue to update) this website.

See ya around!

Susie