New Year's resolution: Write your first novel over age 40

stuff that worked for me

POV: You are middle-aged. You have repeatedly tried to write a novel, but each time you end up looking at your work, deciding it is awful, and giving up. You reluctantly conclude that, at this point, maybe your brain just does not work that way.

You are kinda sad about this, but you know no one gets to do everything they want. You decide it would be a better use of your time to move on to other things. Plus, the new Matlock is on and you need to watch Matlock.

If that sounds familiar, I feel you. Kathy Bates is a delight!

And also the novel part!

Each time I tried to write a novel over the last few years I would start, get discouraged, and give up. My problem was not lack of time to write or read or whatever; I had all the time and resources I needed. I just had bad habits that prevented me from making any real progress.

Until this last summer, that is, when I was reading

Leigh Stein

’s very good blog on publishing, got encouraged to give it another try, and now have a completed manuscript with an editor.

If you are looking down the barrel of 2025 and wondering whether it’s worth even trying again—especially if you’re a bit older—here’s what worked for me.

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QUICK PLUG: Did you ever watch Margaret Cho’s impression of Kim Jong Il in 30 Rock and think “wow I wish someone wrote a detective comedy about a dictator who solves mysteries”? Well, GOOD NEWS!

prompt: a shark who is getting his doctorate

Also there is a shark. Subscribe below; I’ll put the first chapter up here in the new year.

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I committed to finishing an awful first draft.

WOW HOW INSIGHTFUL FIRST DRAFTS ARE BAD

I know. And if you are 22 then this will probably not be hard to overcome. If you have already spent decades writing for work and pleasure but not writing novel-length stuff, however, you may have developed the same bad habit as me: editing as you go.

Most of my career has involved a heavy amount of writing: lawyer stuff, blogs, white papers, marketing, and some academic work. The longest any of that stuff would be is maybe 30-40 pages; virtually all of it would be less than 10 pages.

Over time, I developed a habit of making iterative revisions as I went. By the time I got to the end of whatever I was writing I was basically done because I’d been obsessively editing the entire time. And for short stuff this is fine, especially if you work quickly.

For a novel, it’s crippling.

Whenever I got 20-30 pages into a story (or sooner!), my editing mindset would kick in. I’d start looking at my work critically, hate what I wrote, and then give up—because if I hated the first 20 pages, what would be the point of writing another 200?

This time, I realized that’s what was going on and forced myself to just keep writing until I had a completed first draft, no matter how awful it was.

And it was, in fact, very awful! I rewrote it twice, massively, and then edited it over and over after that, all to just get to the point where I could hire an editor. But I could only make all those edits because I had a first draft to work from, and I could only get that first draft by committing to power through.

I started slow, for once.

My previous efforts at book-writing basically looked like this: get very motivated, block out time, write a huge amount in one week, give up for six months thanks to a wildly unsustainable pace. I’d fall prey to both burnout and thinking that what I wrote was terrible, get horribly discouraged, and bail.

If you are younger, you can probably write at a manic pace and crank out an entire book in three weeks. You have energy! That is so great! USE IT WHILE YOU CAN.

If the days where you could work until 2 AM and not feel nauseous the next morning are beyond you, however, figuring out a sustainable writing pace for a longer-term haul is probably better.

I am sure this is different for everyone, but I started at like 250-500 words a day and did my best to not blow past that. As time went on, I ratcheted up the word count until I was doing about 2,500 a day at the end.

This ramp-up worked very well because it made me look at writing the book as habit, not something I did only when I was super motivated to write 5,000 words a day. And writing more each day got easier because I was further along in the book and had far fewer decisions to make—I was executing rewrites and writing out scenes I’d already planned instead of having to think through basic decisions about characters and plot. By the end, 2,500 words felt easier than 250 words at the start, and I finished the draft energized and excited instead of burned out.

I was realistic about how often I could write.

You probably can’t write every day. I couldn’t, at least, and planning for this made a big difference.

This is because some days I had other things to do. This is called “life” and there tends to be more of it as you get older, which means setting an “X words a day” goal without specifying how many days you are going to write can lead to discouragement or resentment as you either fall behind or force yourself to work when you shouldn’t.

I think this was probably the biggest thing for me. I have the kind of personality where I could force myself to do 500 words a day by writing at weird hours no matter what else was going on. But I wanted to write because I like doing it, and I realized that forcing myself to do it would make me resent it pretty quickly.

So, at the beginning of each month, I looked at my calendar, saw what I had going on, and then mapped out which days I could realistically write. If I could write on an off day at the start of the month, I did, so that if something weird happened later in the month I’d have extra margin to take days off. And if I had a new obligation pop up where I had the flexibility to schedule it—a doctor’s appointment, an errand, a meeting—I’d stack it on an off day so I’d be able to live a regular life while still keeping the pace I wanted to.

I started this about halfway through the process when the “X words a day” started to feel oppressive and it made a HUGE difference in relieving some of the (self-imposed) pressure I felt while still keeping me on track.

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This stuff worked for me, such that a joke idea I had two years ago is now a 75,000-word novel. (Again, there is a shark.) Other writers who have done this, and especially those coming to this as a later-in-life thing, what worked for you?