The art of writing a novel.

Call me silly but I always thought writing a novel would be, well, easy.  I just needed a great idea.  I have the natural urge to write, and write a lot.  My greeting cards are like War and Peace, I keep a day planner which is filled with scribbles and I never had any trouble writing stories for assessment for uni.  Writing a novel was always something I had in my mind that I would do later in life, for fun, maybe in my 30s. 

As of late I have been having a lot of very extravagant, bizarre and wonderful dreams and thus started to write them down.  With this creative spurt, and this here blog, I thought hey why not start a novel now?  This is where my would be novel smacked me in the face.  I would write down my dream all in one go as fast as I could, and end up with a paragraph.... I then would rewrite it and it would still be a paragraph.  Then what every lustre I had would die and id be left with just that paragraph.  Ok so the dream thing isn't working.  Another time I tried again, feeling positive and sure, I sat down at my outrageously green laptop and started to tap away again, same thing, one paragraph in then...... What was going on?  I was so sure I could write a novel when the mood struck me, especially when there are so many bad novels that are published and being sold.

Then I read an article which suddenly changed my way of viewing my own work.  As writers or any sort of artist we are very self critical, this being so, its often hard to find our own work good and worthy.  Especially in our first few years of the art.  This writer explained that most people who have a creative passion give up on their art within the first few years because they aren't producing work to a standard that they are happy with.  The writer also said its very rare that someone, especially a teacher, will make you aware of this.  The key is to keep your creative juices flowing, write a short story every week, it sort of gets the bad stories out so the great ones can begin.  This article really opened my eyes, I wont be put off and I will admit that I cant write a novel on the first go (ha imagine if I could!) but I will simply see everything before this hopeful moment as practice.  I will write a novel, but wont force it, I'm back to thinking it will happen in my 30's.