Fiction writing isn’t magic, and it isn’t about waiting for some divine inspiration to strike. If you’re here thinking that one day a perfect idea will hit you like a lightning bolt and everything will fall into place, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it works.
Writing is a skill. And like any skill, it comes from showing up. Day after day. In the mess and the chaos. During those moments where your brain is screaming, “this sucks!” and you wonder why the hell you’re doing it at all.
It’s easy to romanticize the process, but let’s be real: fiction writing is a grind. It’s about deciding to write when you’d rather watch Netflix, deciding to stay with a story even when the words feel like lead, deciding to push through the discomfort of learning a craft that never truly feels finished.
This guide isn’t a pep talk. I’m not here to tell you that you’ll be the next Hemingway or that you should follow your bliss and everything will magically work out. This is a practical, sometimes uncomfortable map of the real work, because if you’re serious about writing fiction, you need to know it’s going to be a journey, not a sprint.
But here’s the thing: the sooner you commit to the process, the sooner you’ll discover that the struggle isn’t a barrier to success, it’s part of it. So, let’s dive in.
Stop Waiting and Write
Let’s start with the obvious lie most aspiring writers tell themselves: I’m just not ready yet.
Ready for what, exactly?
There’s a certain mental gymnastics routine we run through when we say we’re waiting for the right idea, or we need to finish one more book on story structure, or we’re still outlining the world-building before we start Chapter One. It sounds productive. It feels justified. But more often than not, it’s just fear.
We tell ourselves we need clarity before we commit. That we don’t want to waste time writing the wrong thing. That we should wait until we’ve really figured out our style, our voice, our genre. But clarity doesn’t come from thinking about writing. It comes from actually writing.
You don’t figure it out first. You figure it out through. Through the bad drafts, the awkward dialogue. Or the scenes that fall apart halfway through because you still don’t know what your character wants. That’s not failure. That’s the process. I know, because I have a dozen unfinished drafts in my wake.
Stop Planning and Do
Look, you can plan forever. You can keep building outlines and reading craft books and dreaming about the perfect debut novel. Or you can open a blank document and write the sentence that scares you a little. The one that feels messy and not-good-enough and real.
Nobody writes their first story with confidence. You write it with curiosity, anxiety, self-doubt, and stubbornness. Clarity follows action. Not the other way around.
Embrace it all, because you’ll probably feel all that even when you’re churning out good writing. You’ll cringe every time you hand your writing to someone and wait for them to confirm what you already know: Your writing sucks. Call it anxiety, call it imposter syndrome, call it whatever you want, but at the end of the day, this is the fear you must learn to overcome.
So stop waiting. Write.
Read Like a Thief, Write Like a Lunatic
If you want to write well, start by reading like someone trying to crack a safe.
Don’t just read for pleasure. Read to steal. Pay attention to what hits you in the gut—then rewind and figure out how the author did it. Was it a perfectly timed sentence fragment? A well-hidden setup that paid off two chapters later? A quiet moment that made you cry for reasons you couldn’t quite explain? Good. That’s the stuff you need to dissect.
Highlight the lines that make your chest tighten. Annotate scenes that made you stay up past midnight. Then go back and reverse-engineer them. Look at structure, pacing, syntax. Ask yourself: where did this turn? What changed, and when? If you read a passage that makes you feel like setting your laptop on fire out of jealousy, don’t run from that feeling. Study it. Learn from it.
And then, when you sit down to write, let yourself go a little feral.
Early drafts are not the place for polish. They’re for chaos. For voice. For trying things out. Maybe your characters cuss too much, or your descriptions get weirdly poetic, or your dialogue sounds like a Tarantino fever dream. Good. Keep going. That’s how voice develops—not from restraint, but from letting your weirdness out in the open where you can shape it.
You can revise bad writing. You can’t revise a blank page. And you definitely can’t revise the parts of yourself you’re too afraid to put on paper.
So read with a scalpel. Write with a sledgehammer.
Answer The Most Important Question: Why Do You Want to Write?
This isn’t about the story burning inside you. It’s not about the reader experience or the genre you love. Strip all that away for a second.
Why do you want to write?
Not your characters. Not your future audience. You.
Because writing takes time. Energy. Sacrifice. It’s going to ask things of you that most hobbies—or even most careers—don’t. So you need to be honest about what you’re in this for. Is this a creative outlet? A form of therapy? A career move? A dream you’ve carried since you were twelve and never gave yourself permission to pursue?
Maybe it’s joy, or it’s control. Maybe you just want to build worlds where your rules apply. You could simply be tired of watching TV shows that fumble everything from twists to character development to endings and think, I could do better.
There’s no wrong reason. But if you don’t know your reason, you’re not going to push through in those moments when you lose all your motivation. When the work of writing starts to set in and you question why. You better have an answer for yourself when that happens.
Define success in your own terms. One finished story. One hour of writing a week. Nine books in ten years. A modest but meaningful slice of income from fiction. (Those last two are my goals, by the way.) Your goal doesn’t have to impress anyone. It just has to matter to you.
Clarity here won’t make the writing easier, but it’ll make the doubt easier to manage. So when things get hard—and they will—you’ll remember why you started.
And if your reason changes along the way? That’s allowed too.
Master the Basics of Prose in Fiction Writing
There’s no shortcut around this one. If you want your fiction writing to land—to be readable, immersive, emotionally sharp—you have to get your sentences under control.
That doesn’t mean you need to sound like a literary snob or write like you’re auditioning for The New Yorker. But it does mean you need to understand the basic mechanics of prose. Because when your writing is unclear, it doesn’t matter how compelling your plot is. Readers will DNF(Did Not Finish) your story. Fast.
Start with the fundamentals: consistent tense, subject-verb agreement, and punctuation that actually helps the reader breathe. If you’re constantly switching from past to present tense without knowing it, your story’s going to confuse the reader and make them spend more time trying to understand what you’re saying than taking in your story.
Where to Begin
Use active voice. “The door was slammed by John” is fine in a police report. It’s dead weight in fiction. “John slammed the door” has urgency. Energy. Stakes.
Vivid verbs matter more than fancy adjectives. Don’t say “She walked slowly across the room.” Say “She crept.” “She shuffled.” “She dragged her feet.” One word, more impact. Strip your sentences down to what actually moves the scene forward. You can always layer on rhythm and style once the bones are solid.
And let’s be clear—clean writing doesn’t mean plain writing. It means deliberate writing. You can break the rules once you’ve internalized them. You can play with sentence fragments, weird syntax, or voice-y tangents. But when the basics are tight, those choices feel like craft. Not like sloppiness.
Most early writers think they have a story problem. But nine times out of ten, it’s a prose problem. Clean it up, and suddenly, your characters come alive and your scenes start clicking.
This is the unsexy part of writing. But it’s where most of the growth happens.
Here are Some Resources to Sharpen Your Prose Skills for Fiction Writing:
Active vs. Passive Voice:
- Active Versus Passive Voice by Purdue Online Writing Lab: Purdue OWL
- Use the Active Voice by University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center: Writing Center
Verb Tenses:
- Introduction to Verb Tenses by Purdue Online Writing Lab: Purdue OWL
- Verb Tenses Explained, with Examples by Grammarly: Grammarly: Free AI Writing Assistance
Prose Style Tips:
- The Ultimate Guide to Writing Good Prose by Alliance of Independent Authors: The Self-Publishing Advice Center
- How to Polish Your Prose by Blue Pencil Agency: bluepencilagency.com
Understanding Filter Words:
- How to Avoid Unnecessary Filter Words in Your Writing by MasterClass: MasterClass
- Filter Words in Fiction: Purposeful Inclusion and Dramatic Restriction by Louise Harnby: Louise Harnby
Comprehensive Writing Style Guide:
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: A classic guide offering timeless advice on grammar, style, and composition.
Close Reading for Writers:
- Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: A guide encouraging writers to learn from the masters by closely analyzing their works.
Master the Basic Building Blocks of a Story in Fiction Writing
You don’t have to be a story genius to write something good. But you do need to know what you’re building when. Otherwise, you end up with 40,000 words of vibes and no narrative spine.
Most fiction writing isn’t built from some grand vision—it’s assembled piece by piece from simple, repeatable structures. Once you understand the basic building blocks, you can use them like scaffolding. Ugly at first, maybe. But strong enough to hold up something beautiful.
Let’s break it down:
Beats
A beat the smallest unit of story telling. It’s a shift. A moment of change. It might be emotional (someone gets their heart broken), narrative (a clue is uncovered), or relational (an alliance forms or breaks). Beats are where the story moves. If nothing changes in a beat, you’re probably treading water.
Scenes
Scenes are the units of storytelling that do something. They show characters making decisions, experiencing consequences, or learning new information. A scene should either advance the plot or deepen the reader’s understanding of a character. Ideally both. If it’s just two people talking and nothing shifts? That’s probably not a scene. That’s filler.
Chapters
Chapters are a pacing tool. A permission structure for the reader to pause, or a cliffhanger to make them keep going. They aren’t arbitrary breaks. Good chapters have internal logic—some kind of thematic or narrative arc. Start in one emotional place, end in another. (More on the plot implications of chapters later)
Arcs
Arcs are the long game. Emotional arcs, character arcs, story arcs. This is where you track progression over time—who the character was, who they’re becoming, what’s been gained, what’s been lost. Arcs create meaning. They answer the question: why does this story matter?
You don’t need to get this perfect out of the gate. But if you’re struggling to figure out why your story feels flat or disconnected, chances are you’re missing one of these core pieces.
Knowing the building blocks lets you troubleshoot. It gives you tools. And more importantly, it gives you control.
Writing isn’t about winging it and hoping for magic. It’s about learning the architecture—then making it your own.
Here Are Resources to Deepen Your Understanding of Story Structure in Fiction Writing:
- Story Beats:
- Story Beats: The Key to Line-by-Line Writing by Story Grid: This article delves into how beats function as the smallest units of story, conveying details that move the narrative forward. Story Grid
- What Is a Story Beat? by ScreenCraft: This piece explains that story beats are shifts in the narrative, encompassing emotional turns, actions, reactions, or realizations that propel the story. ScreenCraft
- Scenes:
- Writing The Perfect Scene by Randy Ingermanson: This article outlines the components of a well-structured scene, emphasizing the importance of goal, conflict, and disaster. Advanced Fiction Writing
- Chapters:
- Chapters In A Book: How To Structure Them Well by Jericho Writers: This resource discusses the role of chapters in pacing and structuring a novel, offering insights into effective chapter breaks. Jericho Writers
- Character Arcs:
- How to Write Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland: This comprehensive guide explores the nuances of crafting transformative character journeys, detailing various types of arcs and their significance. Helping Writers Become Authors
Diving into these resources will equip you with a solid foundation in the essential components of storytelling, enhancing your ability to craft engaging and well-structured narratives.
Master the 5 Commandments of Storytelling
Here’s something no one told me early on: All the story structures you’ve heard of—three-act, hero’s journey, Save the Cat—are just different ways of dressing up the same core mechanics.
The Story Grid calls them the Five Commandments of Storytelling, and they apply at every level of story: scenes, sequences, acts, whole novels. Once you internalize them, you start seeing the rhythm behind every compelling narrative. And more importantly, you can start replicating it in your own work.
The 5 Commandments
- Inciting Incident
Something disrupts the status quo. A problem is introduced, a decision must be made, or a desire is sparked. This is the spark that sets everything in motion. - Progressive Complication
Things get harder. New obstacles show up, stakes rise, the pressure builds. If nothing gets more difficult, the story stagnates. This is where tension lives. - Crisis
The turning point. A choice must be made, and it’s not easy. This isn’t just plot—it’s emotional. What’s at risk? What will be lost, no matter the choice? - Climax
The choice is made, the action taken. This is where we see what the character does when it really counts. - Resolution
The dust settles. The consequences play out. What’s changed? What’s been gained—or lost?
You don’t need to memorize fancy templates or color-code your manuscript. You just need to feel this rhythm and start recognizing when a scene or chapter is missing a piece. A good story moves—not because things are happening, but because each piece causes the next.
Once you start writing with these five beats in mind, your work will start to feel like a story. Not just a sequence of events or a character wandering through a concept, but something with shape, urgency, and emotional weight.
Even if the draft is rough. Even if the prose is clunky. These commandments give your story energy.
When You Start Fiction Writing Start Small, But Write for Your Format
One of the most common traps new writers fall into is starting small in the wrong way. They’ll write a handful of short stories when what they really want to write is a novel. Or they’ll dabble in flash fiction to warm up to what their brains are wired for: Long-form storytelling.
Short stories and novels are different beasts. With different pacing, emotional arcs, and rules about what you can get away with. So if your dream is to write novels, you don’t need to master the short story first. You need to start writing novel scenes, even if you’re only writing one.
Write a scene that feels like it belongs in the kind of book you want to create. Maybe it’s a conversation that hints at a larger backstory, or it’s a confrontation at the midpoint. Maybe it’s your opening hook. Whatever it is, write it like it’s part of something bigger.
Why? Because structure is a muscle. And novel-writing requires stamina, pacing awareness, and long-term narrative instincts. If you train on short stories, you’re not necessarily building the right muscles.
This doesn’t mean you have to outline an entire book before you write a word. It means you should practice writing in the format you care about, with a mind toward structure, tension, and reader experience—even if you’re only writing 500 words at a time.
Every small piece you write is a chance to experiment with the tools you’ll need for long-form fiction writing: how to open a scene, when to raise stakes, how to end with momentum. So yes, start small. But make sure those small pieces are part of the world you want to build.
Fiction Writing Practice: Write a Novel Scene in Isolation
Pick a moment you know would exist somewhere in a novel you’d want to write. It doesn’t have to be the beginning. It doesn’t have to make total sense yet. Just pick a moment that has energy for you—emotion, conflict, tension.
Here are three to choose from (or invent your own):
- A character overhears something they weren’t supposed to and has to decide whether to confront or conceal.
- Two characters on opposite sides of a major decision realize they’re both right, and both wrong.
- A character faces a moment of temptation that could cost them everything they’ve built.
Write the scene like it belongs in a finished novel. Don’t explain. Don’t summarize. Just drop the reader into the moment and write your way through the tension. Try to make it feel complete, even if it’s just one scene out of a story you haven’t written yet.
Word count? Whatever you can do. 300 words. 1,000. Doesn’t matter. What matters is writing with intention, like it’s real. Because that’s how it becomes real.
Have a Plan, Even if It’s No Plan
You don’t need to be an outliner to write a great book. But you do need to understand how story works. Will you build the framework first or find it during revision?
There are two classic metaphors for writing styles: Gardeners and Architects.
- Architects (aka plotters, planners, spreadsheet people) map things out ahead of time. Characters, arcs, scene flow, structure. They like knowing where they’re going before they hit the gas.
- Gardeners (aka pantsers) start with a character or a vibe or a question, and grow the story as they go. It’s exploratory. Intuitive. Often messy.
Neither is better. But whichever way you lean, you’re not avoiding the work, you’re just choosing when you do it. Architects plan on the front end. Gardeners discover, then analyze and rework. The editing phase fills in the gaps either way.
What to Keep in Mind
- Plot scaffolding: What’s the foundation of your story? You don’t need every beat plotted, but having a general shape helps. (Opening tension, midpoint shift, climactic payoff.)
- Character arcs: How does your protagonist change, or fail to change? What’s their emotional journey?
- Theme threading: What’s the deeper conversation your story is having? What questions does it keep circling back to?
- Foreshadowing & payoff: Setups need payoffs. Even if you’re discovering your plot as you go, keep a running list of things to return to or resolve.
And here’s the most important part: your plan is allowed to evolve. In fact, it should. As you write, your understanding of the story deepens. That’s not failure, it’s feedback. Don’t cling to an outline that no longer fits. Don’t toss out a draft just because it surprised you.
Have a plan. Even if it’s just a vague shape, a feeling, or a question you’re trying to answer. The point isn’t to follow a rigid map—even if you’re an architect and have every chapter outlined before you start your first draft like I do—it’s to build enough of a compass to keep moving forward when the story takes a life of its own and starts dragging you along with it.
And whether your a gardener or an architect, you have to let the story lead when it wants to.
Resources to Get You Started in Your Fiction Writing
Understand and Plan for What’s Coming
I’ve spent over a decade managing complex technology projects with multi-month timelines, cross-functional teams, the whole chaos-and-coffee show. What I discovered when I finally started finishing books is that writing fiction follows the exact same emotional arc as any long-term project. The deliverables look different, sure, but the resistance? The burnout? The slog in the middle? Identical.
When I wrote The Storm’s Approach and Forged in the Chasms of Darkness, I didn’t rely on creative inspiration to get me to the finish line. I leaned hard on what I know as a project manager (PM): That momentum is temporary, motivation is unreliable, and finishing is about managing energy, not just tasks.
What to Expect Through the Process
- Writing starts: “This is brilliant!”
You’ve got the idea, maybe even the outline. You’re in the launch phase. It’s fun, it’s fast, it feels like it’s working. - Several weeks later: “This is impossible.”
Welcome to the messy middle. In project terms, this is where scope starts to sprawl and clarity thins out. You question your choices, and the self-doubt kicks in. - A few months in: “This will never end…”
You’re deep in the grind now. No more easy wins. Just long hours and diminishing confidence. In a tech project, this is where morale dips. In a novel, it’s where most people quit. - The last few weeks: “I think I can live with this.”
You’re refining. Revising. Cleaning up what you thought was unfixable. You don’t love it (Or maybe you do. This is actually my favorite part of the process), but you see it. You see the shape of the thing you’ve made, you’re adding the smaller details, refining the prose, and .
In PM-speak, this is emotional project management. You’re not just managing your word count; you’re managing your internal state through the lifecycle of a creative build.
How to Keep Moving Forward
- Set goals in deliverables, not dreams. I aim for 2,000 words per day. I don’t think in terms of “finish the book.” That’s too abstract. Progress needs concrete checkboxes.
- Track changes. I document all my chapters in Trello, so I know what I’ve tackled and what’s left. It’s a roadmap, not a guessing game.
- Build in buffers. Just like in any project schedule, I plan for slow weeks, low-motivation days, life. Recovery time is part of the timeline.
- Celebrate the wins. No one is out there waiting to cheer you on when you achieve something. I know, that’s hard to hear, but it’s even more demotivating when you experience it. You have to own those celebrations. If you schedule your own time to celebrate, then invite those people who care about you to the party, you’ll have a great time and be motivated in the process! This was the hardest lesson for me to learn.
- Revisit the goal. My goal was never write a perfect book. It’s to write 9 good books in ten years and make a meaningful slice of my income doing it. Knowing the scale of that goal, and the effort involved in achieving it helps me keep momentum when any single book feels like a mess.
If you treat your novel like a project—one with shifting energy, evolving requirements, and inevitable rough patches—you stop expecting it to be smooth. You start expecting it to be workable. And once something’s workable, it’s finishable.
And finishing is everything.
Your First Draft Will Suck. That’s the Point.
There’s a myth that needs to quietly but permanently die. The one where great writers sit down and produce great sentences on the first try.
They don’t. Not even the seasoned ones.
The first draft isn’t the book. It’s the raw material. It’s clay. And your job in that phase isn’t to mold something elegant or publishable. It’s to get enough material onto the table that you can start shaping it.
The Ugly Stage
A great example of the ugly stage is Nerd Forge’s video where Martina does the same painting in 1, 10, and 100 hours. If you watch her process you’ll see that in every attempt there’s an ugly phase. Where shapes hint at what she’s trying to convey, but they don’t look great. The same will be true of your first draft. If the painstaking details that we add later that make the difference. In the 100 painting, Martina has the time to dedicate to the details, and if you notice, they’re the bulk of the effort every time. So don’t stress about your first draft, it’s not the bulk of the effort, it’s just the beginning.
When I was drafting The Storm’s Approach, there were entire chapters I barely knew what I was going to do with. I had to push through by writing something, anything just so I could figure out what the chapter was even about. I deleted scenes, then brought them back. That’s not a sign of failure. That’s what first drafts are. Exploration. Excavation. Data collection.
Don’t Edit. Yes, I Mean You!
The temptation to self-edit while drafting is strong, especially for writers who care deeply about craft. But stopping every sentence to tweak and polish is like laying bricks while you’re still figuring out where the walls go. It slows you down and keeps you stuck in perfectionism instead of progress.
Here’s what a successful first draft looks like:
- Sentences that ramble.
- Characters that contradict themselves.
- Dialogue that doesn’t quite hit.
- Entire scenes that don’t belong—but still taught you something.
That’s not wasted effort. That’s forward motion.
Editing is where you sculpt. It’s where you clarify, elevate, and restructure. But you can’t revise a blank page. And you can’t revise the version of the story that lives in your head. You have to write it badly before you can write it well.
So lower the stakes. Let your first draft be messy, repetitive, or weird. It should surprise you, even disappoint you. Let it exist. That’s how books get made—not by chasing brilliance, but by committing to the work.
You Don’t Need to Be Good at Fiction Writing. You Just Need to Begin.
There’s a kind of quiet pressure that sneaks into fiction writing. The idea that you need to prove something. That your first chapter has to hook, your characters have to dazzle, your prose has to shine. That if it’s not good, why bother?
But writing isn’t performance. It’s practice. You’re not trying to show the world how talented you are. You’re becoming the writer who can finish the stories you care about.
When I started my first novel, I wasn’t trying to write a masterpiece. I was trying to write something I could share without making people cringe. Something that finally got people to finish my writing. And it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t fast. But I finished it, and achieved my goal.
You’re not here to impress anyone. You’re here to put in the work. To write the awkward scenes, and push through the draft that feels like it’s falling apart. To learn how you write by actually doing it, not reading about it, not talking about it, but getting words down.
Fiction writing isn’t reserved for the chosen few. It’s for the ones who begin. The ones who get comfortable being bad at it for a while. The ones who commit, not because it’s easy, but because it matters to them.
The only thing separating aspiring writers from working writers? Word count. That’s it.
So don’t wait for talent. Don’t wait for clarity. Don’t wait for the right idea. Just start. And keep going.
You don’t need to be good. You just need to begin.
Updates
- 04/09/2025 – Fixed discovered typos immediately after posting.
