How to write a novel

Because I’ve been wondering the exact same thing.

In order to write something, you have to set the scene. That’s what I was taught last summer in a creative writing class, stagnant and sweltering while sitting at a plastic desk during the swollen July heat. The thing is, I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve dappled in short-form poetry for years, plunged myself neck-deep into a sea of cluttered chapbooks. I could never bring myself to try and reach for anything more, until now.

Late March 2025. Raw sunlight trickled down the back of my neck, and I had just put away my good winter coat. I was busy taking the bus to and from a building that doled out daily group therapy when I was supposed to be finishing the final semester of my freshman year of college. Time transformed into a series of unsteady arabesques. The thing about depression is that it can easily become an orbit of self-obsession. Sadness can wrap itself around you as easily as chiffon lace or crinoline paper, all of its gaudy grandeur eclipsing the misery you’ve been stuck in for far too long. Who knows what could happen in that strange, swollen realm of reckless abandon?

I started writing a book. I abandoned it. I picked it up again. This is nothing new. I am anonymous to you, another ill-fated casualty of a girl who clung too long to that sense of white-knuckle wrought adolescent unhappiness. But I’m tired of always writing about that. I’m tired of always living in the denticulate vortexes of my own cycles.

August 2025. I start school again and throw myself into the cyclical motions of incessant homework assignments. Slowly, I rebuild myself in the shadow of the same protruding tangle of thoughts that I used to hide behind. I write for a few weeks, then look at it all the next day and want to use it as kindling for the nearest trash bin. I scrap the half-finished attempt of a first draft I tried to write, nearly twenty thousand words worth of an unplanned novel. I start again, with an outline this time.

October. I turn 20 in the same city I was born in, nestled deep in the womb of crumpled hotel sheets. I walk to a coffeeshop across the street armed with a blank notebook, and leave having fueled my incessant craving for instant dopamine with a $7 chai latte. Back home, the leaves aren’t even close to turning yet; autumn only seems to arrive in Northern California in November. I go to my first college party and accidentally leave the same notebook on the front porch of a stranger’s house. It spends the night next to one of those giant plastic skeleton decorations. I am doing better, even when the days blur into one another. I keep creating and deleting Spotify playlists for hyperrealistic scenarios that I’ll forget about in a day or two.

November. The unsteady seam between autumn and winter makes everything feel heavier when it’s dark out by 5 pm. I’ve started bringing a metal thermos full of tea to campus on the days when it rains. I find time to type something out when I can. Sometimes I’ll write on the bus, ensnared by the strange, muggy realm of my notes app that holds anything from a recent recipe for cinnamon cookies to an ill-fated will I wrote when I was fifteen. I’m around ten thousand words into the new draft of the novel I’ve been working on for over six months. A year ago, I would have seen that as a failure. Now, I see it as a tentative sort of progress that I’m glad I’ve been able to accomplish in between the disconcerting turmoil of schoolwork and transfer applications and daily life.

How do you write something that people will want to read? I keep asking myself. I keep countering it with If you want to write something so badly, you’d drive yourself to the point of near-madness in order to get it out of you.

An act of absolution with no denominational boundaries. An exorcism performed on the carpeted floor of my childhood bedroom. In the end, writing allows me to push past the muddled sense of self-obsession that disguises itself as sadness. Creating characters lets me pour my own past adolescent turmoils into the flimsy papier-mache bodies of complete strangers. My mind has something to chew on late at night, an outline full of muddied plot points to use like a Rubik’s cube. I can collapse everything like a folding lawn chair and let a mind that’s so prone to spiraling out, brim forth with creative ideas.

I’m sure more concrete methods exist. Waking up at five in the morning and chugging a pot of gas-station coffee. Sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, and watching the sun slowly drag itself across your hunched shoulders and half-closed eyelids. Setting timers for an hour each evening and chaining your hands to a favorite pen. Wrestling through character questionnaires and five-pronged plot diagrams. Brute-forcing yourself through it until your ideas come to fruition.

But a part of me likes the idea of this being a long-form project. Like one of those slow-growth forests, teeming with moss and lichen that encircle the bark of trees that have existed long before you were even an idea in the minds of the people who came before you. A supernova caught by one of those cameras with long, telescoping lenses. A distant star shedding its light year after year, even when its feeble shell has begun to collapse inwards.

How to write a novel?
Well, I’ve been wondering the exact same thing.

- kai <3