Better begin now. Novels take a long time.

There are a number of ways to proceed in this genre. One is to have a story to tell, make an outline, then flesh it out. The emphasis here is on plot. Another method is to start with characters that you understand, put them in a situation and the see what happens. You are as surprised as the reader. Rather than working from the outside in, you're moving from the inside out.

If you creating a fiction from out of your life, the first thing to do is to go through all of your journals, calendars, records, notes to yourself, label them and put them in order. Don't try to control the material in advance but try to let the structure emerge on its own. Go into a sort of trance and shuffle your material into piles. Throw the pages into the air and see how they come down. Even if you never want to write a novel, it is fun to go through these planning stages, to see your life in terms of a book and to create yourself out of yourself, backwards, in high heels, dancing.

Just for FUN, do a blurb for your novel, write the jacket cover bio, design the graphics, pick the font, make up fliers announcing your book tour. Why not?

VOICE

Think of someone you know who has a distinctive way of speaking-an accent, a rhythm of speech, a certain speed. When you hear it, you know who is speaking. That's what is called "voice" in writing. When you are telling a story in a novel, you need "voice." You also want to develop a different and distinct voice for each character. Try to hear your characters talk, write down what they are saying.

The quickest, easiest way I've found to develop characters through voice is to write a play. Or rather, write in play form: with minimum stage directions, all dialogue. In a play, everyone has to speak, has to show their motivation through speech. No falling back on summary or passive voice.

In the beginning of a novel, different voices often fight for dominance, for who is going to be in charge of telling the story. Let them all tell their stories separately. Xerox up these stories, cut them apart and use for scenes of dialogue in the novel.

Personally, as a writer, I prefer character to plot. I don't really care much about the plot line, to tell you the truth. I think of it as something I do for other people so they will know what is going on. But for me, I rarely think about plot until fairly late in the project but let character itself generates plot. It's not the most efficient way to proceed perhaps, but one that works for me. But just try this: take two or more characters from your writings, put them in a situation together, and listen to what they say to each other. Keep writing until a plot emerges. It is true that this story line is what keeps people reading, so once you've found a basic plot grounded in character, throw in a bit of extra tension to keep the reader going. To know when to do this is the "craft" of writing--luckily craft is something that can be learned, as opposed to talent which one either has or doesn't have.

POV

A first person point of view both limits and expands a novel. You can go deeper, more quickly (and use more from your journals) in first person than in a "social" point of view where you have to account for what each character knows and how she knows it. I find that it helps to write at least one draft in the first person, just to move the material from place to place. I can always go back and change "I" to "she." Conversely, it always helps to have at least one third person version of a first person story. (Did I mention that writing takes a long time?) When you feel written out on individual voices, stories, etc., xerox them all, sit in the middle of the bed or on the floor and spread the pieces around you. Work in scenes. Put together pieces that lean, for whatever reasons, towards one another. Work with the editing side of your brain, make decisions, cut, prune, slash, burn.

Paste up a new version; tie the parts together by short transitions between the pasted-in paragraphs of dialogue, description, etc. Just write down the first thing that comes to mind and keep moving. Xerox up a clean copy of this version and treat yourself to something wonderful for finishing the first draft of your novel.

This is one of my favorite stages in novel writing, when I can get continuous pagination for the first time, when a spine appears. Often whatever I've written has to be changed many times, but from this moment on I can look on my desk and see a book. And this calls for a celebration. Next, I usually let the manuscript sit for at least a month, sometimes for a year or more. Then I return and repeat the cluster--xerox process all over again-several times. Nor do I know when a particular novel is going to reappear. I just wake up with it in my head. In the between times, it must be simmering down there in the great creative soup of the unconscious.

Try to dream your characters. Tell yourself that you will dream about them and it will increase your chances. Try to become them, dreaming.

While I am in the middle of a writing project, I lead a parallel life. All the time I'm writing, I'm having multi-layered emotional responses to my past, persona, archetypes, fear, ego, plus the past, persona, etc. of all of my characters. When I'm writing hard, I live intensely, yet I am totally unaware of myself as a person, as an ego, as existing in time. If a relative stranger asked me what I'd been doing, Id have to say, well, not much, sitting at the computer. But when sitting there, not unlike dreaming, I'm traveling from star to star, from psyche to psyche, riding the swells of hope and fear, pain and ecstasy, questing and wisdom.

Once, using material from a therapist, I wrote a play about a multiple personality patient. The story was very painful; the woman herself had been severely abused and died very young. Still, I thought, it's not my pain, this won't be hard. But as I progressed in the writing, as I sat sobbing into the words of light on the monitor in front of me, I realized that it had indeed become my pain. If I, the writer, didn't feel the emotion, how could I expect to move the audience? So, be careful what you put in your novel; the ideas and emotions pass through your psyche, creating patterns and leaving residue, whether you want them to or not.

When you're writing sensitive material or have "gone under" in a writing project, a great deal of emotion is displaced. Even if you tell your family and friends that you are writing a novel, thus basically nuts, they won't really understand unless they are writers themselves. Just try to stay below the radar for a while until you've finished the book.