It’s January, guys. 2015. International ‘time to begin again.’ Like many of my pals, I’m not one for annual resolutions. It’s more fun to set goals constantly, or as needed. It’s also fun to adopt mantras. Most of mine are Katy Perry lyrics. Still, I love the idea of beginning again. Towards the end there, 2014 seemed a little long-winded. A dinner-party story that never ends. It doesn’t help that I spent the last couple months of the year being sick and eating 12 cookies a day.

January is good people. A coldie but goodie. THERE ARE TWO FEDERAL HOLIDAYS. In January 2013 I formed a writing partnership that has been feeding me ever since. In January 2015, I’m participating in the Women Fiction Writers Association’s “Write-a-Thin” and committing to polishing my first novel and sending it out to five agents.

It has certainly taken long enough. But maybe it was all part of the process, at least for me. There’s no shame in admitting “I have no idea what I’m doing.” And now, five years later, I think I kind of do.

Here’s my guide to writing a novel in five short years. I trust aspiring novelists will follow it to a T.

1. After years of being a writer who didn’t write much, a storyteller with no real story to tell, have an idea. An inkling. A little seedling you sprouted in a plastic cup of dirt in 4th grade science class. BEGIN.
2. Start a Word doc. But be sure to write portions of your book in 7 different notebooks, as well. Write it on Post-it Notes and on the back of business cards. Make no attempt to organize this or be sensible. You’re an artist!
3. Regret step 2. Wish you were a linear thinker and that you knew where those 7 notebooks were right now.
4. Find the notebooks! Transcribe your brilliant scenes and insights and quotes and snippets. Realize most are unusable.
5. Write in the mornings, evenings, and during work breaks. Fall in love with your characters. Wish you could go on vacation with them and borrow their clothes.
6. Tell your friends that some of the characters are based on them. Become paralyzed with fear that you can’t exercise creative freedom and will somehow offend them. Regret telling them anything, ever.
7. Take a writing workshop! Realize that, despite YEARS of college-level education in writing, you have been making a lot of rookie mistakes.
8. Start over.
9. Go back to what you had before and make it better.
10. Fall in love with your characters again! Fall in love with the idea of yourself as writer.
11. Meet a boy! Stop writing for months.
12. Take another writing workshop! Receive helpful feedback from 9/10 of your classmates, and strangely harsh and discouraging feedback from 1/10. Fixate on the one person. Stop writing for a year.
13. Realize you’ve wasted a year on someone who was, if anything, probably a robot sent to this planet to destroy you. BEGIN AGAIN.
14. Change everything to first person.
15. Change everything to the present tense.
16. Change the narrators.
17. Change everything back again.
18. Move in with your boyfriend! Lose the ability to complete solo tasks for 5 months.
19. Carve out time for yourself. Carve out a space for an office. Get into a groove.
20. Get dumped. Go on a literary hunger strike. Read only books about anger management.
21. Write a play instead!
22. Learn to write sketches, learn to write screenplays. Feel limitless yet also a little lost.
23. Find a group of amazingly supportive writer friends. Commit to a daily writing goal. (Mine was just 15 minutes). Set a timer. Do the thing.
24. Do the thing.
25. Meet a new boy. Keep doing the thing.
26. Get dumped again! Recover much more quickly. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
27. Get into The Voice. Like really into it…
28. Stop doing the thing.
29. Bribe yourself. Finish the thing.
30. YOU HAVE FINISHED THE THING.

Congrats! You made it. Maybe you didn’t always know what you were doing. Maybe you didn’t even know who you were. How about now?

Happy New Year and Happy Writing!