So you want to write a novel. You’re not alone. A quick Google search reveals that there are about 200,000 new titles in the US every year. When I subtract you from the unpublished population of the US, take away the illiterate, those without the ambition, education, or desire, and further remove both the published and the complacent, I am left with the number of people who want what you want. How many out there want to write a novel? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? While you can only guess at what I suspect is a large number of people, you can rest assured that I am one of them. I will say it with you: I want to write a novel.

Did you just smile? I sure did. I smile every time I confess the desire, but I do so not with the foolish grin of a wisher, the convex lips of the hopeless, or the ironic smile of the clever. I commit my whole face. Even though I have already written two novels, I want to write another, and another, and another. I am making writing my life’s work. Before you finally write your novel, I want you to know what happened to me so you are prepared for what might happen to you.

I began wanting to write when I was back in college, but marriage, children, a mortgage, and the thousand demands of responsible living kept me focused on reaching the top of my day job. Those who knew me back then remember that I would routinely say, “I’m going to write a book someday called—”, and then I would insert a title for whatever happened to be relevant at the moment. When I first opened the pocket of a starched shirt, I would title my someday book, Breaking Starch. If I stained my tie at lunch, I would title my book, Tie Stains. Once, I even said “I’m going to write a book someday called Stupid Book Titles.” As ridiculous as it was to be so ridiculous, the practice of verbalizing my someday plan to write sustained me through all of those day job years so, at the end of a long day, when the tight button was loose, tie was off, shave was scruffy, and my shirttail hung like a wrinkled jacket, I could feel good about doing what I had to do so I could someday do what I wanted to do. Hopeful, I learned, is a great friend of practical.

In January 2006, I had been out of college for twenty years. My children were in their teens, business was thriving, marriage surviving, and the only reason I had for not writing was a want of time – the excuse most claim as a reason for ignoring their passions. The nanosecond nineties have become these trilisecond times cram packed with the dos and to-dos of you and everyone you know. You have to make writing time for yourself. That’s what I did. I found a hole in my schedule from four in the morning until I went to work around eight. Including weekends, holidays, sick days, and vacation days, I wrote every day in 2006 and 2007, missed two days in 2008 because of a cold, and I am still going as of this morning. I am taking this break in novel writing to share how the experience changed me. Before you write your Great American Novel, you should know that the experience will change you too.

I was tired that first morning in 2006. I had always imagined that I would write at a wooden desk tucked somewhere in a private part of my home but, after sleepwalking down my stairs at four in the morning, making coffee, starting a fire in the living room fireplace, and observing winter dark outside of every window, I setup a dinner tray and folding chair right there in the middle of the room. I started writing what I called practice writings, and I sent these by email to about one hundred people who knew me. Did anyone read them? Who knows? What I do know is that the six-month experiment taught me to think about readers while I wrote. After finishing sixty-six of those little writings, I wrote a small pile of short stories and two full-length novels. One reason I joined you earlier to say, “I want to write a novel,” is because of the smile, feelings, and thoughts that come over me. Another reason is the writing. My want became a passion.

Spring arrived a few months after I began writing, and the change in season brought with it the first change I noticed in me. The sun lifted earlier in the mornings, so I began seeing light every time I glanced out of my living room windows. I began seeing beauty and significance in the colors, movements, and everything else growing on my little two-acre place. I actually bought a camera and photographed everything that bloomed, contrasted one shade of green with another, moved, did not move, or simply caught my attention. I am neither a photographer nor interested in becoming one, but the practice of writing every day, where I saw with my mind what I captured with words, considering the subtleties of expression that reveal a person’s true motives, examining the external manifestations of inner thoughts – like the look in an eye, lift of a lip, draw of a breath, or position, pose, and posture – became a habit of observation I could neither turn on nor off. Writing made me a watcher.

I first recognized this change on a visit to my doctor. The great man was speaking in detail about my illness, but I never heard a word he said. Instead, I watched how he used his hands to speak, observed the movement of his eyes, the manner in which his facial skin creased confusion over his cheek bones, saw how his fingers lifted, wrote, and returned his pencil as he drew to describe, correlated the tone of his voice to his movements and, in summary, watched him only to see his character appear from behind his medical façade. Sure he was a doctor, but he was also a man nearing seventy, married, a father and grandfather, passionate, wealthy, and concerned for me. I saw that day an unspoken frustration deep in his tired eyes. I saw that he knew he had nothing to heal me, but I saw, too, that he would never stop trying, so long as I kept paying his bill.

Another surprise came one morning when my wife entered our living room. After she said something while I was writing, I stopped, heaved a sigh, stared at nothing, waited until the pressure of frustration burst from me as anger, and then I acted like Jack Nicolson in the movie The Shinning. Until that day, I never showed anger. After I said she could never again interrupt my writing and she countered by telling me I could never again expect my breakfast, we worked our way through my unprecedented flare-up. After twenty years, every marriage is rich with emotion. I learned that day that writing can dominate the writer.

I nearly cried at the site of a stranger’s baby, experienced a pagan’s morning in church where I sat watching without listening, stopped my car alongside a busy road just to look at how a golden wheat field met a green forest that, in turn, met a blue sky, and accused movie directors of cheating because they use lighting, music, facial expressions, and a thousand other cheats to produce the same effects that I try for with words. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is said to have seen the world of the itty-bitty. When you write, unless you do so in short bursts of words, taking readers from scenes of action to action, you will discover the truth of Tolstoy’s little world.

Instead of a ten-point list of changes that you may or may not experience when writing your novel, I offer a metaphor. Writing is seeing. It is a red pill decision like that made in the movie, The Matrix. You will see a whole new world – the real world – and you will want to put it into words. Write so everyone can see it. You may observe more than you did, might want to write all of the time, but it is by remaining engaged in real life, living and loving, laughing and crying, and feeling and sharing that you will become a writer I want to read. Avoid isolation, engage your world, and challenge yourself to write a book others can enjoy. Otherwise, enjoy your cell. Be thankful it’s padded.