In my intentions for 2025 post, I said one of the things was to write the first draft of a novel.

I want to share my progress and thoughts on the process. Hopefully, this will help you on whatever journey you’re pursuing at the moment.

Achievements

Unfortunately, I can’t say that a lot was done in February. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth to say almost nothing happened.

I spent a little time thinking about my idea, but not a lot making notes or writing things down.

It is still very early in the development phase. I’m not too sure who all the characters are, what the story is about, how it’s going to unfold, and so forth.

Working through these questions is both difficult and exciting. The difficult thing is that these are all questions that I need to make up answers for. It’s the stage where things are being created out of nothing, which can be hard work.

It’s also an exciting time because the answers to these questions can be anything. I can make up whatever I like. It doesn’t have to make complete sense yet, everything will be expanded on as time goes by, and inconsistencies can be ironed out later in the planning stages.

On the other hand, I did manage to spend at least half an hour reading every day, so there’s that.

Learnings

The key learning is that I need to be more intentional and focused on developing my idea and story.

This needs to be prioritized over some of the other things in my life if I want to make progress on it.

What Next?

First, a couple of things that I’m not going to be doing.

I’m not beating myself up for having “wasted” a month. As tempting as it might be, it isn’t helpful. Making myself feel bad about what I haven’t done isn’t going to make me feel motivated to do more in the coming month.

The next thing is, I’m not going to panic. I’ll save that option for later in the year. There is still plenty of time for me to hit the goal of having a first draft done by the end of the year. Not doing much in February is a setback, but becoming panicky won’t fix anything.

So, what can I usefully do to make March better than February?

The first is to work on planning my novel. To help with that I’ll be trying the process from Story Genius by Lisa Cron.

I need to schedule some time each week to work on this. My current ad-hoc approach clearly isn’t working too well.

The final thing for March is to just have fun with it and see where it lands.