Thinking of writing your first novel? Dabbling in short stories, but not sure where to begin? Here are a few secrets that help me both get started and finished.

1. Ideas are story-starters. Passion is the story-finisher.

Anyone can come up with the world’s next great novel concept, but few can make the leap to completion without a serious struggle in the middle, and most who attempt probably won’t finish at all. If you’re going to write a large work, make sure you’ve got the passion to do it. Although this sounds discouraging, it makes sense. If you don’t enjoy writing and embrace the struggles and hardships that go along with the writing process, you won’t finish.

2. Write every day; don’t take breaks.

When you write all the time, you keep yourself in an always-activated always-inspired state of mind that is crucial for short story and novel writing. Taking a few days off can lead to procrastination, which can trap you inside a procrastination cycle that lasts for months. Once you start a project, you’ve got to keep at it; no matter what your mind tells you, counter-attack and keep writing, even if it feels like the story is going nowhere. I guarantee that it will eventually go somewhere, and you’ll branch off of that to create a brilliant arc of your story. Remember that this is your first draft and not a complete product. You can go back and edit some other time. Finish now; don’t stop writing for anything.

3. Don’t write in chapters.

I see a lot of aspiring novelists tell me that they’re writing Chapter XX, both as a sign of their novel’s completeness and an ego boost, but consistently notice that these people have been working on the same first-draft novel for two or three years. When you write in chapters, not only do you form story arcs with local endings that might not correlate with the beginning of the next chapter, but also give your mind reason to turn on its inner editor and force you to run back and edit that particular arc until you’re satisfied enough to move on. It creates an awkward, rather premature break in your story. Don’t assume that you know what’s going to come next, even if you’ve written it down in an outline, because that’s not always what happens.

When your next chapter contains events that don’t canonically or chronologically line up with your previous chapters, you’ll want to go back and edit them even more. Editing constitutes a break, gets you out of the right-brained novelist mindset, into the left-brained editor mindset, and goes straight back to point #2 – don’t take breaks.

4. Split your novel into chapters only after it’s finished.

If you’re not writing your novel in chapters, then you’ll end up with one huge, continuous story. However, you’ll find you’ve already created spots where the plot shifts or the narration changes which are perfect for chapter breaks, and you can, once finished, go back and split your novel into chapters. Chapters are really for readability and don’t provide serious practical purpose for people who aren’t the readers (aka, you). They’re a place to create extra suspense, a time lapse, and – most importantly – a place for the reader to put his or her bookmark when they need an excuse to put your book down.

You can always split your novel into chapters after it’s finished, and most likely you won’t even need to edit the content of your writing to create that special “gap” you were looking for in between chapters. In addition, the novel will have a more natural flow to it; it won’t feel, to the reader, like your thought process stopped short somewhere in between chapters.

5. Stay in your right brain.

Great works of art are best made when the right brain, which controls images, imagination and creativity, is in control of your thought process. Enter a dream-like trance and feel free to pay less attention to what you’re writing. Although you’d think this would create garble on the page, you’d be surprised how well your thoughts relate to each other. If you’re a good typist, close your eyes completely – reading your own story brings you into your left brain – and just let the plot and characters whisk you away to the world you’ve created. You’ll start writing more realistic and engaging environments that flow and change as your novel evolves.

6. Know grammar and style.

You can only accomplish #4 if you know, front-to-back, the laws of grammar and style, because your left brain controls grammar and style. So, naturally, if you’re in your right brain all the time you may have difficultly holding onto those grammar rules unless they’re second-nature. I cannot stress how important this is – your English classes were not useless, and if you slacked off you’ll now be playing some catchup. If you don’t know how to write at all, you won’t be able to write well (make sense, right?), so bone-up on your grammar and style. Pick up Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and get reading. Immerse yourself in Eats, Shoots and Leaves. You can’t break the rules of writing until you know them all, and don’t think you can get away with pretending you know grammar, or breaking the rules before knowing them all; people are good at spotting lousy writers.

7. Write short stories first.

Don’t dive straight into your first novel, even if you want to. Before writing my next novel, I always write at least one short story as a warm-up. Short stories do a great job of condensing what could be a full-fledged novel into something with just as much figurative meaning and only a fraction of the length, and are also great ways to show your brain how it creates different symbols and themes (that the entire story will ultimately hinge on). Often, you’ll create objects and characters of great significance without thinking about it and discover them later – usually when someone else looks at your work. People are more willing to read your draft short story than novel, so they might spot certain aspects and give you new ideas that help your short story evolve. This condensed form of the novel-making process gets you ready to make the leap to large-scale works.

As a side note: if you can’t get out of the habit of writing your novel in chapters, you might consider splitting those chapters off from one another and turning each of them into their own short story (which is essentially what you did anyway, but kept them all within a single doc file).

8. Outlines can help – and hurt.

Outlines are a shady topic. They work a bit like solfège in music; great learning tools if you grew up with them, but nightmares if you ignored them as long as you could. So if you’re used to outlines and enjoy them, they can be incredible tools for planning out your novel. On the other hand, if you don’t enjoy them, and never liked pre-writing your essays in school, they’re a nightmare – don’t even bother making one. In addition, if you do make an outline and plan out your novel, chances are you won’t stick to it as your story evolves. At the same time, having the outline will cause you to try to stick to it, which conflicts your novel-evolving interests. Outlines are probably too rigid for the novel-writing process, and I can almost guarantee that you don’t know exactly how your story will turn out.

Instead of writing outlines, grab a nice Moleskine journal and scribble your ideas all over the pages. Sketch, too, the scenes you’re thinking of creating and the individual objects in those scenes. Instead of a concrete guide, the journal becomes a resource and repository of past ideas that you can look back on if you get completely lost while writing.

9. Your initial ideas will change as you write.

That great plot point you made a while back? Suddenly it won’t seem so great. It might not even fit into your story anymore. All stories evolve and take on a life of their own as you write them, so don’t be surprised if you start a novel with one idea, and finish with something completely unrelated.

10. Develop your own methods of planning, creating, and recording your ideas and stories.

These ten tips don’t describe even a fraction of what you can do to plan and write your own short story or novel. Really, it all boils down to your passion and your ideas; if you’ve got both, you can write. Start writing, and develop your own style – the more you write, the better you get. Don’t expect to start as the next Charles Dickens. It takes time, and a lot of it – but if you’re willing to sacrafice your time for the art, you’ll come out of your first endeavor feeling empowered, accomplished, and satisfied in ways you never have before.