How to Write a Novel

At last, a list of easy steps for writing that novel that is in your heart.

1. Drag self out of bed. Make coffee. Drink coffee while perusing the Internet for at least two hours.

2. Eat breakfast. Think about settling down to write. Decide it's more important to pay your outstanding bills. Pay bills.

3. Smoke. Drink more coffee while playing a computer game.

4. Get dressed. Walk downtown to mail bills you paid previously. Find other spurious errands to run downtown.

5. Sign back on the internet to see if anything has changed there. Shop for shoes.

6. Smoke some more.

7. Open up document containing your novel. Read what you wrote yesterday. Delete half of it.

8. Go pee.

9. Make a nice cup of chamomile tea.

10. Go back to novel. Think it sucks.

11. Go BACK to internet and waste an hour answering posts on the forums you belong to. Search e-bay for shoes you couldn't find earlier.

12. Make another cup of tea.

13. Go back to novel. write three words.

14. Wander aimlessly around the house tearing your hair out while trying to think what happens next.

15. Pee again.

16. Realise it's really late and you need to make lunch befo0re you can do anything. Eat PBJ while perusing the internet some more.

17. Go back to novel. Delete the three words you wrote earlier and write three different words.
18. Stare at the screen.

19. Minimize novel and play a computer game while chain smoking.

20. Get a great idea and write three paragraphs before you begin to think it really stinks and you run out of steam.

21. Go pee.

22. Come back to novel. Read what you've written that day and decide it's probably enough. After all, even Stephen King only writes three pages a day.

23. Make dinner. Eat. Sit around the rest of the evening being haunted by all the great things you had to say that you couldn;t think of while actually sitting at your computer.

24. Go to bed.

25. repeat all steps until novel is completed.