I’ve always been scared about writing a novel. Like many, I try, but then get scared by the blank page. I feel daunted by the mammoth task in front of me and end up abandoning it, thinking some other magical day I’ll feel braver. This year I decided it had to change. Maybe it was turning 30, or maybe it’s the pandemic, I’m not sure, but either way, I’m determined to write my first draft.

I started by signing up for NaNoWriMo. It’s my first time doing it and it has already helped me out a lot. I’m a planner so I’ve been working on my outline in Preptober, and while doing so, I had an epiphany. The approach I use to write my novel should be the same as how I write my code. Bear with me…

My day job is software development, and often there’s complex or chunky work that seems quite intimidating at first. I sit there and think, “how in the world am I going to start this?”. And then I do. I don’t think too much about it, I just start writing code telling myself “I have to start somewhere”. The key for me is to write code that’ll more or less work. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to be efficient, it just has to work. After that, I can go back and fine-tune it. Sounds familiar, right?

I don’t know why it took me so long to realise that the approach I need for my writing is the same thing I do day-in, day-out, but the main lesson I will take away from this is that even if I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, I always figure it out in the end.